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Pyschonauts Now Back-Compat on 360
The much requested addition of backwards compatability for Psychonauts has reached the Xbox 360, reports the British Gaming Blog. The list also adds support for titles like Ultimate Spider-Man, Buffy, Shenmue II and ... Aquaman. The list was dropped early, so don't put the discs in quite yet and expect them to work. Still ... yay Psychonauts.
DOS runs on x86. Windows XP runs on x86.
XBox runs on x86. XBox 360 runs on PowerPC.
XBox uses an nvidia video chipset with NVidia-specific extensions.
XBox 360 uses an ATI chipset with ATI-specific extensions.
Take a guess why they've run into problems.
The 360's lackluster backwards compatibility has been a sore spot for a lot of gamers. No one who just bought a shiny new 360 wants to have to keep that huge ugly old Xbox just to play their older favorite games.
Psychonauts in particular is a sentimental favorite for a whole lot of people in the so-called "hardcore" gaming community. It was one of the titles that everyone pointed to when MS released a compatibility updates, as evidence that MS doesn't care about real gamers.
Seeing shovelware titles like Cabela's Big Game Hunter and Barbie Horse Adventures making the cut while fantastic games like Psychonauts and Shenmue 2 were forgotten was a bad thing. This release is one of the biggest steps in the right direction MS has taken.
There's lots still room for improvement, with notably absent fan-favorite titles like Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, Phantom Dust, Otogi, Chronicles of Riddick, Mercenaries, Panzer Dragoon and Jet Set Radio Future. But still, this is a damn good update.
PC games write to hardware registers only through drivers, which are shipped as part of an operating system and can be replaced along with the operating system. Console games, on the other hand, ship the drivers with the game and often ship a game with drivers customized specifically for that game, often taking advantage of imperfectly understood quirks of the hardware. In addition, unlike old PCs and new PCs, the Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles have different CPU architectures, and the Xbox 360 needs an emulator, in effect the opposite of Rosetta, in order to execute Xbox games' Intel instructions on a PowerPC architecture.
Wii's backward compatibility is a result of the hardware upgrade being as transparent as that from Game Boy to Game Boy Color or from PC to PC/XT to PC/AT to what we have now. Other systems with backward compatibility (Sega Genesis, PlayStation 2, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, PLAYSTATION 3) just include the previous generation console's CPU and a subset of its I/O hardware in order to run its games, which hardware may (Gen, PS2, DS) or may not (GBA, PS3) be used for some tasks in titles for the new platform. Microsoft could not do either in Xbox 360 due to contractual disputes with Intel and NVIDIA.
My only quibble is that it gets frustratingly, ridiculously, stupidly hard near the end of the game. When finishing the game is more chore then joy, you have f'd up somewhere along the way.
But, with that one thing aside, the 20+ hours that I have gotten to enjoy the unique level designs and quirky humor make it well worth a purchase. Especially now that it is cheap. As an example: Use telekinesis to hurl a squirrel against a tree, and your 10-year character yells "See you in hell!" in his sing-song voice. Twisted funny.