Does "fake widescreen" in gaming bother you?

[Ed Oscuro]

Me, not so much usually; in a PC shooter I'm used to throwing the view all around the place to see what's happening anyway. I get enough use out of my laptop's wide format for general browsing, so being able to watch movies (which I haven't done so far) or having widescreen games feels like a nice extra (that comes with a performance hit, however).

It would be nice to have the various types of widescreen (16:9 and 16:10) well-supported by games in the short future, and I don't think there's any question more developers will be adding it to the point that it'll be considered industry standard in gaming to allow 16:10 and 16:9 in addition to 4:3.

Are there any unforeseen downsides to this? I can think of increased work for developers (always a problem) getting games to look great on all screens in terms of the detail being put on a screen (possibly more of an issue if you're on a console), and I also don't think that outside of 3D gaming that it's going to have tons of utility for most types of games (but we'll see).

[Twiddle]

the only game that got widescreen display right was FEAR (vertical field of view on a 1.33 AR was better than that of a 1.6/1.78 AR screen, and the wider screens have more horizontal field of view) while other games just provide questionable hacks like cutting off the field of view for widescreen or disproportionately expanding it

shame it was a terrible game

[indstr]

shame it was a terrible game

you can't take it too seriously, and you can't expect it to be revolutionary. it's a solid game, if a bit run of the mill. decent special effects in the cutscenes. definitely not the scariest thing i've ever seen, but not too bad either.

it had some insanely tense firefights, especially if you don't use the slowdown key (i didn't use it the whole game)

on the whole, i enjoyed it. nothing like far cry or something like that, but still a decent game

[kengou]

I don't care much. Didn't even notice it in Bioshock until people pointed it out. But then I'm no graphics-whore anyway. I'm also used to the 90 degree FOV from most PC FPSes, so if it's close enough to that I'm happy.

Also I really enjoyed FEAR. Nothing revolutionary, but it was a lot of fun and the ending was insane.

[Ed Oscuro]

you can't take it too seriously, and you can't expect it to be revolutionary.

Sounds like a description of any FPS since DOOM (with the possible exceptions of Quake, Rainbow Six, or HL2, something along those lines)

[indstr]

Quake

while quake had a revolutionary engine, (graphics, and one of the earliest games to have mouselook. although i think marathon came out earlier), the formula was almost exactly the same as doom

which is not to say that it's bad.

doom clones are not original, but if you enjoy that type of gameplay, most of them are for the most part pretty good

i've been enjoying fps games for 15 years now and i've only recently begun to tire of them. maybe i wore myself out in 2004 when i played and completed: painkiller, far cry, doom 3, half life 2, chronicles of riddick. and also played a fair bit of unreal tournament 2004 online as well

doom 3 however, does suck. i have no idea why i played it through the end. i was expecting a lot more from id on this one. if you contrast it with half life 2 or far cry that year, doom 3 is just pretty sad

[Ed Oscuro]

the possible exceptions of...

DOOM III did suck, except for the hell levels some of which were pretty decent. The multiplayer maps were also pretty nice 'n moody. The expansion pack also had a few nice areas.

The rest, though...on the whole, unredeemably shitty. LOL LET'S HAVE ANOTHER IMP SPAWN POINT + a CRATE CRANE RIDE WOO!!

i've been enjoying fps games for 15 years now and i've only recently begun to tire of them.

Almost exactly what I could've written...actually a lot of the new stuff is lots of fun, at least to demo through. Like Timeshift...looks great and seems to have some fun bits, but I hear it falls into the "same old" syndrome. That's what bugs me about lots of the current crop of games...that "lol next area" syndrome. Only recently have FPSes started to experiment with the same ideas that led shmups to scoring mechanics and rank (auto-adjusting difficulty being "rank" in shooters, probably the first truly "modern" gameplay element to creep into FPSes).

But there is a widening variety of games. Looking forward playing Condemned 2 sometime, even if it's more of the same, and Far Cry 2 should be interesting at the least.

[indstr]

and Far Cry 2 should be interesting at the least.

i was hoping so, but i tried the crysis demo, and even on medium graphics settings, it ran like crap on my comp. it ran fine in low detail, but then the graphics were on par with no one lives forever. bioshock runs OK and ut2k3 runs like a dream, so i'm pretty disappointed in the performance on crysis. guess i will just have to wait until next comp upgrade to play it

[Ed Oscuro]

Far Cry 2 isn't using the Crysis engine, so wait for the demo.

On the other hand, I believe it's going to have a terrain somewhat like Oblivion (remember the "free roaming" plans for STALKER), so that could balance things out...plus there'll be plenty of post-processing effects all around.

[indstr]

Far Cry 2 isn't using the Crysis engine, so wait for the demo.

On the other hand, I believe it's going to have a terrain somewhat like Oblivion (remember the "free roaming" plans for STALKER), so that could balance things out...plus there'll be plenty of post-processing effects all around.

i didn't think stalker ever had plans to be free roaming like oblivion.. even back in the day they mentioned the choke points similar to what the game has now

and i may or may not have played a leaked alpha of stalker back in 2003. it may or may not have been very primitive at the time, but it may or may not have set the scene for the bleakness that the current game has. it may or may not have been awesome

[Ed Oscuro]

STALKER did want to be free-roaming, hence the precaching screens (and the resulting tweak for some users by disabling precaches).