The Gamer's Voice - Video Game Reviews, Latest Game News & Video Game Podcasts

Capcom has just announced that Universal Pictures will be releasing the cinematic “masterpiece” Street Fighter: The Movie to Blu-Ray early next year. Read More

It has just been announced today that the all new CG movie Resident Evil Degeneration is also scheduled for release on UMD for the PSP, alongside Blu-Ray and DVD versions. Read More

As predicted by Old School Fool and myself, the winner of the High-Def format war is Blu-Ray, leaving HD-DVD in the bargain bin of your local movie retailers. I’d just like to give you guys a little run down of our view of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, along with some data on each of them.

Although HD-DVD was teh first to market by about three months, it was still far inferior to Blu-Ray. An HD-DVD can hold 15GB on a single layer, and 30GB on a dual layer. This is opposed to a Blu-Ray disc which can hold 25GB on a single layer and 50GB on a dual layer. Although we’re not all about to go out and buy burners for either format to burn movies onto, this still shows which has more potential as far as bonus features and extra content are concerned, as well as video quality. Since the disc size is so large, it leaves a lot of room that wasn’t there before on the regular discs.

At this year’s Digital Life, Old School Fool and I took a little break and sat down at the HD-DVD booth/party bus/we’re on our last leg area. We were sitting in some sort of surround sound chair, similar to the ones we sell at VGC. In front of us were two Xbox 360s with the HD-DVD attachments on them. At first, we couldn’t really tell what these things were because we were so bored of the show we just wanted to leave, but when we recognized it, we were appaled. To think that a PlayStation 3 has a Blu-Ray drive BUILT INTO the system itself and the Xbox 360 STILL had to suffice with a bulky attachment that takes up a USB port and doesn’t fit anywhere you want it to. I know that the 360 came out before HD-DVD, but they still could have at least remodeled the system so the drive was built-in like the PS3. OSF and I both knew that the format was dying because NO ONE was at the booth and the presenter was talking to people who were just trying to sleep in the chairs provided like us.

With the format war over, we may see an Xbox 360 with a Blu-Ray drive in it, we might not. I don’t really see it happening considering Pioneer is in league with Sony with the entire format of Blu-Ray, so it will cost Microsoft a LOT of money to get a license for Blu-Ray, let alone the technology itself. PS3 fanboys rejoice!