Slashdot Mirror
New Xbox 360 BackCompat Update
docdude316 writes "Gamespot is reporting that the Xbox 360 got another backward compatibility update Monday. The article says 'Microsoft has updated its Xbox 360 backward-compatibility list, this time adding 39 new games and updating support for nine more. That brings the total number of Xbox games playable on the Xbox 360 up past the 250 mark.' More backward compatibility is a good thing, but where's Psychonauts and Conker?" No Pyschonauts yet == BOOOO! And where is Jet Set Radio Future?
Now how about fixing the Xbox Live Arcade Game problem when you swap consoles out because your previous one died! Ahh, DRM at its finest.
... of course, it'll only get worse later on ...
The only Xbox game I have bought so far was Halo 2. I had never played it because I didn't have an Xbox but when I bought the 360 it was only £10 so I figured "what the hey" because MS would obviously make the effort to ensure that Halo and Halo 2 played perfectly. Not. I don't know if anyone else has played it through from start to finish but I have and I can tell you that the emulation is not perfect. I don't know how much better it looks than on the Xbox (I believe they updated some of the textures) but in the later levels I noticed that whenever there was a really bright flash there was a residual semi-transparent image of the flash that wouldn't go away. Yes, you could see through it but it was really annoying and meant that you had to save your progress, exit to the main menu, and then reload. I lost count of how many times I had to do this. I have not bothered to buy any more Xbox games. Mind you, I haven't bought many 360 games either (at £50 a go what do you expect?), just a few preowned ones and nothing really that stands out as being massively better than the original Xbox.
Oh, I played the demo of Saints Row having heard it was better than GTA: San Andreas. No, it isn't. The control is crappy, there is far too little blood and it crashed my 360.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
I think MS has done an AWESOME job so far, porting the game that they have.
The single biggest reason why people are unimpressed/upset with MS's limited backwards compatability list is because they're comparing MS to Sony's ability to support Sony's own old games. But many people fail to realize that Sony has been using the same-ish hardware for all their consoles (at least I think so).
However, Microsoft not only put a more complex processor in the 360 (3 cores in the Xbox 360, and 1 core in the Xbox), they put a PowerPC based CPU in the Xbox 360 (what old Macs used I think) versus the Xbox which used an x86 chip.
There was a reason why very few PC games were ported to Macs. The reason is because of the differing CPU architecture.
So the fact that MS managed to port as many games as it has is commendable. However, I do think that they ought to keep hard at it, making more, and more games compatible.
Just my two cents.