King Kong Is Perfectly Dark

Et tu, Ubisoft?  It seems that playing the new King Kong for the Microsoft Xbox 360 on a non-HD television doesn't work so well.  Specifically, standard televisions display the game as way too dark.  So dark, in fact, that it's not possible to see the action in the game.  The excuse offered up by the company is that nobody bothered to develop or test the game on a standard television.

The Ubisoft boss said the team who made the game used certain settings on high-definition TV screens.  It did not occur to them that there would be a problem with standard televisions, which are what most people use to play console games.

How could the developers not test King Kong on a standard television?  Many game development companies have bought into the high definition future, and that's all fine and good, but the breakdown happens when the developers lose sight that the majority of their audience isn't playing on a HDTV just yet.  Some would argue that anyone playing the Xbox 360 on a standard television is missing the point of the console anyways, but unless the game says something like "only playable on HDTV" on the box, this kind of snafu is just plain careless.  Ubisoft should do the right thing here and fix the problem with a patch on Xbox Live (which I'm not crazy about, but that's a soapbox for another day) and by replacing the defective game discs via mail or retail for gamers unable to get the patch online.  There are enough anti-customer publishers out there.  We don't need another one.