Part of the reason I bought the set was that for the longest time I had been rollin' with a 720p Panasonic plasma set, and even though I totally loved it and the colors were rich and the blacks were black, I was drawn to the allure of the 1080p magic (and a slightly larger screen). See, I've never actually had any personal experience with a 1080p set, just sorta seein' them at a friend's house where they're they're all calibrated crappy and I never really know if I am seeing "what it's supposed to be like" or just the default I Didn't Give A Shit settings that they leave them on. But all that sounds disingenuous kinda. Cause the reason wasn't really at all that "I was drawn to the magic," well it kind of was, but it was mostly because I know the Wii U will support 1080p, and I am such a pathetic man that I literally bought a 1080p set for that primarily.
Both my PlayStation triple and my laptop can output in the 1080p, so it was nice to take it for a little spin last night. But one thing that maybe is just common knowledge to everyone that maybe some people like me just never really thought about is that most games these days actually don't even run in 1080p! Some stuff does, sure. I played a relatively sublime couple of games of Super Stardust HD in 1080p, and Wipeout HD. Those looked great! But I was kind of surprised to notice that most of the current games I've been playing, most specifically Darksiders and the Madden 13 demo, actually only output in 720p. I can tell from the fancy little thing up in the corner of my TV that says what source signal it's displaying.
But I mean, so what, right? The game's the game. Weeeell, yeah. But I dunno. 720p doesn't look bad or anything, it looks great! It looked so good that when I switched from my 1080i CRT that weighed more than me and was cheaper per-pound to buy than 85/15 ground beef to my 720p plasma I was like "hot dang, that be lookin' good." Playing Super Stardust HD in 720p and then going to 1080p isn't quite as big a jump as that was. But all the same, there it is! Things are crisper around the edges, less soft. There's less of that Shimmer on diagonal lines. It looks nice!
The scuttlebutt is comin' out lately that the Wii U will push 1080p in "all its games," which was some probable crap from a Nintendo rep that I would bet has no idea what he's saying. But it got me to thinking, what if it did? That'd sure be a huge leap in general quality. At the same time, think of all the extra graphical and performance horsepower you could squeeze out of the system if you were only pushing 720p? No signs point to the Wii U being a slouch in the graphics department, but it's a question worth pondering. Will the U, much unlike the HD consoles of this generation, be able to handle 1080p universally? Interesting to think about. So far, it seems like most developers have almost uniformly decided that the performance power they retain by going sub-1080p is worth the trade-off. What will Nintendo do? What will the third parties choose? I can hardly stand not knowing! Nah though, I can.
In the meanwhile I will have this TV, waiting, waiting. I will be watching The Mighty Ducks on Blu-ray in 1080p, and pretending that this life is my dream world, and I can crawl into Emilio Estevez' shirt pocket and live out the rest of my days, smelling like crackling firewood and Downy dryer sheets.