Thats the problem. For B5 there isn't a proper aspect ratio as such.

A lot of the CG files survived. A guy called Tom Smith found a lot of them by talking to the original CG team and he re-rendered a bunch of shots on wide-screen and in hi def. Even with the original 1990s models and lighting, it looked incredibly impressive. Unfortunately Straczynski flipped out at someone doing…

Yup, people have been calling out for a clean-slate Buffy remaster for years as the previous one was really horrendously done. To be fair, they did go back and fix some problems later on, but others issues were left unaddressed.

The remaster wasn’t pan and scan as such, it was the original 4:3 edit of the show that was done for its original release in 1993-98.

“Would you go to the doctor and have them take out your spleen for nothing?”

That’s never been a problem during my (extensive) research into the topic. The only episode that has that problem is the original pilot, where the original master tapes were apparently kept in a warehouse that was flooded and then invaded by rats, and some of the original elements were reportedly lost when they did…

The main problem was that they did not carry on from TNG into DS9. Fully 50% of the cost of doing TNG’s famously expensive HD remaster (over $25 million) was setting up the pipelines, the software, the processes and hiring the right people and shaking the gremlins out of the system. Once the actual system was in full…

B5 was 100% shot and intended to be in widescreen. It was a selling point for the show even in 1994. Unfortunately (see my reply elsewhere) there was a screw-up which led to the show’s live-action-only footage all being in widescreen but the CGI and composites only being delivered in 4:3 and not actually existing in…

Whilst this would be a normal analysis for shows of that era, not for B5. The show’s pilot was a surprise success when it was released on Laserdisc (not long after it aired), so for the show itself they decided to film and protect for widescreen, on the understanding that that format would be coming down the pipe for…

The game has a metric ton of cutscenes, plus it zooms in for Mass Effect-style conversations.

Legends and Lattes is a fun, meme-generating (and possibly meme-generated) book but no more, and I think the Hugo has had a tendency for a while to get a bit over-excited about fun or ironic books which are meme-worthy. The last one which did that was Space Opera, a perfectly adequate bit of disposable frippery which…

Reportedly Netflix are looking into buying Paramount in its totality, which would be huge move, and presumably see all Paramount+ shows move to Netflix anyway (presumably to be cancelled instantly if they are more than three seasons in).

Added into the problem is that DLSS has sent the wrong message to company execs, I’ve seen a few developers moaning that the second that corporates heard the term, they started thinking that DLSS could simply be used to make up for expensive optimisation, which contributed to why so many recent game launches on PC…

To a certain degree this problem is present in other games. There was a tech interview about Half-Life: Alyx and someone said the code to switch a light source on is still exactly the same as it was in Quake (!) because it works and they’ve never needed to change it. There’s underlying code in Red Dead Redemption 2…

The game is locked to 30fps on the Xbox, it will not be on PC because there is no reason to do so (and if they’ve gone nuts and done that, it’ll be easily unlockable, probably within hours of the game releasing). If there is a mid-cycle PS5 Pro or an Xbox Series X.V or something, I suspect they’ll also do an upgrade…

Lindsay Ellis has an excellent three-part YouTube documentary on the subject (A Long-Expected Autopsy, Battle of Five Studios and The Desolation of Warners), although it doesn’t quite cover all the bases and, for legal reasons, there’s a few logical conclusions that can easily be reached but she doesn’t spell out.

I don’t think it’s really viable with modern graphics. I think there was a developer once, for BioWare, who explained the dramatically increasing dev times for games by saying they could put a bespoke chest in a map in Baldur’s Gate II in well under an hour, but it took an afternoon for Neverwinter Nights, a couple of…

It’d be interesting for a different approach where companies just drop an expansion for an older game. If Bethesda dropped a new expansion now, 12 years later, for Skyrim, people would still play the hell out of it, dated graphics be damned. If Rockstar actually delivered a SP expansion for Red Dead 2 (or GTA5 for…

Yeah, that’s a bit Fallout 3/Broken Steel and that annoyed enough people at the time.

I don’t think any Bethesda SP RPG has ever had a 10-year plan. Skyrim and Fallout 4 were both through their full expansion/DLC cycle and done and dusted in 18 months, and then they were making the Next Thing.