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New 360 Backwards Compatibility
Gamespot is reporting that a new update to the 360's backwards compatibility has been issued ... and just as promptly recalled. From the article: "Late last night, Microsoft updated the backwards-compatibility list with eight games from the trio of Tom Clancy-inspired series. Software emulators for Ghost Recon, Ghost Recon 2, Ghost Recon 2 Summit Strike, Rainbow Six 3, Rainbow Six 3 Black Arrow, Splinter Cell, Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow, and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory all became available for download. However, within hours of the new update's release, reports began to circulate that it was causing problems with Halo 2. "
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
.... let's not have 100 childish "what a surprise from Microsoft!" comments.
I knew they were doing soft emulation, but I thought it was modular. I'm a little surprised that they only have one peice of software which does all emulation. I presumed they would code different backends for all the popular titles. Guess it would be more work, but less headaches in the long run.
Not sure where I got these ideas from, but that is what I thought.
My inner self is ineffable, so don't eff with me.
...to the next-gen, where not only is hardware not ready for launch, but the software isnt either
Next thing, you'll be downloading patches for your new xbox2 games before theyre even released. I suppose that since they have moved away from off-the-shelf PC components, they can make it more PC-like in other ways.
I'm more interested in seeing the price of the retail XBox drop. That kind of backward compatibility is what you know is going to work for all XBox titles.
One step forward and two steps back.[/sing]
Fabulous job, guys. Sony may be more greedy (I refuse to label it as something so intangible as 'evil'), but at least when they say 'backwards compatible', they mean it. I like that I can still play my copies of Final Fantasy Tactics, or Gran Turismo, or Bushido Blade without having to modify anything at all. It is a fairly sweet deal, indeed.
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
Judging by how great Splinter Cell looked on a standard XB on an SDTV, I'd love to see what it's like all nice and upscaled with that fancy AA and other improvements. It must be a very pretty game.
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
If you are one of the few people who will be getting a 360 this gen, you really need to just forget about backwards compatibility.
It was, and always will be, a unwanted marketing gimmick by Microsoft.
First of all, there is no such thing as 'backward compatibility' - the few games that actually do run are essentially quick and dirty ports to the 360.
Second, Microsoft seems to be using the incredibly low standard of basically being able to run for claiming a game is supported.
The amount of engineering time and cost to individually debug and fix each and every game that has problems is problem Microsoft will never even remotely be able to tackle.
Third, even if some of the games you want to run on your 360 actually do work, you wouldn't want to play them since they are not going to be the same game as the originals since all sorts of subtle, and not so subtle, issues permeate these Xbox games running on the 360 and the chance the any game will ever play exactly like it did on the Xbox is close to zero. Regardless of how much cash and manpower Microsoft has at their disposal, fix bugs that happen ten hours into old Xbox games just ain't gonna happen.
They've already added a new update that both adds the compatibility for the new games, along with avoids the Halo 2 issue. All is good now.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
But it will never be 100% and, even if the only title that it doesn't run only sold 50 units, people are going to bitch...
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
Anything that stops Halo 2 from working is a Good Thing
I wonder how many people that complain about the 360 emulation have actually used any other emulators before, especially newly released ones? Most of the time they are slow, glitchy, and lots of games don't work yet. It usually takes the authors years to get near perfect emulation up and running. On each release some games will work better, and some may get worse. It's really the nature of the beast. To this day there still isn't a completly perfect NES emulator, that should tell you something.