Ugh, games aren’t immune to this either. Most of them are actually okay, but every once in a while there’s one that causes a (rightful) blowup at the developers. Bioshock and Borderlands come to mind. The 16:9 and 16:10 versions are 4:3 blown up to fit the screen, so you actually see less of the picture. Needless to say that in games where FOV is hugely important since it affects your ability to identify threats, this gets really annoying.
Bioshock learned from their mistake and sent out a patch (eventually), Borderlands requires an ini hack to fix. This isn’t as easy it sounds unless you look up the proper FOV settings, since it can result in pretty bad tunnel vision if you do it wrong (and keep in mind that you have to shut down the game, start it up, and load a game every time you want to check whether or not it’s correct). Though I suppose the fact that you can ini hack on PC is much better than the non-fixable butchering they do on the HD channels mentioned here.
What’s especially odd is that this almost has to be deliberate, I can sort of see how it may be difficult to rescan a film or update something for HD, but in a game you’re not doing much at all. The ini hacks are nothing more than changing one or two numbers. At the very worst (a proprietary engine) they have to do some linear algebra and trig, and even then it’s probably not necessary if the methods needed are defined well.