Insert Coin #3The (format) war is over...

Catching up with some posts I started a while back but have yet to finish, welcome to Insert Coin #3, not ultimately about games this time but as you may have guessed a winner to the format war was announced a few weeks back. That is of course the war between the two rival formats HD-DVD and Blu-ray who were duking it out to become the new Hidef optical medium. Sony are the creators of Blu-ray and have been pushing their format with the inclusion of a drive in the PS3, and of their Vaio laptops too. Toshiba sat in the other corner with the HD-DVD format. Now I can't be bothered to go into the specific pros and cons of each format here, but will say that technically blu-ray is the "better" format in terms of storage capacity. This has reminded many of the VHS/Betamax war many years ago, personally I was too young to remember this but VHS won outright as it was the cheaper to produce despite Betamax providing the better quality. In this format war, the "better" format won, although it is widely believed that Sony bought out many of the HD-DVD supporters.

This feature is supposed to be about gaming, so what does all this have to do with anything? Well I've been interested in the outcome of this war and like a lot of people am surprised that it ended as quickly as it has. Now, myself being an owner of an HD TV, I would like to test it's capabilities. Whilst the standard def signal looks ok, it's still quite obvious that that signal suffers because it is on a higher resolution TV. Now that blu-ray is the winner, I find myself thinking, hey it would be cool to have in my possession a blu-ray player. That being said, the cheapest blu-ray player out there is, OMG the Playstation 3. I never gave any serious thought to buying a PS3, the price point being far too high and the lack of quality titles available for the console - or at least titles which I could not already get for the 360. But now, there are some quality games on the horizon, Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo 5 are two upcoming titles I am very interested in.

As I said I would like to see blu-ray now I have the HD TV goodness, and being a fan of a fair few revision3 shows, all of which (that I've tried at least) are made available in HD format. That is good in that, I am experiencing some non-game HD content, also Netflix are a regular sponsor of the shows, and blu-ray rental is incredibly tempting. Netflix is of course US only, but there are easily enough UK alternatives out there. Online DVD (+game) rental is the way to go it seems so tempted to sort that out and then switch over to Blu-ray when I finally sort out a PS3. It is probably not much of a coincidence that following the announcement that the format war is over, there must have been a noticeable spike in their sales. Now recently with the help of my good buddy Wilson, I've been looking into getting a new pone contract with the promise of a PS3 as a free gift. The catch is that you obviously have to go for one of the higher rate contracts, they seem to start at ~£35 and you are tied into a 18 month contract. Crunching the numbers and that works out as ~£17 to cover the PS3, and the rest being the cost of the actual contract. Now I'm getting very off topic here but my mobile phone usage is pretty low in the whole scheme of things so it doesn't seem that worthwhile for myself, although it is very tempting to spread the costs and get a PS3 now. Thinking about it, I do feel a little guilty spending all the money for what is effectively going to be primarily a Blu-ray player. There are more crucial purchases that I should be considering first plus GTA4 comes out in a couple of weeks, I've pre-ordered a 360 copy (obviously), so maybe when I start to get bored with that (lol?), I'll properly reconsider the PS3 again, although like the iPod Classic, it's pretty much a definite purchase, it's more of a case of when rather than should I.

This has been a little off-topic but it needed to be posted sooner rather than later, as the more I put it off, the less relevant it gets (especially if by the time I actually posted, I was an owner of a PS3, that's not the case here). I wanna post an Insert Coin about WoW (sorry), and after seeing Kidderminster Harriers play the other day, I have a strong urge to actually play football and/or football manager lol.