First off:
You have just over a week to complete your Art Contest submissions. Don't forget!
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Initially, our goal was to present this collection of Fancy Pants games, very specifically as you remember them. This meant editing or changing those original games as little as possible - and selling the back mostly around features like localization, steam integration, and the Treasure Trove of bonus content.
But as we've spoken with the community over the last few weeks, we've come to better understand where that line of remaining "true to the original" really is, and how that can be played around with.
World 2, as seen in it's original web-based aspect ratio
Sometimes it's better to present a game in a more ideal way, and give you an enhanced experience that will give you the same feelings you had when first playing these games online 15 years ago. We've all had the experience of revisiting a gem from our childhood, only to learn it wasn't quite what we had built it up to be in our heads.
With that in mind, Brad is hard at work to give players the option to play the original 3 Worlds in a widescreen format on your PC for the very first time! The goal here is to ensure this game plays and feels AS good as you remember, while also giving new players the best possible version of these games.
The best you could hope for with "faked" widescreen
Many of you have likely experienced downloading these games, or playing them through a service like Flashpoint. That allows you to "fake" widescreen, by dragging the executable window wider.
While it may feel functional, the games were never designed with this in mind, and it always comes with a litany of errors. There would be art assets that did not extend to the full screen width. Edges of incomplete art that were not meant to be seen. Graphical glitches that would harm the overall feel and appeal of the experience. The "bounds" of each level in the code were set in ways that would make the added width feel clunky. It technically worked. But we saw this as an opportunity to improve beyond that, and offer something greater than what you can already do for free with existing versions of the game.
A WIP screenshot of the widescreen support Brad is currently implementing!
Brad has been hard at work, cracking into old code in multiple coding languages, reverse engineering his decade+ old work to make this a reality!
Thank you to you all for letting us know how important this feature was to you - and motivating us to put in the additional time to do it right!