Hi, The higher resolution is from the new graphical acceleration drivers. An immediate quick fix would be to disable them.
on x86, you can disable it by dropping to boot prompt and typing userconf disable i915drm* userconf disable radeon* boot and then it would hopefully go back to being a 80x25 console. (depending on your hardware, plus I might be wrong with the exact name) If you like this you can add it to /boot.cfg it's a hack, but it'll work right away.
