Xbox 360 Game News, Reviews, and Columns - XboxFocus

HD Elitism

by Dick Ward August 13th 2008 1:26 AM CDT2 Comments

If anything was revealed at Microsoft’s E3 press conference, it’s that no market is going left untapped. From the casual to hardcore, and with the coming price drops, every economic level is being tapped as customers for the Xbox 360. But are developers shooting themselves in the foot by excluding those that haven’t made the HD jump yet?

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Let’s start with a real life scenario. I lived with my parents up until about a year ago, and during that time they purchased a fantastic 37” Sony LCD which I was able to play my 360 on. The high resolution was mindblowing for the games I had, but I never had much of a problem switching back to my old TV. The games still played the same. That all changed on the day of August 9th, 2006.

Being an enormous fan of anything zombie related, I picked up Dead Rising on the day of release and invited some friends over to controller swap through the game. We spent around 16 hours with it that day, and loved every minute of it. The following morning though, when I had to move the 360 back to my 27” standard def set, I ran into a problem - I couldn’t read a single word on the screen. Without a high def set, Dead Rising just isn’t the same. I had no idea what books were in my inventory, I couldn’t reference menus or quest text. It wasn’t unplayable, but it certainly wasn’t the same game. I can only imagine how disappointed I would have been if I hadn’t even had the chance to play the game on a high def set to begin with.

Dead Rising’s not the only game that assumes that players have moved into the age of massive HD televisions. Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 is just as bad, if not worse, for having a multiplayer mode that’s pretty unplayable for those without access to the latest and greatest in televisions. Even on my wonderful new high def monitor a multiplayer game was nearly impossible just due to the size of the screen. Without 37” at least, it’s incredibly difficult to deal with all the effects on the screen.


The cost of console gaming shot up significantly with this generation. Of course, anyone that already owned an HDTV didn’t notice, since they already bought the prerequisite. For those only interested in gaming though, adding an $800+ television (37” Vizio) to a $400 console brings the total cost up to the oft complained about PC gaming levels.

When working retail around the 360 launch, I always heard the question “Well, if it’s not going to look any better on my old TV, why bother getting it?”. It was mainly from parents and it was a hard question to answer. Without the graphical point, there wasn’t a whole lot to sell people on. HD quality games and movie rentals just don’t matter to the people without HD.

HDTV adoption rates are increasing every day, but that doesn’t mean we’re there yet. There’s a pretty sizable core of gamers that sadly have to suffer with standard definition graphics. Whether they’re in houses with an HDTV that’s not used for games, or don’t have access to high def at all, these gamers are falling by the wayside. There’s a pretty easy fix for all this though, and it comes down to choice.

It may be more than a lot of people need, but why not add some customization to games? Let us choose from a few different font sizes, turn off some of the more intrusive filters and minimize particle effects. Even easier, set a standard for each definition that the system can switch to depending on what kind of hookup it has. It wouldn’t be difficult, and it would certainly be helpful.

A large percentage of Americans own an HDTV, but it’s not yet universal, even among gamers. Not giving support to standard definition televisions is not only a problem for the people that own them, it’s a problem for anyone trying to sell them systems.