High Definition Sucks

That's a dead url, btw, so don't bother.

There is something really annoying going on, and it's why I don't watch as much TV or play as many new video games anymore. At some point, games and shows started just assuming you have a widescreen television. Even just a couple of years ago, a new game would give you an option to play in widescreen or full-screen. Now they just assume you have the most expensive, gigantic HD, 3D alien View-a-motron available for domestic purchase.

So now everything is cutoff. On a standard television, TV Shows and commercials do this stupid thing where half of the onscreen text is bleeding out past the edges, or half of people's faces are cut out of frame. In video games, this means that the Heads Up Display is impossible to read, as well as text. The new Halo games do this. So do the Dragon Age and the Mass Effect series'. Both of those games are ALL ABOUT reading text and determining a response... in a visual presentation that makes both of those things impossible.

Do you see where the trouble comes in?

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It's obvious they're trying to push more HD TV sales. They don't even give you the option to adjust it to your viewing experience, anymore. Time was, you could go into the options menu and adjust the look, depending on whether your television was shaped like a square or a rectangle. I guess that treated the customer with too much respect, so they said goodbye that feature right soon. Now developers test games on gigantic, widescreen monitors and just assume you have the same equipment.

So now we have games and TV shows that look wrong, on purpose. This is greedy, desperate and lazy.

The future is here, and it's retarded!

Except the HD TV owners in the US are such a small majority, and the amount of people who even take advantage of HD viewing anyway is pathetic. Focusing on that tiny sliver of an audience that not only owns these things, but also takes advantage of them is a counter-productive business strategy at any time. But during a recession? All this does is punish people with a lower income bracket, and for what? So I can watch some shit like Judging Amy in visual clarity so minimal as to be completely pointless?

So I can squint while trying to figure out how many grenades I have left in Halo?

Weren't HD/Widescreen TVs supposed to make looking at things EASIER?

High Definition television is the biggest scam of the 21st century so far. It is disgusting that game developers and television networks are going along with this. I am not buying a new television just because someone thinks they can get away with this shit.

If the only way you can think of to get people to buy HD or Widescreen televisions is to make your products worse, then you don't deserve gainful employment.

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~A.H.