Xbox 360 Updates Social Features, Back Compat

Microsoft is gearing up for another big update to Xbox Live, and soon they'll be offering a friend of a friend feature that will allow users to peruse their friends' friend lists. It's a voluntary service, and is gated by your age to avoid any parental fears. If you'd rather turn it off ahead of time, they already have a dedicated site set up for that purpose. (Gamertag login required.) That update will be dropping on December 4th. Relatedly, they're also rolling out a whole bunch of new backwards compatability options for your old Xbox games. Highlights include support for: Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance, Burnout 2: Point of Impact, Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone, Indiana Jones And The Emperors Tomb, Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter, Syberia II, The Bard's Tale, Worms 3D. There's also support for a slew of sports titles going all the way back to 2003.

Comments

Re:The friend of a friend feature

[mollymoo]

But really what I'd appreciate is some sort of network inspection, topology tool so you could figure out who was the best choice to host in a game. Even in circumstances when there's not much to do about a problem, like latency, it'd be better to just know what and where the problem was, as opposed to just observing it and wondering about its origin. Not to mention, all the data put together would give a very good measure of network performance offered by the various ISPs.

Wouldn't it be even better if for your substantial monthly subscription Microsoft provided the servers, which could thereby be guaranteed adequate bandwidth and good latency (at least to the backbone)? It's absurd that you pay money to Microsoft then have to host the damn games on your own system.