Games on Widescreen LCD's

[the Langolier]

I am choosing a replacement laptop and I am trying to decide on a screen size. Generally on laptops, the larger screensizes are widescreen aspect (16:10), because well, no one wants to carry around a 17x14" laptop. Widescreen is pretty nice, especially for playing DVD's, but naturally with a widescreen there are non-"standard" resolutions. I have heard that when choosing standard screen resolutions like 1280x1024, the screen looks stretched out horizontally.

Now, the only real reason to own a computer is to play Diablo 1 and it's affiliates (he he), so my question is: how do the widescreens affect the look of gaming? A larger screen would be nice, but not at the expense of odd-looking games (and I am really not a fan of non-uniform stretching to begin with)

[Rhydderch Hael]

You'd have a problem with this issue when it older games such as Diablo. They were created in an age where widescreen was a seldom-sought option and thus they're crafted to fit 4:3 aspect ratios perfectly.

Newer games and systems were made with widescreen in mind. If the games themselves do not have an anamorphic feature (where it can draw either at "full screen" or "widescreen" aspect ratios) then the games are at least rendered to present a passably realistic view when stretched out in a widescreen format. The end result is that viewing in the 4:3 aspect ratio looks more squished-in vertically, but that is more aesthetically tolerable than a view that is stretched horizontally.

[Raelynn]

You'd have a problem with this issue when it older games such as Diablo. They were created in an age where widescreen was a seldom-sought option and thus they're crafted to fit 4:3 aspect ratios perfectly.

Newer games and systems were made with widescreen in mind. If the games themselves do not have an anamorphic feature (where it can draw either at "full screen" or "widescreen" aspect ratios) then the games are at least rendered to present a passably realistic view when stretched out in a widescreen format. The end result is that viewing in the 4:3 aspect ratio looks more squished-in vertically, but that is more aesthetically tolerable than a view that is stretched horizontally.
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I just bought a widescreen monitor for my new desktop and in most cases (not all but most) you can at least get around the problem by playing in windowed mode. It's not always great, but, at the very least, it won't have the distortion.

[the Langolier]

I just bought a widescreen monitor for my new desktop and in most cases (not all but most) you can at least get around the problem by playing in windowed mode.  It's not always great, but, at the very least, it won't have the distortion.
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I did some stretching to get Diablo into 16:10 aspect, and I have to say it looks pretty terrible:



If you have a 640x480 resolution game, can you see if it is as noticable as this?

[roguebanshee]

I have a widescreen laptop, the squashed image in standard resolution (4:3) fullscreen games only bother me if I'm going back and forth between my laptop and my desktop (which is running 1280x1024).

It's all about what you're used to.