Jeff Gerstmann is Still Alive

After spending a few hours setting up microphones and yelling at a laptop, we’ve recorded another installment of the Ryan Davis Weekly Podcast Classic, the Arrow Pointing Down podcast.

Sounds like there’s a bit of echo, primarily from mic bleed if I had to guess, but the high ceiling in my living room probably didn’t help matters much. Either way, it sounds way better than the Skype-based test we did last week, and is probably more scattered and insane than last week’s, too! So check that out!

Well, the studio exclusivity announcement back at CES sounded a lot like a fat lady warming up, and today might be remembered as the day that she started singing and marking the final phase of the HD DVD format.

Best Buy announced that it’s going to "focus on Blu-Ray products" and recommend them to consumers over the competing HD DVD format. The Best Buys in my area already seemed to be devoting more shelf space to BD movies, and now it all makes sense.

Meanwhile, Netflix announced that it’s done stocking new HD DVD releases and will be completely rid of them by the end of the year.

A friend of mine, who is too busy playing Call of Duty 4 to keep up on this nonsense, sent me a text message yesterday because he noticed that the price on the 360’s HD DVD add-on had dropped, and he was thinking about getting one. After thinking on it for a bit, and realizing he’s such a huge SOCOM fan that he’ll end up with a PS3 eventually, I told him to save his money.

Today’s announcements already read like Step 2 in an HD DVD exit strategy to me. That’s not to say that it’s a dead format and the format war is finished… but now it just feels like a matter of time. Please note that I’m saying "feel" and not quoting sales or anything like that. Facts are, like, sooooo overrated. And most of the ones out there these days are probably spun by whatever PR department issued them.

The third HD DVD RIP item today is a note I saw about Amazon’s HD DVD sale. They dropped an extra ten bucks off the 360’s add-on (making it $119.99) and they’ve got a half-off sale going for around 150 different movies. Since a lot of the movies were already 30 percent off, the savings aren’t quite as dramatic as that sounds. But as someone who already has an HD DVD player and is looking for some movie bargains, this might be the right time for me to get stuff like Transformers, Shooter, Face/Off, The Last Starfighter, The Warriors, Bulletproof, and so on. Or I could just buy three more copies of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, just in case the copy I already own spontaneously bursts into flames. But at the same time, I think there will be bigger, better closeout sales ahead, provided the HD format continues to slide out of the market. So, for now, I’m probably going to hang onto my money.

(new Points! video this week, by the way)

Oof… I haven’t seen this side of 6AM in months. Why am I up so early, you ask? Not because I’ve been playing Poker Smash all night, though I can see why you’d say that.

It’s because I’ll be appearing on G4’s X-Play tonight in the Head to Head segment. So I’ll be appearing on a TV that’s inside a TV show. Mindblowing! It’ll air tonight at 5PM and 8PM, both Pacific times. Check your local listings and tune in!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get these Golden Grahams inside me so I can get on the road.

[UPDATE] The “Web Xclusive” side of the interview is now up on X-Play’s site. For the rest, which also includes former Shacknews EIC Chris Remo, you’ll have to wait until the show airs. If I had known it was going to be Former Editor Day over at X-Play, I would have dressed up! Actually, I guess wearing what can now only be known as the Penny Arcade shirt is probably fitting.

[UPDATE 2] The on-air segment has been posted online right over here. Also, I made a slight correction to the reference to Chris Remo’s employment status earlier today. Apparently I misunderstood the situation. As someone who does understand what it’s like to be out of work, I opted not to dig any further into the topic.

I’m a big fan of Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld on Fox News. Now, this is where you knee-jerk and say "Fox News? Psssssshhhh!" I don’t know, it’s the only show I watch on the network. Anyway, Red Eye is a beautiful and ridiculous mash of celebrity news nonsense and some occasional political nonsense, all rolled up into a panel-type show that has a great seat-of-their-pants feel to it. Lately they’ve been talking a lot about the awesome Australian guy that threw a massive party, got in trouble with the law over it, and now refuses to take off his sunglasses. Earth-shattering stuff.

OK, enough setup. The world’s most mediocre director of bad video game-themed movies, Uwe Boll, appeared on the show this week to promote the Dungeon Siege movie. He also speaks about boxing his critics, dishes a bit about the celebs that have been in his films, and throws a few jabs in at people who play games. You might think he would attempt to pander to his core audience when given the chance. Nope! He already understands that we’ve got no love for him.

Uwe comes off as a dirtbag, but a dirtbag that you can believe in. If you’ve never seem him interviewed before, it’s worth watching. I feel like I understand him a bit better now that it’s clear that he’s 100% in it for the money.

No embeddable video, but the show’s official site is here. Click on Uwe’s face to watch the segment for yourself. It’s up there as of this writing. Then be sure to write them and say that they should book me as a guest, because it looks like the guys that make it are having a ton of fun doing so. I think my only complaint is that the show’s starting to have too many interview segments. It’s more interesting when the guests are involved in the discussion, not just promoting their own junk.

Red Eye airs M-F on Fox News at midnight Pacific, 3AM Eastern, and there’s usually a Saturday show, too, but all this pesky presidential coverage has been preempting it lately.

Yeah, I know, it’s the 1/15 video and today is 1/17. I’m still messing around with different video hosts. Turns out Vimeo is currently having some trouble with files over 400MB, so I had to re-render it and upload it a third time, blah blah blah. But I like three things about it:

A) The quality seems better than most video hosts.

B) Viewers don’t need to install a crazy plugin to watch it (unlike Stage6).

C) Anyone who wants to see it but can’t stream for one reason or another can download the original file. That means you should be able to watch it on a PS3 or 360, if that’s your thing.

Now if it just didn’t take eight hours or more just to upload and process one (large-ass) file…

Anyway, stylin’ video is below:

That’s the first auto-generated video thumbnail I’ve been happy with in some time. It just says “ooooooooooooh.” Anyway, if you have trouble streaming it here, kick it on over to my page on Vimeo and you could download it in divx format.

This one somehow got to be over an hour, which some of you have said isn’t an issue. Let me know if you watch the whole thing, and if not, how long you think these things should be. I’m still playing around with the format and the frequency of these.

One new thing you’ll notice is that I’ve collected some of the questions that have come in and answered them in the video. I’d like to do more of this in the future. I’ll probably install some question submission form here on the site, or maybe just post an e-mail address.

[ERRATA] I mention that Gaiares was the first 8-meg Genesis game. That, of course, is incorrect. It was Strider, a game I bought for $80 and beat the same day, feeling totally ripped off in the process.

So while I was hanging out in the pitch-black darkness of my power-free home yesterday, Warner Bros. made it known that they were going to drop support of HD DVD in favor of Blu-Ray this May. Here’s the full press release, for those of you into this sort of thing.

This is somewhat similar to the announcement Paramount made last year, when it dropped support for BD in favor of HD DVD.

I’m sorry, but I’m still having trouble caring about either format,, especially as it relates to the video game console “war.” When I’m buying a movie, which is happening less and less often these days, I’m will choose one of the HD formats when it’s available, but I feel like this entire business is rapidly becoming less and less relevant to more and more people.

We live in a world where low-quality streaming YouTube videos bring in millions of hits. Where people download bootleg videos that were shot with a camera pointing at a movie screen and are, for the most part, satisfied. Where torrents of complete seasons of television, compressed down to sub-broadcast quality, are often easier to get than the real, licensed products. Is video quality of the 1080p variety really a concern for the general public? Is anyone running out and buying new TVs just so they can watch Superbad in 1080p? I don’t think so. As far as I’m concerned, HDTVs are primarily for video games and cable/satellite programming that you can’t get any other way, like live sporting events. The whole “better version of this movie” thing is just a bonus.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll usually try to choose the highest quality format available, and I own both an Xbox 360 HD DVD drive and a PS3, so I’m equipped to go either route, if necessary. But plenty of people out there want it fast and without hassle. And as time goes on, the path of least resistance is going to be a download (legal or otherwise), not buying or renting a disc in some next-generation video format.

So my stance on this whole thing is that this is a battle for videophiles on the fringe of the disc-buying public. And as bandwidth speeds increase, enabling faster transmissions of higher-quality video, this whole battle over which disc is better is going to become increasingly silly and pointless.

Just got an e-mail from the fine people (person?) that produce TV Carnage. They’ve just started taking pre-orders for a DVD version of OUCH TELEVISION MY BRAIN HURTS, which is actually the first of the five volumes. OK, maybe I’d better back up for a second.

TV Carnage is amazing. This Canadian gentleman–who is also the face of that “whudafxup” anti-smoking campaign–takes some of the most mind-melting moments of television he can acquire, chops them up into their purest, most-damaging form, and then cuts them together into a great big video collage–without the whole thing becoming some big masturbatory film-school student piece with a heavy “message” or anything like that. I submitted a clip that ended up appearing in A Sore For Sighted Eyes, the fifth volume. It features a televangelist that morphs into a fighter jet.

While I can’t speak to the quality of this new re-edit, I will say that the other three DVDs are most certainly worth owning. Each one is a life-changing event. Considering the original release of OUCH was pretty straightforward and not edited as tightly as the newer stuff, I have to imagine the new release will be a huge improvement.

Anyway, I pre-ordered the new disc and I can’t wait. Hopefully it’s got director’s commentary on it. Watching them with the commentary on makes it a completely different experience.

But don’t take my word for it, check out this clip for a brief taste. Then check out this one.

Or try out the official site.