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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. "
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.