Dragon's Lair Trilogy (Switch) - Faux Widescreen by CROPPING ORIGINAL IMAGE

[DavidD]

This is just a warning to anyone interested...

 

Dragon's Lair Trilogy (DL, DL2, and Space Ace) is currently on sale on the eShop for $9.99.  I purchased it just for the weirdness of adding another set of arcade games to my Switch...

 

The original game footage has all been mangled to look as though it's wide screen.  The top and bottom of all the animation is missing, and there appears to be no option to play the game with the original 4:3 footage -- just faux widescreen.

 

[Asaki]

Yuck.

[Crazy Climber]

Dude...weak. Glad I waited. Thanks for the heads up!

[zzip]

Hmm,  it's widescreen on PS4 too,  but I didn't notice anything being cropped to achieve that.   It's in HD too, so I just assumed they remasted it from the original material.

[Video]

Aww that sucks. Considering some of the ques to do your button presses just blink bits of the screen, I could see cropping images making the games unplayable.

 

I wanted it too.

[DavidD]

14 hours ago, zzip said:

Hmm,  it's widescreen on PS4 too,  but I didn't notice anything being cropped to achieve that.   It's in HD too, so I just assumed they remasted it from the original material.

I'll double check JUST in case I'm crazy, but the original was 4:3 and all of the footage is widescreen -- and there's no way to do that without cropping the image.  The original source material was 4:3, I believe.

That, and when I e-mailed the company's tech support, they said I was right and that they'd pass on my request for patching the game with the original footage.  I don't know how likely that is, though.

 

2 hours ago, Video said:

Aww that sucks. Considering some of the ques to do your button presses just blink bits of the screen, I could see cropping images making the games unplayable.

 

I wanted it too.

I don't know if the game itself is actually UNPLAYABLE -- I'm assuming they were halfway intelligent and ensured that the scenes show all the required stuff, but I haven't tried playing it much -- the mangled image sort of got rid of my interest.

[zzip]

9 hours ago, DavidD said:

I'll double check JUST in case I'm crazy, but the original was 4:3 and all of the footage is widescreen -- and there's no way to do that without cropping the image.  The original source material was 4:3, I believe.

That, and when I e-mailed the company's tech support, they said I was right and that they'd pass on my request for patching the game with the original footage.  I don't know how likely that is, though.

Now you had me curious so I looked up the gameplay of the HD Widescreen version and the original laserdisc version.   So yes it is cropped a bit at the top and bottom,  BUT there's also more detail on the left and right sides not present in the laserdisc.   So the original version cropped the source material too, but just in a different way.   I'm not terribly bothered because I also own this game on PC-DVD rom and on the Wii, so I can revisit the 4:3 version if I want,  but I think the 1080p HD version looks better

 

Screenshots from youtube: (laserdisc first followed by remastered widescreen)

 

 

Edited June 26, 2020 by zzip