30th July 2015, 10:05 AM
In recent years, the HD remake (not to be confused with a real remake) has become very popular. We've seen such HD remakes of Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear, and Banjo Kazooie. In all those cases, the switch to wide screen was fairly easy to accomplish. Since everything's rendered in real time, simply extending the viewing area does the job just fine. There are some cases (such as cut scenes) where trouble can come up (Silent Hill HD, I'm looking at you), but generally it works well.
Not so much for two HD rereleases I recently picked up. I'm talking about Resident Evil Rebirth (PS4 version) and Grim Fandango (PC version). Two already great games with some minor visual enhancements, but notably they both are defaulted to wide screen. That's the biggest problem. Both of these games use entirely pre-rendered backgrounds. As a result, there's no way to "extend the viewing area" because those pre-rendered assets were never designed with that in mind. So, they did the only thing they could, they stretched out the 4:3 image to fit a wide screen ratio. All those graphical enhancements, but with an ugly stretched out image. It's clear they put it that way purely because new gamers might not accept an "update" with "those black bars".
Now the good news is I'm not really mad at all. I'm just saying it doesn't work, and clearly the developers agreed. They've put in an option in both of these remakes to switch the game to it's intended 4:3 (with all the other visual enhancements intact), and I'm certainly glad of that. My main reason for this is to say that going forward, remakes of games with prerendered backgrounds all need to have this option. These two shouldn't be lone exceptions.
Not so much for two HD rereleases I recently picked up. I'm talking about Resident Evil Rebirth (PS4 version) and Grim Fandango (PC version). Two already great games with some minor visual enhancements, but notably they both are defaulted to wide screen. That's the biggest problem. Both of these games use entirely pre-rendered backgrounds. As a result, there's no way to "extend the viewing area" because those pre-rendered assets were never designed with that in mind. So, they did the only thing they could, they stretched out the 4:3 image to fit a wide screen ratio. All those graphical enhancements, but with an ugly stretched out image. It's clear they put it that way purely because new gamers might not accept an "update" with "those black bars".
Now the good news is I'm not really mad at all. I'm just saying it doesn't work, and clearly the developers agreed. They've put in an option in both of these remakes to switch the game to it's intended 4:3 (with all the other visual enhancements intact), and I'm certainly glad of that. My main reason for this is to say that going forward, remakes of games with prerendered backgrounds all need to have this option. These two shouldn't be lone exceptions.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)