I picked up the BBC series Planet Earth a few days ago. Its amazingly beautiful. Watching it in 1080 HDTV on blu-ray is incredible.

I recommend this enthusiastically if you like this kind of thing. It was shot with special high speed cameras. I bought the British version with David Attenborough as the narrator.

Here is a few previews:

Trailer:

Bird of Paradise clip:

For more information: Wikipedia on Planet Earth Series

Planet Earth is an Emmy Award-winning BBC nature documentary series narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Alastair Fothergill. It was first broadcast in the UK from 5 March 2006. The American version is narrated by Sigourney Weaver.

The series was co-produced with Discovery Channel and the NHK in association with the CBC, and was described by its makers as “the definitive look at the diversity of our planet”. It was also the first of its kind to be filmed almost entirely in high-definition. The series was nominated for the Pioneer Audience Award for Best Programme at the 2007 BAFTA TV awards.

I was born in 1969, which means I was around the right age to play many of the “first” video games as they began arriving in arcades and — as consoles — in the early 1970’s. Those were heady days for poor kids with a jones for the latest video games, and we fed our craving every chance we got, but selling candy and snacks door to door, mowing lawns with a push mower, and any other way we could brainstorm in an afternoon to make a couple of bucks. Going to an arcade was an event for us; a bike or skateboard ride that took a half hour or more, down through the neighborhood and out on to a busy street or three. When the sum of your funds for afternoon fun amounts to less then $2 cash for the whole day — you get creative: You go to the beach instead. It was there that I got paddled by Mr. Jackson, who ran the snack bar in Huntington Beach, and who caught me blowing orange soda in the coin slot of his newest acquisition: a game called “Dragons Lair”. It was frontier justice on his part, and richly deserved; I got more then 150 “credits” out of the machine before he got wise to what I was doing. It was enough to learn the game, and well worth the spanking (and the subsequent cleaning of his machines “coin box”) that came later.

Over the years I have played a lot of games; some good, some awful. I have drifted away from games, and into books, comic books, art and music, and drifted back again. I have spent countless months on a computer all night, grinding out endless levels in “massively multi-player” games. I have grown up with games, and I have grown apart from them. I have married and had children, and lost every bit of free time there was to lose, and then some, and learned how to take it back again in bits and pieces. I have found that while I still love games, I don’t have time to be a the gamer I used to be. Eventually, you put away the things that don’t matter enough to you anymore. My computer is now a tool. I create blogs and websites, post the odd post to a forum, update my social networks, make telephone calls, edit music, movies, and write.

When I game, I do it socially, and these moments are shared with others playing games like Rock Band: our generations answer to Uno, or Canasta; games that can be played by groups of adults, socially. The single player gaming I do now is represented by bite sized chunks of fun, when I find a longer game that I can play through over the course of days or weeks. It took me months to beat Grand Theft Auto San Andreas at 100%, partially because it is something I have to do later, after the kids are in bed.

The new centerpiece to our family room is the Playstation 3 Console. For me it represents the future of gaming and the convergence of computers, television, and music. It finds and plays media from my PC: Torrents of TV shows, all of my CD’s, comic books and family short films, favorite youtube videos and so on, and it does it all from the comfortable expanse of 42″ of flat panel HDTV goodness. It plays DVD’s, and Blu-rays, in high definition sounds and colors, and it serves podcasts, mp3’s and mpeg video to my sons PSP wirelessly, throughout the house and anywhere out in the world where we can get a wifi signal.

When I want to try a new game, I download the demo from the Playstation Store, and give it a whirl. Where the game truly shines, and my googling seems to bear out my initial impressions: I purchase. I buy used if I can, and trade in anything that doesn’t make the grade.

Now there have been countless digital worlds created during the output of the war between the Xbox 360 crowd and the PS3 advocates, and I have nothing more to add to that conversation. Cameron has an Xbox 360 and loves it, we have a Ps3 and are thrilled with it. Both consoles are amazing, and both have a lot more pluses then minuses in my opinion. For me, the addition of the Blu-ray player was the deal maker, and why not? It’s hands down the best stand alone Blu-ray player on the market today. But — in case you were wondering… Yes, the PS3 is about games, and it is the exclusive home to two of the best released in the last year: Ratchet and Clank Future, and Uncharted: Drakes Fortune.

I won’t go into a long description of either game here. There are countless places on the net where you can find such things already. I will say that Drake is probably the best movie I have ever lived outside of dreaming, and is easily the best action game of its type since the original Tomb Raider. I spent most of my Saturday playing through the first half, and the puzzles, jumping, swinging and climbing kept me on the edge of my seat throughout. The gunfights were challenging, and I was forced to find cover and fight smart, which is a nice change. The manual aim feature is great fun — a mini game unto itself. The story and the characters are well written and engaging. The acting and dialog is well done and moves the story along at a nice quick pace. The music is is expertly orchestrated and foreshadows the tale as you pass through it. The whole thing looks and sounds amazing in HD. In fact, there are moments where the whole thing looks a lot more like a movie then a game, while still maintaining the core playability of the best action RPG’s. The occasional cut scene combined with a sprung trap or falling platform is a great “Dragons Lair” era homage, and is all the more enjoyable to me now, sans the Orange Soda.

For those of you out on the fence between the two main console powerhouses, understand that you really cant make a bad choice here, and if you — like my family and millions of others every month — choose to go with the PS3, you will not be disappointed in the games either. Do your homework and pick up a couple of titles like Uncharted or Ratchet and Clank. These are every bit as “game of the year” as anything released on the Xbox, and they are visually stunning to boot.

Happy gaming!