Descent Into Madness (Suggs To Be You)

Very rarely do I find games that get to me. This isn’t through a lack of trying; I primarily look for strong and engaging narratives when purchasing games, though very few of them tend to register with me on a mental or emotional level. However, when a video game does get to me, it seems to have to have just as powerful an effect on me than if I was watching the story as a TV show or film, if not more so. Now I don’t mean to sound pretentious when I say that because for something to register with me, I only ask that it have some lasting effect and I don’t instantly forget about it after I’ve finished, which I think we can all agree is the measure of an experience being worthwhile. For example, I would say Psychonauts has registered with me in the same way Monty Python and The Holy Grail has because I haven’t found a game as genuinely hilarious. The tongue-in-cheek, surrealist humour of both of them has definitely had an influence on me as a comedian, yet in terms of mental or emotional resonating with an audience, video gaming as a medium has distinct advantage due to it being an interactive medium; especially when it comes to empathising with a protagonist’s descent into madness.

Just needed to get this joke out of my system. Last one, I promise.

I recently played through Spec Ops: The Line. For those of you who haven’t played it, Spec Ops is a 3^rd person shooter that follows a special operations task force into storm hit Dubai to save any of the remaining survivors and  investigate what happened to the decorated American Platoon of Soldiers, the Damned 33^rd. The game is loosely based on the book Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and is an examination of both the Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder that soldiers can experience in action and how removed actual video games about war are from the real thing. After a few hours of game play, there is an incident that involves white phosphorous that made me as a player feel physically nauseous and incredibly guilty. Why? It was because it was the player who causes the incident. That simple fact alone means that the player is more invested in the narrative. They’re not passive watching it on a TV screen for the main character to deal with as if it was a film. Having watched Apocalypse Now last weekend, a film inspired by Heart of Darkness, the horrors in that didn’t get to me as much as Spec Ops although it is based on nearly identical themes.

The game finds subtle ways to break the fourth wall to remind you what you've done. (Until that moment where all the characters look directly to the camera and call the player a dick.)

From that point onwards, the player watches the main character try to cope with the things he is doing to survive while also trying to comprehend what he has done; thus allowing the main character’s self-awareness to be that of the audience, making them feel guilty about the horrors they are committing. There comes a certain point in the game when the battlefield changes in a sudden flash to look like a hell on earth before transforming back, which is both symbolic as well as representative of the main character has losing a part of his sanity and being scared forever. Needless to say, Spec Ops: The Line got to me.

I find this altering of the pre-established reality as a way representing the main characters diminishing mental state at its most effective in video games because you are able to actively observe it at your own pace. We all remember the Scarecrow sections of Batman: Arkham Asylum for doing this masterfully to give us both an insight into Batman’s psyche and a unique way for him to battle the Scarecrow. For those of you who have played Eternal Darkness, you will recall how well the game was able to mess with the player in a variety of ways when the sanity meter was low and made them think their TV was broken.

World's worst Pic 'n' Mix salesman ever.

Not that all video games get this right. The desert section from Uncharted 3 is a test in patience at best. I find the key to getting this to work effectively is to use it both sparingly and subtlety. The best uses have those moments where the player isn’t sure what they have seen and are able to doubt themselves. It is a good way of re-enforcing a theme or an idea in the games narrative. Of course, not all games need to incorporate this to be a good game or to give a deep and meaningful experience.

I am a firm believer that video games have the potential to have a more powerful effect on the audience than film and TV. While there will always be shining examples of masterful story telling in every medium, watching a character walk through hell on earth and having the choices you actively made be the reason he is there are two completely different experiences altogether (and I know which one will stay with me for the longest). Now I’m going to play some Sly Cooper: Thieves In Time to remind myself there is still joy in the world.

You don't need to understand what's going on in Kingdom Hearts. Nobody does.

Sorry to make a lot of people feel old (or alienate a lot of young readers at once) but It's been at least ten years since Kingdom Hearts came out on the PS2 which was a lovely idea on paper where Disney characters and their associated worlds get smushed together with cameos from Final Fantasy characters and other original content from Square-Enix. It was awesome, taking on the role of Sora... or someone, you got to team up with Aladdin to smash Jafar with a key-sword... or something to go on an epic journey with Donald Duck and Goofy to track down the legendary Kingdom Hearts... or somewhere.

Whatever was happening in this game, it was awesome.

So after having a magical journey fighting The Heartless through Alice in Wonderland, Halloween Town and Neverland among others I ended up in a location called Hollow Bastion and then some stuff happened involving some guy called Ansem, who wasn't really a guy called Ansem as it turned out because of events that transpired in Kingdom Hearts 2, which is actually the third game in the series as a matter of fact, which explains why "Organisation XIII" consisted of only four people due to the rest of them being thoroughly dispatched during the events of Chain of Memories on the Game Boy Advance, which people understandably mistook for a spin-off title instead of a fully canonised, core story title. The Kingdom Hearts series then became a kind of equal opportunities campaign for gaming platforms, having a main series title appearing on smartphones, microwaves and the long since defunct Neo Geo Pocket. 

This fight, of course, being the turning point of the entire story... eventually.

So when I bought Dream Drop Distance for the Nintendo 3DS I was worried that I would be completely lost having not followed the series in its entirety whatsoever. Turns out that although this was true (Who or what is Braig?) it turns out that you can just sort of power through and get to the business of twatting stuff with keys on sticks without having to worry about why you're doing it. It turns out that these games have a habit of saving all their inter-game lore for five minutes at the start and half an hour at the end, leaving plenty of time for good clean Disney related fun for the thirty hours betwixt.

Also, Sebastian becomes the size of a goat in the GBA title. Fun!

Twenty Keyblade (or chi-blade) Masters? Fuggedaboudit you can just concentrating on having fun with Quasimodo! What on earth is Master Xehanort up to? Who gives a shit because... Tron. The series is certainly self-aware of it's own uncontrollably burgeoning plot and makes up for it by being lots of fun to play and very pretty to look at. Just pick up a copy of whichever title is easiest for you to acquire and get to the happy business of speculating whether Disney will be including Darth Vader and Wolverine into Kingdom Hearts 3 due to wealth of real world corporate stuff that has happened since ancient times when Kingdom Hearts 2 (3) was released. Of course, Kingdom Hearts 3 will be closer to Kingdom Hearts 10 at this rate for anyone keeping count but if you've learned anything from my article today is that it does not matter one bit. 

First Evepressions: A 2 week trial of Eve Online

by Hugo Jones
                                                                     
It has happened, through the wormhole I have travelled and found myself in New Eden. That's right, I'm in Eve, pulled in by the 2 week free trial, the 10 year anniversary - a serious feat for any MMO I'm told - and thinking I'm Mal Reynolds. Don't Google Eve after watching Firefly. The download and installation were all a doddle, as always fast internets and fast computers make life that bit easier. 

"Wait, what?"
Eve has a reputation for confronting newbs with the steepest learning curb in the galaxy (don't look at me I only have Runescape to compare this against) and so far most of it does make sense. The tutorial runs the rookie capsuleer through the most basic of spacefaring skills and the starter missions are fun and simple enough to accomplish. Many of these missions provide the player with sweet new rides - albeit really cheap ones. 

The story line missions really suffer from the lack of a compelling storyline. In a game like WOW where the players are phased in azerboth (or whatever it is called) - each player experiences the same world differently according to their game choices. In Eve all players experience the world collectively. Once those asteroids in front of me are mined out by me or other players, the same applies to you, space cowboy. The point is, where in some other game the player becomes the central protagonist to the entire universe, in Eve you are small, you are nothing and you can affect relative amounts of nothing. A player can't complete missions, work his way up and destroy the enemy faction because there are thousands of players playing their with that enemy faction, nothing would make sense if everybody could be a winner at once.

"Big ships aplenty! Yeeeeeeahh boyyyyy"
As a result Eve can feel like a lonely place, even with the incessant chatter on the player channels. So what is a pilot to do? Well go join a corporation, an in game player made organisation where like minded pilots can go round doing what they like to do, which is basically a player's guild. Where the hell do you start with those? You apply to these things, I had one corp member ask me what career I was going into. Career? I play games to escape these things, I can barely work out what I want to do in the real world, let alone set myself a virtual career path. 

And it seems that New Eden has all the same problems as the real world, theft, embezzlement, corruption, a ludicrous trade in pointless bits accessories (ooh a shiny new hat). Some of the scandals even make it to the real world news, as ISK the in game currency can be used to buy PLEX -game time/subscription- ISK has a rate comparable to what it costs in the real world for game time. So when billion ISK ponzi schemes collapse it hurts in the real world. 


"Back we go!"
And yet for all of it's universe and shiny big ships, I don't think I'll be sticking around, perhaps I'm after something with more of a pre defined story line, perhaps I'm afraid of the commitment. Who knows?  

One thing is for sure though; Eve is not a game, its a second world, a world where you work for your ISK, where you mine and refine and build and buy and insure(!?) stuff, so maybe just maybe you can get to the point where you can really start blowing cool stuff up. It's like you get home from your real job that keeps food on the table and internets in the tubes only to switch to your second job to keep your spacecraft flying and your character geared up with the dopest hat.

Eve is not a game, it is the first step to the singularity, it is the beginnings of the total online human, where the mechanics of the game provide the player with everything they need(so long as they work for it) to survive and prosper. But do you know what, I'd rather we start our entirely virtual existence from the sturdy community of Eve players than a world populated by say, Neopets. Do those still exist? (Yes - Ed)

Unfinished Business: Conquering Your Demons.

We all have those memories we wish we didn't have. Embarrassing, humiliating or just downright shameful things we wish weren't part of our histories. All of this is made worse still in that we cannot undo or change the past meaning that our regrets will haunt us forever. Yet I did find that in the case of my very worst regret that I could change the past! I could unmake my regrets and wipe that particular slate clean! Beneath all those damnable atrocities I was responsible for, all the mishandled romances I could have made work and all those embarrassing screw ups in between laid my most bitter regret and that was not achieving a 100% rating in Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back.

Bitter, bitter regret. With seals.

Now I'm not a die-hard completionist in all walks of my gaming life. I lack the time or inclination to earn each and every achievement/trophy available to me and I don't feel particularly bad about that either. I'm not, shall we say, all dat bovvered. But Crash 2 and I have a history. I played that game quite a lot when I was younger although I never owned it. I had a memory card with a save file on it and would load it up whenever I went over to a particular mate's place or that one family restaurant that had a PlayStation with it on. This was also in the days before literally everybody was on the Internet. It was a time where kids were way more likely to find game guides in magasines than they were on websites or those mysterious not yet invented "blogs" you hear about. Incidentally, I never quite found everything in Crash 2 because believe me my friends, there is some serious 'how the hell?' bullshit going on with the secrets in that game.

Hint: You can't reach that gem from below, or even from this level.

I could probably rant on about that for an entire article and disguise my frustration and lack of childhood success as an deconstruction of secret collectibles and levels in games, but the crucial fact of the matter is that I just did not accomplish what I set out to do in this game after putting considerable investment into it. That's the difference between all the achievements I haven't earned (and didn't care about) and my failure at gem collecting back in the 90s. But recently, thanks to the Playstation Network service, I finally managed to go back and take care of that game once and for all, with a great psychological payoff.

Although the actual in-game 'reward' is not so incredible...

Everyone has had that fantasy about being able to go back in time and transplant their mature mindset into their younger selves. Just imagine how much more confident and competent you would be with the advantage of advanced experience. Well that's exactly how it felt playing Crash 2 again. I had all the extra experience of gaming to deal with the trickier sections, any amount of guides to help me track down some of the more bullshit gems (that game pulls some serious shenanigans I tell you, I usually don't go in for guides) and of course it doesn't hurt that I had complete access to the game too! I was totally unstoppable!

Like this armoured chicken

Fellow 103% writer and friend Ben "Spoon" Winterton has written about gaming to-do lists before but his personal list consists of at least as many games that he hasn't touched at all and games he isn't particularly bothered about completing in of themselves (Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts is a case in point) as there are games that Ben feels a genuine sense of longing to finish. I would suggest that people reading this article think back to an example of a milestone not quite achieved or a challenge not yet overcome and go back and cross that one off the list. It's high time you did.  

Guide to setting up your HDTV for gaming

by Dave Lamb

This is a follow up to my first guide on how to pick a HDTV for gaming. After you've selected the prefect TV for gaming, it’s time to tweak the settings to get the very best out of your new set.

"Modern/hygienic living space is completely optional"

You're probably quite happy with the picture on your HDTV but did you know it can look even better with a few changes to the settings. About half of TV owners don’t take the time to set it up their TV’s but there are three big reasons why you should.

The picture will look better

Manufacturers set up their TVs so that they are very bright and colourful when they are on display in the store. This is to exploit the fact the human eye is always drawn to the brightest image. However games, movies and TV programmes are made to a specific set of standards. If your TV is aligned to these standards you will be watching the content as the creators intended, seeing what they originally wanted you to see.

It will use less energy

Once your TV is set up to an accurate picture mode it will normally use between 15 - 50% less energy

It will reduce eye strain

When we look at something bright our pupils shrink to let less light in and when we look at something dark, they dilate to let more light in. If your TV is set too bright, then the picture is constantly changing from bright to dark. This causes your pupils to continually open and close and as a result, your eyes will become tired. If you set up your TV correctly you can have a more comfortable viewing experience and avoid eye strain.

Next follow my 5 steps on how to select the best settings to produce the very best picture your HDTV is capable of. 

1. Select the correct picture mode

The first step is to select the correct picture mode to produce a realistic picture and ensure you are not losing any detail. Change the picture mode setting to cinema/movie mode. If your TV has a THX mode select this as it a mode that attempts to provide the industry standards. 

As you can see, in dynamic mode picture detail is lost and the picture is less realistic. 

Straight away you will notice a drop in brightness which may seem strange at first. Your eyes have become used to watching an overly bright image and it will take time for them to adjust. After a few days you should realise colours are more natural and watching TV is more enjoyable.

2. Select the correct picture size

You should adjust the Picture Size, Aspect or Ratio setting so that the edges of the picture are not lost outside the edges of the screen, known as overscan. The best setting is usually called something like ‘just scan’, ‘screen fit’ or ‘full’. If your TV has an overscan setting turn it off.

As you can see here, if the picture size setting is set incorrectly you lose the edges of the image.

 3. Disable any unnecessary features.
There are unfortunately many picture processing features that degrade the picture quality of sets. It sounds ridiculous but these are all purely for marketing campaigns.

Energy saving features

These should be switched off as they reduce the brightness on your picture. By setting up your TV correctly with this guide you are already saving energy. Power saving functions dim and brighten an image unnaturally which adversely affect picture quality.

Dynamic Brightness (Dynamic Contrast/Black Enhancer/Dynamic Backlight)
Similar to the energy saving features these also brighten and dim the picture in an unstable way which negatively affects picture quality.

Led Dimming
If you have a LED LCD TV this feature should be set to off unless you have a full backlit LED TV, in which case it should be set to low. Again this setting will affect brightness stability if set incorrectly.

Sharpening and Noise Reduction

Sharpening settings add false sharpness to an image which can obscure fine detail in high definition images. Noise reduction smoothes an image which can hide image detail.

Motion Enhancement (Motion Plus/Motion Flow/TruMotion/Intelligent Frame Creation)
This setting creates extra frames in video you are watching by guessing what should be in between existing frames. The created frames often contain errors like ghosting of objects in the picture.

A created frame is inserted in-between the original two frames.

The created frame often shows errors like this. The moral of the story is you can create something out of nothing.

4. Check your Colour Temperature, Colour Gamut and Gamma

In most cases these will be correctly set after you select the cinema or movie mode earlier in the guide but it’s worth checking them. Colour temperature should be set to warm or warm 2 if available. If your TV has a colour gamut option it should be set to rec709 or BT709. If your TV has a gamma setting it should be set to 2.2 - 2.4 if the option is available. These settings align your picture with those used by the studios to ensure you are viewing the content as they intended.

The finished product should be more realistic like the image on the right.

5. Console specific settings

Finally I’ll add some specific settings for consoles that should help you get the best picture quality out of them.

Xbox 360
Firstly make sure you're using an HDMI cable if you can and select the correct resolution of your TV on the Xbox 360. Go in the display settings, set the reference levels to standard and the HDMI colour space to Source.

PS3
As with the Xbox 360 use a HDMI cable if you can. Turn the Cross Color Reduction Filter off,set the RGB Full Range to limited, set Y Pb/Cb Pr/Cr Super White to on and BD 1080P 24Hz Output to automatic.


Wii
There’s not much in the way of setting on the Wii but use the component cables if you can and set the resolution to 480p.

Notes on input lag...

Most Modern TV’s have settings such as game mode which aims to reduce input lag. They do this by removing most of the processing present in modes like "dynamic". If you've followed this guide you should have selected the movie or cinema mode which also cuts out on much of the processing. Movie modes sometimes yields the same results as game modes when it comes to input lag, as long as any frame creation is turned off but you may need to enable it depending on your model. 

There you have it. Give your eyes a few days the adjust and you should be much happier with the picture quality. If anyone has any questions please feel free to ask in the comments section below.

Follow Dave Lamb on..

Twitter - @DaveLambs

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Contact on LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/mrdlamb

"Get on with it!" -- An Impatient Gamer's Lament

I know this is more my TV Blogger friend Yogesh's remit but I'm one of those people that are always trying to get people to watch a TV series called The Wire. I ruthlessly offer to loan out my DVDs and often buy Season 1 as a present for people as a form of encouragement but all too often I see people giving up on the show early on. This is where I insist that they must watch the 'first three episodes' before I agree to leave their home and untie their family by which time their appreciation of the show is sufficient for them to continue watching without my dogged insistence. This is because people have the astounding realisation that the show is great.

I'll let people in the know do the voice in their head. It's way more fun!

But for the longest time I was very indignant about the amount of persuasion people required from me in order to really get into the show. I was frustrated by how much the show depends on word of mouth hype to persuade folks to get past the first couple of episodes without losing patience. I stopped feeling this way over the weekend when I tried to play a series of games published by Rockstar in succession. I tried L.A. Noire, GTA4 and Red Dead Redemption over the course of a long afternoon and found myself getting very agitated by the slow pace at the beginning of each game. It will only be due to the insistence of my gaming friends that these games are worth persevering with that I'll even bother to return to these titles. It's for the same reason that The Wire can lose a lot of people early on and that is because it is such a slow burn in terms of the early pacing.

This is an illustration of slow pacing. You do better.

The only thing is that I can accept slow pacing from The Wire because it was adapted from what was originally a novel. What's more, the story and the world is actually deep and intricate enough to warrant the level of set up and exposition and you can vary up the action plenty due the number of distinct plot lines and characters than the medium of TV allows you to juggle. I won't pick on exclusively Rockstar in this article but to begin with we have Red Dead, GTA4 and L.A. Noire taking its sweet time padding out the early levels of their game with mind numbingly simple stuff. What's worse is that the 'story' we're being told during these tutorial segments is often of relatively little consequence. 

...and you, the player, have to choke it all down.

The first hour or so of L.A. Noire doesn't provide the in-game intrigue to keep you interested in the overall story arc they're building. The newspaper and flashback cut scenes are way more engaging then the mysteries I'm solving at this point and it's sad that the playable narrative content is the dullest thing about what is going on, especially if you pad out the experience further by doing the street crime stuff too. Red Dead has me spend a lot of time trotting about on a horse at the start. It takes forever to actually ride to the tutorial section, which is a largely uneventful horseback tour of a ranch, before I get to my first real mission which is a horse race...

and this is where I turn the console off. Grand Theft Horses indeed!

Not even the modern GTA series lets you see any of the real story until you've plodded through the first few gauntlets of missions. It's almost like these games won't even trust us with their main storylines until we've mastered the most basic controls and game elements. It is to the detriment of the game experience too. The opening of Far Cry 3 takes it's sweet time getting to the point. At least the story is present from the beginning but I feel like I had to jump my way through quite a lot of cut scenes and 'This is how you buy a gun' type hoops before I was allowed to run wild on the island like all my friends had been doing.

I might sound like an old fart here but it's not often that a triple A release comes along where you can just get right into some satisfying action within five minutes of starting a new game. Spec Ops: The Line did a fantastic job of this by getting me right into a firefight straight after the opening chopper section. I had to swallow about a minute's worth of cut scene and that was all. In fact many shooters of the modern era can actually pull off a short badass in media res, opening sequence to get the pace off to a flying start.

Let's look at Final Fantasy 7. It has a killer opening sequence at one of Midgar's Mako reactors . This just goes to show that a longform genre of game like FF7 need not take its sweet time getting to the fun. I don't know how the same company also developed Kingdom Hearts 2 and Final Fantasy 13, mind you. Those games took forever to get going... and were very if they ever did get going.

Seriously, was it an intentional joke that the main character of such a slow paced game is called "Lightning"?

At any rate, third person adventure games like Red Dead certainly do not need to start off as slowly as they do. Less so if the game is a frickin sandbox world of all things. The sheer size of the game world is more than enough padding if padding is what you're trying to deliver. There is no need to pad out the start. It's the worst place to do it. If you're setting up a vastly complex narrative then at least find an engaging and concise way to do it, gamers are there to game after all.

There are only so many long-form products that I'm willing to convince my fellow gamers to press on with despite their shaky starts and I'm afraid that The Wire is quite a tough level of quality to live up to. I don't believe that the in game storytelling of Red Dead is quite up to snuff so you may as well let me use the horse mounted flame-throwers immediately and let me have my fun (Spoiler alert!!)     

How the Candy Crushed me: A Saga

by Jak Marshall

If you've been on Facebook recently, many users who should know better (including myself) have been sucked into playing variants what has become the viral social game, Candy Crush Saga which boasts a rather phenomenal 10 million plus count for monthly active users, which puts the game in the same bracket as FarmVille for general maddening ubiquity.

I personally think that the character design is just off-putting... 

I should put a disclaimer on this article because the game is highly addictive and something you feel dirty for coming back to time and time again. Here's how it pulls you in.

First of all it's a match-3 game of the Bejeweled ilk which means it's already dead set to be a time sink. But there's missions and social elements and lovely little graphics of delicious sweeties galore on top of all that.

The thing is that the difficulty curve rapidly steepens. If you've ever studied the mechanics of puzzle games you will know that the developers can make a level as hard or as easy as they bloody well choose through the clever tweaking of parameters buried in the mathsy code parts of the game.

That's why the genre is so varied and popular. Also check out Puzzle Quest...

Candy Crush has made most of its non-tutorial levels just hard enough that it's only barely possible to beat them without resorting to other options that make the game a lot easier.

First of which is the obligatory "pay to win" option where you can use real cash money to buy 'booster' power-ups which might not even bloody work without some degree of skilful use and (largely) luck on the part of the player. But no reader of mine is about to spend money on such a game (are you?) so we won't go into that. There is one other way to make the game easier though. But it involves Diplomacy!

You see, as well as requesting extra lives from friends of yours who may or may not be Candy Crush addicts you can also ask them to send you extra moves and other aids (at no cost to them) to help you get through the level you're currently stuck on. There are also certain parts of the game where you need to have at least three of your friends take the time out of their busy candy crushing days to send you 'boat tickets' to progress from episode to episode, meaning that you actually do need some friends to play this game and you have to publicly admit that you have a problem in order to keep playing. It's like having to show your AA badge to get into a bar, and it also increased the visibility of the game.

Despite having a built in lives system to stop you playing for hours... you still find yourself playing for quite some time.

But it's all very well asking your friends for help except when you realise that they probably want your help in return. This would be fine if the various game's overworld map wasn't laid out like a giant race to the finish type board game with all your friends on it. Friends that you would quite like to overtake on this board and (using a built in feature of the game that allows you to) publicly boast that you are ahead of them.

It's a symbiotic relationship and it is often that the case that you can't make swift progress without assistance. I'm on a meager level 38 and it's because I am too stubborn to ask for help but my resolve is wavering as of late. Especially since people who I consider myself ultimately better than in every single way are outperforming me and this can only be because of 'politics' .

Because I'm really good at video games.

But ultimately, Candy Crush is to the social puzzle games genre as Dark Souls is to the Western RPG genre. You can make no progress for the longest time because of a steep difficulty curve, feel a great sense of accomplishment when you do make progress and there is a multiplayer element to the game which one is reluctant to use at first, but is ultimately the best way to make swifter progress, even if it isn't as satisfying. I just can't wait for Candy Crush: Prepare to Die Edition. Peace out. 

HDTV for gaming: A consumer's guide.

by Dave Lamb

I’ve decided to put my years of home cinema calibration and setup to good use and provide the readers of 103% with a guide to picking the best HDTV for gaming. In this guide I’ll show you how to pick the very best HDTV to help you to get the most out of our beloved video game consoles.

Modern games boast some of the most beautiful CG graphics. A good HDTV can help bring out the best in them.

Screen size

The very first step anyone should take when selecting a TV is choosing a screen size.  The table below shows the recommended viewing distances for different sized screens.

It may seem like these recommendations provide a large screen size for your room. However, such TVs are geared towards creating an immersive cinematic experience. The biggest complaint among TV buyers is that they wish they had bought a bigger set.

LCD vs Plasma 

There are two major television technologies on the market currently and they are LCD and Plasma. Plasma TV’s have phosphors that create the image on the screen and light up individually, whereas LCDs are a liquid crystal screen that does not self-illuminate and requires a separate backlight.

Plasma has a number of benefits where picture quality is concerned. Their motion resolution is higher which means images do not blur when moving across the screen quickly. This makes games like Sonic Generations a lot clearer as the levels speed across your screen.  They also have deeper black levels and can be viewed from the side without colours becoming washed out. The only downfall of plasma is that they can’t give off as much light as an LCD. This makes them unsuitable for environments with a lot of natural light such as a conservatory. As long as you have something to control the light levels in the room like curtains or blinds, this isn’t a problem. Overall the many advantages of plasma outweigh their one downfall making them better performers for gamers and cinema lovers alike. 

An example of LCD motion blur on the left compared to the clear motion of plasma on the right.

Unfortunately if you want a screen of a size less than 42 inches you’re stuck with LCD due to manufacturing limitations. Some of you may also have heard of OLED screens. These are essentially the Holy Grail for home cinema fans as they provide better picture quality than both LCD and Plasma. There’s a few popping up on the market this year but you’ll need very deep pockets to purchase one of these sets. 

The image on the left is an example of the poor black levels on LCD screens, whereas the image on the right demonstrates plasma’s superior performance.

Input lag

Now, Input lag is something not a lot of people know about until it causes them a problem.  It’s best described as the delay between the television receiving a signal and it being displayed on the screen. It’s caused by Image processing which takes time and therefore adds some degree of delay.  This causes an issue for first person shooters and rhythm games such as guitar hero as they require fast reflexes. It causes the image on your screen to be slightly behind the real time events so you may find it difficult to pull off a headshot in Halo.

The LCD TV here is displaying around 40ms of delay compared to a lag free CRT monitor. Older CRT TV’s have zero input lag as they use analogue systems compared to the digital sets of today which require processing.

It is generally considered that input lag of around 30ms or below is acceptable. The best sets have around 16ms and the really bad ones can have around 120ms of delay.  You might be reading this and assume you can walk into a store and ask for a TV with low input lag and have a life of hassle free gaming. Unfortunately this is not the case. Manufactures don’t publish these figures so it’s left to you to go digging around reviews to retrieve this information.

Professional Reviews

So far I’ve recommended you buy plasma if you can, with a low input lag. My final piece of advice is to choose a set with the best picture quality according to professional reviews. Two excellent websites for this are www.avforums.com and www.hdtvtest.co.uk. These websites use professional equipment to test TVs against industry standards. They also always measure input lag which is great for us gamers. A lot of people go by reviews on websites like CNET but they do not use a scientific approach and rely more on subjective opinions. The websites above will test a TV from every angle and provide you with the information to choose one with excellent picture quality.  

A chart measuring a TV’s colour performance. The white triangle represents the TV’s performance whereas the other triangle is the standard the TV should be achieving. 

On modern TV’s sound quality isn’t amazing. This is because sets have become so slim it is impossible to fit a decent pair of speakers inside. If you want great sound you’re going to have to shell out for external speakers.

Summary

• Select your screen size according to viewing distance.
• Go for a plasma if you can.
• Find a set with low input lag.
• Search professional reviews for one with great picture quality.
• You will need to get some decent speakers for the beat sound.

So what’s an example of a great set for gaming? I recently purchased the Panasonic TX-P42UT50B after I read the review on HDTV Test here. It’s a plasma which is relatively cheap, has an input lag of just 16ms and provides excellent picture quality.

If you’re looking for a decent pair of speakers to pair with your TV I’d recommend the Creative GigaWorks T20 Series. They’re inexpensive speakers that will drastically improve your sound quality compared to your TVs’ inbuilt ones.

Update 2014: Unfortunately Panasonic are withdrawing from the plasma market due to the cost, bulkiness and high power consumption of the screens. The technology is beginning to disappear so the market will be saturated with LED LCD displays until OLED comes down in price over the next 3 years. Fortunately, Sony have made some amazing gaming TV's over the past year, which have the smallest amount of input lag I've seen. Check out the W6 range if you're looking for a great gaming TV. 

Hope you’ve found this guide useful. Feel free to ask me any questions in the comments section below and make sure you check out my next guide on how to set up your HDTV for gaming. 

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The Ambiguity of Game Trailers: CyberPunk 2077 Trailer Edition

by Ed Colley

Here’s a problem with cinematic game trailers. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here’s a link to the new trailer for CyberPunk 2077. Give it a watch, I’ll wait. Done? Now put aside the very impressive visual aesthetics for a moment. What have you learned about the game itself? Is a real-time-strategy, a first-person-shooter or even a MMORPG? Can you tell me anything about the characters involved? The chances are you can’t if your only information about the game is that trailer. But how come game trailers (and only game trailers) are allowed to get away with this? You couldn’t away with this for a film. Imagine if the trailer for the King’s Speech was just a freeze frame of Colin Firth in his lingerie to a brooding, indie soundtrack. You’d just think it was a poorly cast advert for a strangely named aftershave.

Search result for "The King's Speech". He must really like steam-punk, he's got cogs and everything.

Ambiguous trailers frustrate me. They frustrate me because you come out them feeling as if you know less about them than when you started. However, it frustrates me less if the trailer is also a standout piece cinematography (see the Dead Island trailer for details). The perfume analogy from the first paragraph is apt for this type of cinematic game trailer. It’s a short and vacuous advert which attempts to entice you into a sale without providing any real information. Now there are reasons for this of course. A perfume advert can’t describe a smell to you and hope to maintain its flimsy veil of elegance. In the case of CyberPunk 2077, it’s 3 years from being released so a large portion of the game hasn’t even been designed yet. They don’t even know what they’re selling really. 

"Okay, it's kind of like a really strong orange-y smell with a bit of petrol. There's possibly a Mentos in their too."

Regardless, I feel can’t let this level of ambiguity in marketing go by without calling it out and trying to smugly take it as out of context as possible. So without further ado, here is a list of adverts and trailers that the CyperPunk 2077 trailer could also apply to. Feel free to join in in the comments.

1.       A game where you play as a special police task force that is designed to take down a uprising of robotic, lingerie models.

2.       An advert for bulletproof make-up.

3.       A game in which you play as a freelance news Helicopter trying to film stories in a futuristic city where you get high scores for good composition and framing. Points will be deducted for every news headline which reads “News helicopter crashed again due to the pilot being too concerned about the lighting in his shot to concentrate on flying a god-damn helicopter”.

4.       A game in which the claw from a grab the cuddly toy machine in an arcade becomes sentient, gains human form and goes on a killing spree in search of vengeance for all the cuddly toys that have been cruelly taken from them over the years.

5.       An infomercial that goes along the lines of “Has this ever happened to you? Some bullets just can’t cut it with today's new super-cyborgs. Try Branson’s Bullets. For all your on-the-go cyborg exterminating needs. Also try Branson’s new make-up piercing rounds. ”

Having done some research, CyberPunk 2077 is meant to be an open world RPG from CD Projekt RED, who are most notable for producing the Witcher series. I was surprised to find out that the original CyberPunk game is a moderately successful 80s’s pen and paper RPG. To produce a trailer of such scale and quality for such a widely unknown brand definitely shows dedication. The basic premise follows the citizens of Night City, where humans are able to augment themselves with cyber-technology but at the cost of their humanity. Now that sounds like a good premise.

Don't worry, only 22 years to wait and then Spider-man can sort everything out.  

Developers feel the need to release these early trailers to build more interest and following in the hope of achieving more sales, such is the current state of the gaming industry. The problem remains that they are still tasked with marketing an incomplete and interactive product in a non-interactive medium. Therefore the only remaining features you can show your audience is the world you hope to immerse them in and the human element. Both of these can be demonstrated with strong story telling. If the trailer had shown the horrors of the process of augmentation followed by one citizen's descent into insanity, that would have been more compelling than watching a minute of bullet-time.

Still, those of you looking for irony will say that the trailer got me to research the game in spite of how much it annoyed me, so it has served its purpose.  In which case, aren’t you a clever clogs Mr. Marketing. I hope you enjoy your profitable career writing terrible dialogue for some pretentious perfumes, you ponce. It looks like I’ve been tricked by the internet again. Or in other words, I’ve just been Cyber-Punked.