It's been bugging me for some time that the Eurogamer comparison videos I produce are horrendously over-engineered in relation to the actual end result, so I decided to make more use of the HD captures and produce download-only files that show the full resolution and frame rate of each game, running in realtime.
The first one I produced, Soul Calibur IV, was beautiful enough to convince me to carry on with all the others and incorporate the whole process into the existing workflow. Enough bandwidth has been thrown at these videos to make them look almost passable for the actual game running on the console itself.
The edited files are encoded into VC-1 using Microsoft Expression Encoder 2, and the resultant WMVs are playable on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and fast PCs (any dual core unit should work fine).
So, here are the links required to get your hands on the downloadable goodies:
Soul Calibur IV: click here
Mercenaries II: World in Flames: click here
Beijing 2008: click here
FaceBreaker: click here
EA Sports Compilation (Tiger Woods 09/Madden 09/NHL 09): click here
Don't expect scintillating gameplay here, nor expertly mixed audio. The clips are specifically captured to be synced for technical comparison. As it is, in all of the releases above, the actual gameplay is identical cross-platform any way.
