Several of the games I got (D&D: Dragonshard, Two Worlds 2, UFO: Aftermath, one other one I can't recall the name) seem to have the same problem displaying. What happens is this:

When I run the game it shows a black screen with a message in the center that says something about the scan rate being invalid or wrong somehow (it's a message built into the hardware, not displayed by the game). I can generally still hear sound and it seems to accept my input but I can't see what I'm doing.

In the case of Two Worlds 2, I couldn't find a settings file with relevant info, but I ended up going into the registry and changing the resolution (it was set to something ridiculous like 2048x1536 even though my monitor only supports up to 1280x768).

But in all the other games, I could find neither a settings file of any kind containing resolution or relevant graphical info, nor that info within the registry (if there was an entry in the registry at all).

What should I do to fix these games?

I've heard of this problem before. My guess is that the games try to configure themselves for optimal resolution and that the graphics adapter/driver/Windows API somehow returns invalid values. A little more information about your system could be helpful.

You don't by chance have a GTX 970 or GTX 980 do you?

Since it's trying to do double your native resolution it sounds like it might be DSR.
This feature may also apply to older nVidia cards if you have the newest Drivers - not sure on the status of this.

Well I'm not at my home computer at the moment. Let's see if I remember the specs:

It's a Geforce (640 I think), I'm running Win 7 64 bit (I think it's professional, there are like 5 editions and it's hard to keep them strait). I don't remember exactly how much ram and all that it has, but that shouldn't effect compatibility. It's a pretty decent PC, only a couple years old. The monitor's older than that but it's an LCD 4x3, I think it's about 17 inches but I may be wrong.

But anyway, what other info do you need?

And where do games tend to keep these settings anyway? If you happen to know for the specific games I mentioned I would appreciate it. After all, the settings must be somewhere, right?

Maybe if I ran the games windowed, I could at least get into the settings to change them, but even if I Alt-Enter, it doesn't seem to work when they're in this condition for some reason.

EDIT:

I'm not familiar with DSR, but I just looked it up, and it sounds like oversampling to me. But that would then average pixels to reduce the resolution anyway, so I don't think it should effect the output resolution.

2ND EDIT:

I remembered what the other game is: Space Colony HD.