OK, so this was actually announced over ten days ago but I hadn’t seen it reported anywhere and somehow missed it, but Guitar Hero is getting a PAL release. This is excellent news not only because publishers have been reluctant when it comes to bringing gimmicky rhythm action games with cool controllers over here, and I can’t remember any remotely high profile ones since Samba De Amigo back in 2000. Even that was a rarity and proved to be little more than an investment for the collectors as the limited PAL run has led to the eBay price more than doubling since then.

For those not in the know, Guitar Hero looks like a typical music game but is played on a guitar-shaped controller, a little short of full size. You have five buttons along the neck and a big button to strum which you hit in time with the markers scrolling down the screen. You also have a functional whammy bar that can be used for extra points when holding notes, and also a motion sensor that puts you into a high scoring mode when you swing it vertically. Play it to some covers of classic rock and metal songs which actually sound like the originals and you have a game that makes you feel like you can play guitar, even if you can’t.

As with Samba, this is likely to be a shrewd investment as well as a damn good game. The limited US run means prices are already on the rise, and with the game and the guitar controller costing the same as a basic Xbox 360 game (that’ll be £49.99) you’ll want to get your preorder in on this one as soon as possible.

The ongoing saga of Highbury’s debt problems (covered here) looks like it could be coming to a close with the announcement that the other Bournemouth-based games magazine company, Imagine Publishing, which was set up by the original founder of Paragon, which became Highbury Entertainment before being bought out by Imagine. Still with me? Imagine’s output is improving but when they started out it was impressively bad.

Imagine are only taking on the profit-making magazines from Highbury (which includes GamesTM and Play) and laying off a lot of staff who are finding out in the next couple of weeks whether or not they still have a job. That can’t be fun and although it seems like the guys I know on GamesTM and Jude on Play are safe since they have editorial jobs on profitable mags, I know that my cousin who worked in the design department there is now only allowed to go back for two hours on Monday to clear out his personal belongings. That has to suck…

I’ve been searching desperately for something to write on here that wasn’t just about my new TV and/or DVD player which is proving very difficult at the moment because I’m obsessing over the whole thing. I’ve been playing with settings and have the new DVD player looking great, so I’m happy with it now and can find something else to talk about.

Anyway, this is the best I could come up with. There’s an interesting article here at GamesFirst which speculates on that popular topic of whether or not DVD9 is going to be big enough for Xbox 360 games. They look at the massive improvement in the graphical quality of Xbox games (check out that Azurik/FarCry comparison!) and then at the relatively small increase in the size of game data. Judging by that, in a few years compression and knowledge of the hardware should allow for massive and stunning games on a single disc and it has allayed some of my fears.

Only time will tell but I remember that seriously impressive 96k FPS demo from when it came out and it doesn’t look half bad. Imagine what that technology would allow them to fit in an 8.5GB disc with some high definition art assets.

The replacement SD-350E arrived and has exactly the same problems as the first one. I called Toshiba and they said that I just got unlucky despite the fact that I’ve had two that have done it, Jan has one, and several people in this thread complain of similar issues. Full credit to Amazon for their returns policy though, as they say that my card will be refunded in the next couple of days and they pay for DHL to come and pick up the returns which must cost them a fortune.

Anyway, I went to Richer Sounds and paid a bit more for a Samsung DVD-HD950. OK, so it wasn’t only a bit more. I paid twice the price of the Toshiba…

It’s a similar size and has all the same features (HDMI, upscaling, multiregion, etc) but also more connections, DVD-A support, SACD support, WMA support, and no annoying blue disc tray (instead it has an attractive but hardly practical white LCD screen and a power button with a blue light around the outside when it’s turned off). Also, as my TV is a Samsung as well, the remote can control my TV and saves me having to keep two around when I’m watching a DVD. Surprisingly, it comes with an HDMI cable (both HDMI-HDMI and HDMI-DVI) which could have saved me some money if I’d bought this one in the first place. At least I’ll have a spare when the PS3 comes out…

First impressions are that the remote is cluttered and will take some time to learn the ropes of, but this player has a lot more options than the SD-350E, which was fairly anaemic in that respect. Picture quality is excellent although the default settings need tweaking slightly, and it seems that the scaler is fairly cheap as 480/576p looks marginally better than 720p and 1080i. I’m sure once I get my head around what all those damn buttons do I’ll be fine.

New to my features page is a guide to HDTV that I’ve been working on which can be found here. You may have noticed that I finally managed to get a decent one that I’m happy with but the experience taught me that there are more new acronyms, jargon, and pitfalls to learn and negotiate than any other kind of new technology that I can remember, even when building a PC, so I thought passing on my experience would be useful. Just explaining it all had to be fitted into two rather long pages.

As always I welcome feedback and any corrections for stuff that I inevitably missed on a topic this big. Hopefully someone finds it useful and avoids making a purchase that’s going to bite them in the ass in the future when they find that they can only watch HD-DVD in 480p.

Now that I’ve spent 24 hours with the TV I can expand on a few things that a couple of hours playtime only allowed me to gloss over, and how to solve a couple of problems that cropped up for anyone else who might be getting or already have the same TV.

• As usual with TVs the default settings are crap. I’m quite happy with the following settings, which look good for games and DVDs: contrast – 85; brightness – 70; sharpness – 25; colour – 50; tone – Warm1.
• Turn off digital noise reduction. It leaves some weird grey trails in black areas of bright sections (examples here) which is incredibly annoying and looks horrible in stuff like credits or movies with a lot of high contrast black and white (Sin City, for example).
• When connecting a 360 to any TV via component, remember to flick the switch on the cable from TV to HDTV. I spent a while trying to work out why it looked so crap before realising it was in 480i and not the 720p that I’d set it to.
• The skipping issue on the SD-350E is really annoying, but thankfully the artifacting problem is gone through HDMI. Amazon are sending me a replacement which should be here tomorrow so that I can see if I just got unlucky with this one, but nonetheless 576p looks great. Now just give me affordable HD-DVD because I need 720p movies.
• Annoyingly to turn the PS2’s output from RGB to component you need to go into the menu and change it yourself, which it won’t do over a component cable. You have to run it through SCART, change the output, and then swap in the new cable, and that just about makes it look passable. I pray that the PS3 can upscale the games.
• It’s been said that PGR3 doesn’t actually run in true HD and when you see it running on an HDTV it certainly appears to be true. It looks good but nowhere near the impossibly gorgeous DOA4.

There you go, then. We’ll see if there’s anything else that bears mentioning but now that the teething problems have been ironed out for me I’m very happy with things. The TV gets a thumbs up from me if you’re looking for HDTV on a budget.