It was about six months ago that I had saved up enough cash to go get myself a widescreen monitor. Nothing fancy, mind you - just a nice 19" widescreen with a native resolution of 1440 x 900. After all, so many games out there support widescreen resolution.

Or so I thought.

I can understand games that don't support widescreen resolutions, provided they are at least a couple of years old. But it's becoming more and more prevalent these days, and there is absolutely NO excuse for a -new- title not to support widescreen resolutions out of the box.

People who have standard monitors need to understand - when a game that does not support widescreen runs on a widescreen monitor, it doesn't show up normally with say, black bars on the sides (god, I wish it DID, or if there was a utility that did that...) It is STRETCHED. This mucks up the picture completely... like taking a bit of the funnies on silly putty... then streeeetching it. It's terribly annoying. There's even an extremely popular site on the net called the Widescreen Gaming Forum which collects information from contributors on how to "hack" games which don't support widescreen natively. The problem is... "hacks" should not be necessary for NEW GAMES. (the other problems tend to be that even with these "hacks", it frequently messes up the field of view, or chops off portions of the screen.)

World of Warcraft supports widescreen. So does City Life, and Oblivion, and many others...

but... GTA: San Andreas does not. Neither does Battlefield 2, or Battle for Middle Earth II. All relatively new games. My god, even PREY (a game that is less than 2 months old) has NO native widescreen support. Finally, please... Firaxis. Tell me. Why, WHY BY GOD WHY does Civilization 4 have full widescreen support, but a game based off of it, which is a WEEK OLD (CivCity: Rome) does not. CivCity is so messed up that if you use a "hack", it can't recognize where your cursor is pointing on the screen. This is intollerable.

Game developers - get your collective asses in gear and make native widescreen support standard.

Oh, and Firaxis - I'll be waiting for a CivCity patch.