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After all these years, even as my interest shifted from adventure games to FPSs, The Last Express is still the best game I've ever played.  I'm over the moon that more people will finally have a chance to play it!

I apologize if this has already been mentioned, but the only thing I found from searching was from four years ago...

If 16:10 is to be supported as a native aspect ratio, then 16:9 should be as well.  I took a look in several local computer shops, and it is getting very difficult to find 16:10 monitors; 16:9 seems to be the new norm.

Would it not be possible to handle aspect ratios similar to the Monkey Island Special Editions?  That is, 16:9 is the native aspect ratio, and if your monitor is any other aspect ratio, the image is letterboxed.  I don't know about anyone else, but I don't mind the black bars at all, and it would eliminate the need to have different versions of artwork, or cropping the image.

I would maintain that imaginative images can indeed make a great film, at least from my standpoint.  Case in point:  The Fall, a film which has a simple, familiar story at best: essentially in the form of a bedtime story told to a child.  Because of this, half of the film critics hated it, because they go to watch a movie for the story above all else, preferably one that is original and/or literate.  Nothing wrong with that.

However, the other half of the film critics loved it, because the film was bursting with tons of creativity, imagination, and sheer scope.  In their minds, the images were so compelling and beautiful that they became absorbed in the movie as much as if there were an incredibly original story.  But on top of that, they felt that although the film might not contain the strongest story, it was still very well told.  As someone once said, to paraphrase: "it's not what story you tell that matters, but how you tell it."

Of course, neither one of these ways is the "right" way to evaluate a film.  I often find myself on both sides of the above spectrum!  It all depends on what you want from a film, whether it be emotional or intellectual stimulation, or both combined.  Someone is not automatically smart because they liked 2001: A Space Odyssey, or stupid because they hated it.  In a similar vein, the inverse is true of a film like Transformers 2.  Although try telling that to the people on the IMDb forums... 

Anyway, with regard to Oscar noms, I have seen 6 of the 10 Best Picture nominees: Avatar, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglorious Basterds, Up, and Up in the Air.  I thoroughly enjoyed all of them, so bring on the Oscars! 

I'm normally a lurker here, but I play AGS games and have ambitions to make one in the future.

Darth's first post took the words out of my mouth.  I LOVED this movie.  And that is not something I say lightly.  I have seen hundreds and hundreds of movies from every decade since the 1890s.  I've been blown away before, by films like Citizen Kane, Lawrence of Arabia, Casablanca, Singin' in the Rain, and even obscure films like Koyannisqatsi and Russian Ark.  I watch lots of Hollywood blockbusters, and find most of them entertaining, but forgettable.

But something about Avatar has really struck a chord with me.  I was blown away by the visuals, charmed by the simple, yet effective, story, and ultimately felt for the characters and cared about what happened to them.  I went a second time to confirm that I wasn't just being distracted by the visuals, and found that I loved the movie just as much.

I can certainly understand how people might not like it; like every other film, it's all subjective, and everyone has different tastes.  For me, anyway, Avatar exactly my cup of tea, and very few other films have delivered the pure joy I felt watching it.

That being said, come Oscar time, there are lot of deserving films up for Best Picture this year.  I would be happy if almost any of them won.  It was good year for movies in my book... 

Interesting you say that spire because Police Quest 2 is a SCI0 game not an AGI game.

Whoops, my bad.  Amend my thought to say "any AGI or SCI game that uses a text parser".

I have never been interested in fan games or remakes, considering them a waste of both development time and creativeness. I can understand that some of the older titles could be improved with a face lift and added features but overall all it is still the same game.

I've never been able to play the original PQ2, or any AGI game in fact, because I find the combination of graphics and parser interface too cumbersome.  I've been spoiled by SCI games... 

So I definitely appreciate the effort RedPress is going to.  The backgrounds (especially the "realistic" ones) look awesome!

Well...I'm just curious to learn what a Verb coin is actually. Could anyone please tell?

From the AGS Wiki: http://www.americangirlscouts.org/agswiki/Verb_coin

I didn't know what it was myself until I googled it just now! 

It's just a shame that there doesn't seem to be a set of standard widescreen resolutions, like there are for 4:3 resolutions.

It's not quite as standardized as 4:3 monitors, but there are a few common 16:10 resolutions:

1280x800
1440x900
1680x1050
1920x1200
2560x1600

Pretty much all recent 16:10 monitors out there have one of these as their native res.  My monitor's is 1440x900, and it's been a while since I played a 640x400 (16:10) AGS game, but I have to play the 4:3 ones windowed.

This is, I think, an important point.  Games will look much better if they're scaled to each monitor's native res.  How feasible this is, I don't know.  Does pixel-based scaling have to be power-of-two based to look good?

The Direct X scaling method in the 3D gaming world seems to be pretty sharp and clear. You have to remember that the graphics is being scaled up from (in my case) something like 1024x768 to 2560x1600. It looked good because the pixel size wasn't blocky due to actual resolution change but instead a smooth interpolation was presented.

Are you saying that you ran Crysis at 1024x768 and your monitor is scaling it up?  Because otherwise, if your monitor's native res is 2560x1600, then the game is running at 2560x1600 with no scaling.

I have an NVIDIA Geforce 6600 gt.  I have a Samsung SyncMaster 22" widescreen monitor.  I do not have this problem.  Perhaps you need a different driver version for your video card, monitor, or to check some sites about this.

I have a Geforce 7600 GT and a Samsung SyncMaster 19" widescreen monitor.  The "flat panel scaling" option in the Nvidia control panel did not work, no matter what settings I tweaked  So I updated my drivers, which made things worse.  Whereas before, my monitor's native resolution of 1440x900 worked perfectly, the updated drivers treated 1440x900 as a 4:3 resolution, stretching it off the sides of the monitor.  I was able to fix this and subsequently get windowboxed 4:3 resolutions as low as 1024x768 through some registry tweaks and an older version of the Nvidia control panel (but not older drivers).  However, this method does not work for resolutions lower than 1024x768.  Things below that res do run, but they are scaled and stretched into a very blurry result that is not pleasant to look at.  I have since checked the release notes of every single driver release since, but nothing about fixing it.

This pretty much tells me you have an issue with your video card drivers, since I've never had any errors whatsoever when choosing filters (any filters).

It was an internal AGS error, actually.  Oh well, I can't seem to replicate it now!    But now there's a new problem.  The game I was trying to run, La Croix Pan, will not run in a window for me.  I have it set to run at 1280x800 in a window with 2x scaling, but it instead forces my monitor to a letterboxed 640x480 fullscreen mode, even though I have "Force alternate letterbox resolution" turned off.

I honestly think that some of you people with widescreen monitors should check and see if there are drivers you can get to correct your problems, since it doesn't seem to be a universal issue with widescreen monitors -- or maybe mine is just hyper fantastic, I don't know!  8)

Your monitor is hyper fantastic.    Googling "Nvidia Flat Panel Scaling" turns up a lot of people having my problem.  And even on Nvidia's own forums has it been brought up: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=16588.

I'm getting off topic.  In short, I'd still love to see higher resolutions and different (or better, as the case may be) aspect ratio support in AGS.

But please, please, please, for those of us who'd like to make use of the full screen area in either resolution, wouldn't it be possible to force a vertical cropping of a 640x480 screen as I suggested above?

I, myself, would prefer a horizontal cropping of the image on 4:3 monitors, with 16:10 monitors getting the full image.  In Garage's example, some nice touches, like a fire escape, the top of the paintings and the top of the kitchen archway, are cut off when vertically cropped.  Or, better yet, letterbox the 16:10 image in the 4:3 frame, as is already done.  This has worked for DVD's, so why not games?  The whole point of a widescreen monitor, in my mind, is to see more image, not less.

I should also point out that those of us with Nvidia graphics cards are unable to run our widescreen monitors in resolutions lower than 1024x768 without stretching, due to a bug that Nvidia refuses to fix.  Using the 2x and 3x filters sometimes gives me errors in games about using an invalid coordinate point or something.  Being able to play 4:3 AGS games without stretching would be a nice side effect of having higher max resolutions.

First post, anyway.  I love playing AGS games, and look forward to playing more in the future.