To all of my elves, ninjas and space marines - greetings. I'm coming at you today to talk about the epic battle between HD-DVD and Blu Ray DVD. A conflict of massive proportions as various movie studios, game publishers and hardware manufacturers were forced to take sides, producing a widespread chain of events.

And now, a champion has emerged. Toshiba, one of the originators of the HD-DVD format, has announced that they are no longer producing players and media in that format. What is the significance, you ask?

First off, Microsoft manufactured an HD Player as an add-on to their Xbox 360. When it came out about 2 years ago it started at a healthy $200 and change, dropping to a little over $100 now. The silver lining for Microsoft is that they did not manfacture the Xbox 360 with an INTERNAL HD DVD drive, which would have been catastrophic.

On the other hand Sony, the huge backer of Blu-Ray, is blowing up. Not only are Sony's shares up 5% as of this week, but they took a HUGE gamble, manufacturing their PlayStation 3 game console with an INTERNAL Blu-Ray drive. No need to throw a wrench in their production process at all, and the customer service/ product support lines remain at a low healthy buzz.

The name Blu-ray comes from the actual technology, which utilizes a blue-violet laser to read and write data. The name is a combination of "Blue" (blue-violet laser) and "Ray" (optical ray). According to the Blu-ray Disc Association the spelling of "Blu-ray" is not a mistake, the character "e" was intentionally left out so the term could be registered as a trademark.

As videogame console publishers look ahead to the NEXT generation of gaming and gaming capabilities, the future seems vast. Consider this; a normal DVD today, which is the standard delivery device for all videogames, holds a little under 5GB of information.
A Blu-Ray DVD packs a tremendous 25GB of information, and on a double sided Blu-Ray, up to 50GB of information. What can you do with a videogame with that type of memory? The question really is what CAN'T you do! Here are some specific possibilities; Online worlds will reach a depth and scope unheard of before; Every single object in a game can be destroyed or altered; Character death-sequences will never be the same twice; The number of characters on the screen at one time can reach into the high hundreds;  Sound quality will be unmatched like anything ever before, and the list goes on and on.

So stay tuned for more intel from the underground. I work tirelessly so you don't have to.
Now excuse me as I have to go play Call Of Duty 4, I have to make my 9th Prestige tonight and I only need 4 more headshots to get my Red Tiger G36. You know how it goes...