Tiny on-screen text in modern video games

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^ The back of the GTA IV case says it supports 1080, and I basically change the TV settings to force it to output in 1080.

But like you said, it makes no difference. The on-screen text is still laughably small.

I hate to keep harping on this, but I keep finding new and better examples.

I'll have to post this in two parts, since WP keeps giving me "ERROR IN POSTING" when I try to post five pics at once.



Once again, this is about four feet away from the 46-inch screen. I know that an iPhone camera doesn't exactly capture what the human eye can see, but you at least get an idea of what I'm dealing with. The character names, PLAYER 1, 00/08, CLEAR, SUPER, SELECT, CHANGE DISPLAY, and COMBO can be seen easily enough. However, the button combination under Vega's name is so insanely small that's it's completely illegible. Let's move a little closer:



Alright. On the left of the button combination, I can make out an arrow pointing to the right. To the right I can see a plus sign and a fist. But in between these icons is a jumbled and distorted mess of red and white and black. Still unreadable.



And finally, putting the iPhone right up against the damn screen, we can make out the text, if just barely. Before the plus sign and the fist, it's telling me to charge the move by holding the stick to the left or right before attacking. But just look at the word CHARGE here. The only reason I even know it says CHARGE instead of CHANGE or C'HOOGE is because I know the game features moves that must be charged. The word is being compressed into the smallest number of pixels possible, resulting in a complete mess. I would maybe expect this from a small SDTV, but certainly not a 46-inch 1080 HDTV with an HDMI cable.

Let's try another one:



Another unreadable pile of jumbled crap. Let's move closer:



There we go. A right arrow, a command to press right or left, a plus sign, and a fist, followed by "after Flying Barcelona Attack, near opponent." I guess I should be happy that it's legible, but it's more than slightly ridiculous that I had to get this close to the screen to make out the words, and they're still distorted after being squeezed into such a small space. The word OR looks the worst, but the text in parentheses doesn't look much better.

Again, I realize that an iPhone camera isn't the best way of demonstrating this. It's making my nice HDTV screen look like a blurry old cathode ray tube SDTV that was made in 1972, when in reality it does look quite nice and sharp. But the point remains that this ridiculously tiny text is completely unreadable from more than a couple of feet away, and the pictures should give at least a rough idea of what's going on here. Developers are cramming as much text as possible into just a few pixels, which is fine on a computer monitor but disastrous on a TV screen.