Dismissing Recap's arguments off-hand is the easy way ou
Normally I'd agree, but for two things:
1. I have a hard time understanding his point, since he's got an opinion but has so far failed to really back it up except with more opinions, and things that are unclear. I have a hard time understanding the point he's trying to make, and it makes my head hurt.
2. I'm advocating freedom of choice and he's advocating his myopic viewpoint. I'm saying vive la difference, and he's saying my way my way! It's not really a two-way conversation, it's me vs the wall.
Take the CPS II example. How can one respond to that? It is clear that, in that case, when you see the digital image you are seeing it in an aspect ratio that the designers never meant for it, whereas the result on a CRT is drastically different.
Widescreen TVs existed when they made these games.
Here's how it worked: capcom made games with wide horizontal aspects which, when compressed into a 4:3 screen, gave a very high horizontal resolution. So high in fact that many screens, especially smaller ones, couldn't display all the pixels, so in effect you were missing part of the art. On a wide screen you'd get the full picture, and yes, it'd be stretched out in comparison, but hey: they've been doing this with movies for years, compressing or cropping them to fit screens. So what?
I had this trouble with my book (yes recap, I wrote a book, I'm fucking awesome, shut up about it), and I had a small discussion about this regarding the Capcom GnG sprites. Basically some games were presented in a square resolution and the sprites appeared wider (stretched) on the screen, while some were widescreen and appeared narrower on the screen.
Capcom couldn't account for different screen aspects, smaller screens with lots of art missing on account of overscan, badly calibrated screens with top-curl or rollover or any of a hundred differences 'in the wild'. There's no ideal display, it's all up to preferences.
So hey, I'm advocating freedom of choice.