SDTV's don't have to suck!

Like I mentioned in a previous post, after PAX I went up even farther north to hang out with Squash for a week of sitting around and playing games ‘til the early hours of the morning. So pretty much what I normally do, just with Squash… so pretty much what we used to do until he moved to Washington. While there I finally finished Fallout 3, and still plan on eventually finishing that post about it that I started back in July. Then I started Banjo-Kazooie and Star Ocean 4, which I am still currently working my way through.

What I want to talk about today however, has much more to do with the television I was playing these games on. At my house, I have a 50 inch 1080p DLP rear projection television made in 2006 or 2007, I can’t quite remember, but it has all the goodies you’d ever want for gaming. Maybe not the best HDTV by today’s standards, but it gets the job done wonderfully. Squash also has a nice 1080p LCD that he uses for all this gaming needs, aside from that horrible World of Warcraft addiction of his. We are both pretty adamantly opposed to playing splitscreen. Especially on HDTV’s because of the 16:9 ratio, which provides no good way to split the screen and still give players a good aspect ratio. Sadly, I think Halo 3’s solution is the best, which wastes large chunks of screen real estate by outputting the game in 4:3 and splitting it the traditional way. Anyway, I’m getting off topic. You might even say I digress, but that’d be dumb. So, the point was, we hate splitscreen so when he used to come to my house, he’d actually lug his 37 inch TV with him. Mine on the other hand, while actually being a good deal lighter, is far more impractical because it’s gigantic. Not to mention having to unhook the thousands of things I have plugged into the back. So what I’d do is just bring my 360 and hook it up to his old CRT. It’s a pretty decent size, definitely over 30 inches, but it can still only do 480i.

So back on track, I played Fallout 3 for a good 5 to 10 hours before moving onto the other titles and had no real problems with the display. Sure it didn’t look as nice in the lower resolution, and reading text was a bit more tedious do to the interlacing, but it worked. No real complaints there. Banjo-Kazooie, however, wasn’t so nice. The game looked like it had a thin layer of Vaseline smeared over the camera lens, and the text was quite small, which combined with said Vaseline made it very difficult to read. The game has even been patched because of text complaints and I still had to struggle to read anything. Picking out my vehicle among all the other objects was like trying to focus on a fast moving brownish blob in the middle of a puddle of Skittle induced vomit. How’s that for tasting the rainbow! …Sorry. So I’m exaggerating a bit, but it was tedious. It was playable, but I found myself with a dull headache after a short time from concentrating so hard on simply seeing. Alternatively, playing the game on my TV provides a crisp picture, that really shows the amount of detail and polish Rare put into their game. It looks outstanding.

Star Ocean is the same way. The bloody thing doesn’t even run in 4:3. There are black bars while playing on an SDTV forcing the widescreen ratio. The text is even harder to read than Banjo-Kazooie, but infinitely more important, and not just for the story. It’s absolutely horrible because Star Ocean is an RPG that has a lot of menu micromanagement. It’s quite fun to build your characters various skills and battle abilities, but not when you can’t read anything! It also suffers from the general blurry hazy quality Banjo-Kazooie has that results in a headache after playing for any significant length of time. Lo and behold, bringing the game back to my house to finish brought out the true high def glory that is so easy on the eyes. Both games look great on an HD display.

Last I heard though, most 360 owners don’t own HDTV’s. They are getting cheaper, but they are still a bit of an outrageous purchase for the average consumer. So if that is the case, why are all these games seemingly not being tested on SDTV’s. This seems like a bit of an absurd problem considering how long it has been going on. Dead Rising suffered from this problem and it came out way back in 2006. HDTV penetration was significantly lower back then and the PS3 had yet to even launch. HD console gaming was still in its infancy and already developers were blowing off the displays that we’ve used for the previous few decades.

What’s the deal with this? Last generation I never had this problem. The best any of the consoles could do was 480p, and the standard was 480i. That meant everything was tested and designed to run on that type of television. Now that console developers are forced to make games run on multiple resolutions I think I can see where the problems come from. Of the games I’ve played in SD on my 360, the ones developed by primarily PC studios always seem to do better. Orange Box, Oblivion/Fallout 3, and Gears of War are all made by studios that became famous on the PC first. Meaning from day one they had multiple resolutions in mind. That’s just correlation, probably not causation, but it’s a theory nonetheless!

In any case, this was more a rant than anything else, I won’t claim to have any real wisdom you can gain from reading this article, but if you must take something away from it.... Either developers start testing your games on regular TV’s, or everyone else get with the program and buy a shiny new HDTV. And most importantly, Squash, buy a second HDTV so I have something to use during my increasingly rare visits to your house. Get a job, hippie!