Is Vanquish the first to do..............

SDTV mode? That is what I have been asking for. All games from this point on should have this feature where there is zoomed text. I could never get why switching to HD called for smaller text on screen in games. I thought it would go the other way around with bigger, crisper and more vibrant text. Anyway, kudos to Vanquish for doing that and I hope more games follow suit.

this game is looking cool

I've noticed that, in some games, the text onscreen is far too small to read on a small TV screen.

Perhaps developers are designing games for large screen HDTVs these days, and so that might be why the text is so small on a small screen, since it might be optimized for a large screen. Statistically, the trend might be that more gamers are getting big-screen TVs, so that's the direction developers will go.