P>The first full week of being format neutral, and all appears to be well.
Well, that pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it? I picked up Casino Royale, Layer Cake and Black Hawk Down, and all seems to be pretty good. All of them having PCM soundtracks doesn’t hurt either. I’ve also grabbed Motorstorm and Resistance Fall of Man recently, so the gaming and movie split is about 50-50 right now, on top of everything else I’ve been doing. The reasoning for those three titles, aside f…om exclusivity, is their extras are mostly port overs from the SD versions, so it gives me another reason to cast aside the SD versions of the above titles that I’ve already got.
Well, in terms of news, the Blu-ray folks have reason to celebrate, as Casino Royale cracked the Top 10 Amazon sales last week, a big bragging point for the next-gen folks, regardless of where you stand. Blu-ray supporters justifiably have a solid bragging point to talk about, we’ll see if HD-DVD responds in kind in the coming weeks and months. Circuit City and Microsoft have tried to push things in terms of hardware affordability and swaying filmmakers to the other platform, but we’ll see how long that lasts/sticks. In other hardware news, it sounds like the second-generation Panasonic BR player will have all the audio bells and whistles that folks have been waiting on for the first wave of players. Whether the early adopting Panny owners are rewarded or not remains to be seen, but just a heads-up to all.
In terms of software, while the BD Association says that the war is won and now they’re setting their sights on SD DVDs, the Universal gang is saying that they want to employ more HDi extras on their titles (starting on Children of Men and Smokin’ Aces), which no doubt will please those who have the Toshiba HD players, and now they can clean the dust out of their Ethernet connections. Hopefully the new technology will help show off the potential of the next-gen platform, regardless of laser housing.
So what’s on store shelves this week? Well, it’s another week to be Blu, as Rocky Balboa, Chicken Little, Eragon, Finding Neverland and Big Fish all come to high def fruition this week. HD-DVD owners have, well, Children of Men, but that doesn’t come out until next week. Oh well.
That’s all for this week high definers, so until next time, keep the brightness low and the resolution high!
