Spectrum_Legacy: The dude with that hot take about image stretching to fit widescreen, borders, pillarboxes and whatnot never got back after dropping the stinky because:
1. It was a troll post.
2. He eventually thought about what he wrote and possibly abandoned his wicked ways of image stretching.
3. And/or it was a bot.
That quoted post seems to be referring to me and my post, and all of those quoted statements are untrue. I'm neither a bot nor a troll, and nor have I changed my position as stated in my first post in this thread as a result of subsequent replies to it.
And I never said anything about "stretching to fit widescreen," rather, I just want the games to fit normal (meaning,
non-widescreen screens) properly, just as all other modern games do when they are developed properly. That is not an unreasonable expectation.
The reason why I never replied again into this thread was because I didn't want to cause this thread to turn into a discussion solely about the issues I've described whilst those issues are starting to become detached from the games themselves which this thread is about, which seemed to be what would have happened if I were to reply again...hence that is exactly the reason why I didn't do so (in other words, I didn't reply again in hopes that by not doing so, this thread would stay on-topic to the games released in the OP).
Although that thing that I wanted not to happen now seems to have happened
anyway, without me having replied further (before this post now, that is).
My original complaint post in this thread is perfectly reasonable, and none of the counter-arguments against it have defeated my point IMO.
Regardless of what the excuses are, the facts remain that:
Black bars and/or newly-created cartoon borders in these ports, which were
not present in the original version of these games, are inherently immersion-breaking and therefore greatly reduce the enjoyment of playing the games.
The counter-argument that I should "play on the original hardware then" is inherently ridiculous, as it is not at all reasonable to expect an average consumer to have arcade cabinet games strewn about their household. Those are very rare and very expensive commodities and not at all readily accessible nor easy to acquire nor easy to accommodate in terms of how much physical space they occupy.
The counter argument of "the original arcade games had painted physical bezels, so therefore these ports are exactly the same as original" is also not convincing, since there is no immersion-breaking black bars on the original arcade version, and the equally immersion-breaking and newly-drawn cartoon borders also did not exist on those versions either, and, one can very easily naturally & automatically and without even thinking about it, through subconscious cognitive function, ignore & pay zero attention to the physical structure of the arcade cabinets whilst playing the games whilst watching the screen (and solely the screen) that is in the cabinet.
In contrast, there is
no way to automatically & subconsciously to ignore giant black bars and/or newly-drawn & totally out-of-place cartoon borders that occupy massive amounts of t
he screen space itself, screen space which the game itself
should be occupying but isn't, but which the original versions' screens did occupy.
And that inability to ignore this problem is
especially so since ~99.9% of games
do not have this problem, which means that due to a gamer's experience of almost always gaming
without having this problem, the gamer is therefore very cognitively acclimated
to notice very substantially, during the rare occasions when this problem does occur, that it is indeed happening, and it is sticking out as would a totally
un-ignorable sore thumb.
And that stuff I just said all also speaks to the counter-argument of "you can't notice black pixels because they are just pixels that are off" --- No, that is totally incorrect. I
certainly do notice black pixels in games like these, because I have countless hours spent gaming on games which take up the whole screen, as games should do. Therefore, when a game
fails in its duty to take up the whole screen, that failure, as delivered through inappropriate bars of black pixels, is always, invariably, and very severely, noticeable and immersion-breaking.
