The Joy of Being a Games Critic in Ireland (Patreon)

Hi All, I'm working on the Mario Galaxy review at the moment and have some thoughts to share which some of you may find interesting. When it comes to capturing footage of games I always do my best to make sure I have the highest quality video available. I figure there's no point in going to the trouble of making my reviews if I don't also make sure the footage quality is top notch too. With the Galaxy footage I had accidentally recorded in 4:3 even though the Wii has a 16:9 option available so I spent all day yesterday re-recording the game. There's a longer story behind how I could make such a simple mistake but I won't get into it here, let's just say my recorder wasn't being very co-operative. Anyway I have the new Galaxy footage now and it looks great but what I really wanted to talk about was Sunshine. Before even starting the Mario series of reviews there was one thing I needed to check first, whether or not Sunshine plays in 60 hertz. For a lot of you reading this, this is the kind of thing you may never have had to worry about but years ago in Europe some geniuses decided our TVs should operate at a different standard from American or Japanese ones. While most old TVs were capable of refreshing the image 60 times per second (NTSC), European ones capped out at 50 frames a second. (PAL) Unfortunately this meant porting games to PAL regions usually resulted in a speed reduction to 5/6ths speed. This might not sound like much but if you play both side to side you'll notice the difference immediately. If you're playing a JRPG you might not really care but for a platformer it can change the feel of the entire game. This is why you'll rarely ever see speedrunners run retro games on European consoles. Thankfully the Gamecube was a pretty good console for 60hz support, most games give us the option of displaying them in 60hz which gives us the full speed and Sunshine was no exception. I successfully got footage of Sunshine and began piecing together the review. The Sunshine review itself was very hard to edit together since I spend a lot of my time talking about things which are hard to represent on screen. It was tough but in the end I think I did a good job, I even spent a lot of extra time swapping out clips I wasn't totally happy about with footage that was much better. This is something I rarely have to do for other games but with Sunshine I must have replaced at least 5 minutes of footage with new clips that better illustrated my points and I went back and captured a ton more footage to show various things more clearly. I had the whole video pieced together when I realised something, the footage wasn't progressive scan. For those of you who aren't aware this is another relic of old TVs. On a modern screen the whole image is updated line by line and so the whole screen gets refreshed each frame. On an old TV the image was drawn in lines but usually only half the screen at a time. When you're playing this usually looks ok, in fact this was part of the problem. It turns out Sunshine had such smooth interlacing and Windows Media Player has such smooth deinterlacing that I hadn't noticed the problem until it came time to render the video. Admittedly I should have done a test render much sooner but the footage looked perfect so I figured there was no need. Rendering the video, which should have been a cathartic moment for me, was suddenly a moment of dread and disappointment. I had two options: either put the video out as is (which results in slightly worse video quality) or get the progressive scan footage and start from scratch. After so much effort gone into choosing the right clips I figured I should release it as is, I knew if I had asked you all the consensus would have been to put the video out and move on rather than spend so much time on such a small issue. In the end I spent a few hours messing around with several deinterlace plugins and finding the settings which I thought gave the best results. I wanted to be proud of the Sunshine video but it was very demoralising to have such an issue crop up at the 11th hour. Most of you probably didn't even notice and I put as much work in as possible to minimise the problem but there are some deinterlacing artifacts on visible in the final video, most noticeable on the HUD. I'll need some Sunshine footage for the remaining Mario reviews so I decided I wanted to set this problem right by getting some new footage of Sunshine. That's what I was doing today when I finally found out that PAL versions of most Gamecube games don't support progressive scan at all. It had been nagging at me for about a month that I could have gotten better footage for Sunshine so imagine my relief when I realised that actually, I had done about as well as I could. Short of emulation (which brings its own headaches) or importing a GC/Wii and NTSC copy of the game I wouldn't have been able to do any better. The frustrating thing is these problems obviously wouldn't have occurred if I lived elsewhere and this is just one of the headaches of gaming in Ireland. It can be particularly irksome living in the UK/Ireland (where everyone speaks English) and having to wait ages for games to be translated into a bunch of languages you don't speak, or worse yet not released at all. We got Chrono Trigger in 2009. It seems much more straightforward if you live in the US or Japan. These are the downsides of trying to get good game footage in Europe and one of the things which sadly puts me off doing more old games. It's either emulation or working around these problems and neither of those are ideal. Anyway enough ranting, for now I'm just relieved about the Sunshine video. Even the flub I made with the delayed quote text ended up being kind of funny.