Please.. Please… No More…

You know it’s a slow news year when you hit number 17 of your “comparison” articles on Eurogamer.

How many times can someone write… “it loads a bit faster on Xbox360, looks a bit better on PS3, but ultimately the game is exactly the same”

I mean, it’s a simple cut and paste job, but I think somewhere we’re missing the fundamental fucking point.

No-one actually gives a shit. And anyone who does give a shit is a fucking retard who is wasting their life force giving a shit about things that really don’t matter.

We’re not in the SNES vs Megadrive era any more. There isn’t a mode seven or opacity tricks, one doesn’t have a better audio processor over the other, the technical differences are so minuscule nowadays that it becomes irrelevant.

Please, for the love of god can we just move on from comparison videos and trying to ignite the format console war of the bygone era. Yes, Amiga vs ST, C64 vs Speccy, Snes vs Megadrive, they were wars because there were actually differences.

And here we finally rest on my point. (I KNEW there was one) – Making comparison VIDEOS is a complete and utterly fucking retarded thing to do. Seriously, it’s one of the most basically fundamentally thick fucking ideas I’ve ever seen.

Sure, the concept is sound, record the same bit of a game, split the video down the middle, label, publish, sit back in awe as people play spot the difference. Awesome idea..

Except… Hold on, What technology are you using here?

Right, so I’m assuming you’re pumping the signal through a composite or S-video cable, into a DVD-R machine perhaps, which is compressing it from whatever resolution the signal is in to a compressed lossy MPEG2/Div X codec.

Then, when that hardware is finished fucking about with it, you’ll rip a .vob file from a DVD, convert it back into a new video format that is, again, compressed.
Then you upload it to your website, and even with broadband, you’re looking at about 80mb for a minute of footage in a web-codec. Lets assume DivX

So basically, simply in the transition from PS3/Xbox 360 to Web Site video, your footage has been compressed/decompressed/compressed again all in a majorily lossy format. So any clarity that you’re trying to identify and compare is no longer there because of the format you’ve fucking picked.

Therefore, making your video completely, and utterly fundamentally fucking useless.

It is ONLY possible to do these comparison videos in a native uncompressed video. And those fuckers are big. We’re talking hundreds upon hundreds of megabytes – and I suppose you could pump the signal from the hardware directly into a PC and save it there, but as soon as you pump it through any sort of compression Codec, what you see is not what the PS3/Xbox360 is pumping out.

FUCKING COCKS.