"I don't want to bore you with the technical side of things, but the long and the short of it is that the text you see in the demo will be the same as that you find in the retail version of the game," said George Kelion, community manager at Rare, in a post on the on Tuesday. "I'm sorry that we weren't able to address this issue... but it's simply something that's too expensive in terms of time, resources and money to alter."

The problem, which renders text unreadable, was discovered by SDTV owners last week when the demo for Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts was released on Xbox Live. Rare initially promised to look into the issue, but decided against it, betting that most Xbox 360 owners use HD sets, thereby suppressing any mainstream consumer outcry.

Interestingly, the decision not to fix the tiny text issue is against Microsoft's own Xbox Live Arcade game policy, which states that all games must be playable, including readable text, on 14" SDTV sets.

This isn't the first time SDTV owners have gotten the shaft in an HD gaming world. In 2006, Capcom said it would not enlarge the tiny text found in , which was difficult to read by both HD and SDTV users. Similarly, the text of many other recent games, including for Wii, are difficult to read on SD sets as developers optimize games for play on widescreen TVs.