25th March 2004, 2:00 PM
Well some games do that because of technical reasons (like some N64 racers), or because they also support 16:9 sets and you lose picture information when it's reduced to 4:3. BG&E is one such example where the image is widescreen but not anamorphic, so it was either a technical decision or to make it seem more cinematic as you said. However in the case of something like RE4 which does have 16:9 anamorphic support, you'd be losing picture information if it were displayed in fullscreen on a 4:3 tv. So it's got black bars on a regular tv, like a widescreen DVD.