To continue the theme I’ve had going lately, where I neglect modern consoles and massive Steam backlogs in favor of playing decade-old Xbox games, I’ve started Metal Arms: A Glitch In The System.

I’m not going to talk about that tonight, though, because I’ve barely gotten going on it.

What I am going to talk about is how gleeful I am that I appear to have, quite unintentionally, purchased a television that eliminates one of the most vexing results of the move to 16:9 format televisions, that being the need to constantly change the aspect ratio when playing 4:3 content.

It turns out that my TV features a setting labeled “Auto Wide”, which when enabled further enables an option that lets you choose what the thing does when handed a 4:3 image. By default, this is set to stretch the picture, because TV manufacturers live in fear of consumers complaining that there are black bars on the sides of the picture.

When set to ” Normal”, the set blissfully flips back and forth between wide-screen and 4:3 mode automatically, and a small annoyance is no more.

It is a small thing, but a delightful one.