Wait a Minute(Man)

I just recently purchased Watchmen The Motion Comic blu-ray which is a bit out of the norm for me because

a) it's published by rival company DC comics

b) purists like me prefer to read the actual comic books

One of the things i was really excited about it was the digital copy of the movie included as i was planning to use it on my psp. So i popped the disc onto my computer to hopefully extract it onto my psp only to discovered that it required me to update my window media player before i could view it. Being curious why this would involved my media player, i logged onto Warner Bros website to read the troubleshoot and it seems that the digital copy is only playable on window media player. What's the point of a digital copy of the movie if you can't even extract it onto your portables like a Sony PSP?

Sooner or Later

Some gamers liked to use their ps3 to watch blu-ray movies while me i'm somewhere in between, i'll decide depending on which movie and other reasons i rather not indulge here. I did notice that blu-ray movie have a pretty long loading time and the playstation3 tends to load the movies faster than standard blu-ray players. The only problem with that is the movie disc will also download certain files onto the playstation3 hard disk without even prompting the user whether or not to do so, and i'm not just talking about the BD Live download here.

Yes i guess you could say the inevitable has happened, i'm starting to get addicted to blu-rays.

Regeneration of Degeneration

The new TV has a nice little notice appearing on the screen whenever it changes from its native resolution so while watching Degeneration blu-ray again on the new setup, i happened to noticed not everything on the disc is full HD as i would have thought. The main feature is of course full HD however the Generation of Degeneration making-of is output at 1080i, not such a major issue considering it's just a making-of. Some of the Degeneration trailers are also output at 1080i but thankfully all the wonderfully-recorded voice bloopers are in full HD. The interview with leon motion-actor along with some other odd film trailers are output at standard definition (480p) probably due to the source material itself. However the real highlight of watching the blu-ray on the new setup is i can finally view the picture-in-picture (PIP) feature which i had a really hard time on standard definition as the smaller frame was simply impossible to see anymore on SD.

Blu Eye Boy

A couple of weeks ago, i didn't have any good reasons to even turn on my Playstation3. In the span of less than two weeks, i got two good reasons to keep my Playstation3 (i'm kidding of course) until Capcom releases Resident Evil 5, Siren: New Translation to play and Resident Evil: Degeneration Blu-ray to watch.

Resident Evil: Degeneration is my first real blu-ray movie and i know i tend to make a pretty big deal out of this but i assured you it's only because i intend to stay away from these things so that i don't get addicted to collecting them. Thanks to ash, i was able to order it online from amazon instead of paying inflated prices at the video store or buying it from a random stranger at the local forum. Not that i have anything against those but since this is Resident Evil, i decided the whole process of "acquiring" the movie should be extra special too. I may be a little late to the party seeing that it's about a month since the blu-ray debuted but sometimes it's the journey there that matters and not about getting there first.

Stranglehold Scores

Stranglehold as a game alone is such a hard-sell seeing that the whole campaign last for roughly less than ten hours. Sure Midway could have made it a bit longer but there is really no point to it as the whole game is rather repetitive and any longer would not have serve the game any good. In the end, the whole John Woo experience feels unfulfilled because while the game does play like a John Woo film, it lacks that cinema flair of it's silver screen predecessor. The cutscenes in Stranglehold are just plain bad and i found myself wishing that there were less cutscenes in the game, it was that bad.

Thankfully the Hard Boiled movie which inspired the game is also included on the Collector Edition, making the purchase worthwhile at its current price which is about the price of a blu-ray movie alone. Hard Boiled isn't just any movie, if you have not seen it i strongly urge you to watch it if you have any love for action films.

Enemies defeated - 1264
Highest style combo - 32
Style point earned - 2857
Paper cranes found - 110
Damage to world - $ 146,048,617

Overall ranking - C -