Microsoft dropping Backwards Compatibility?
 

Link: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3151161

What the heck? I was still waiting for Unreal Championship 2.

Yeah, who wants to play the likes of Jet Set Radio Future when Barbie's Adventure in Horse Entrails is fully compatible.

Hum, I can't be the only one that makes extensive use of the PS2 backwards compatibility feature. While I do buy new consoles to play the latest games, it sure is convenient to be able to use the same system to pop in a game like Castlevania:SoTN whenever the urge hits me.

Oh wai- looks like this news is already crushed.

'Barbie's Horse Entrail Lasso Competition: The Revenge of Barbie' coming soon maybe!

Oooh, a dozen.

Fuck, it should be more than 2x that amount, every month. They'll never get anywhere in the back catalogue if they work this slowly.

Man, 12 games, that's really slow progress... Well, I'm glad that they're at least continuing with the backwards compatibility. It just doesn't feel right that an Xbox 360 cannot play all original Xbox games.

- Psychonauts
- Shenmue 2
- Blood Omen 2
- Legacy of Kain Defiance
- Jet Set Radio Future
- Hitman Silent Assassin
- The Matrix Path of Neo
- Breakdown
- Prince of Persia The Two Thrones

That's ALL I'm asking for.

Instead of wasting valuable efforts, time and money on games that are 'easy' to emulate and that no one wants, they should try and do a poll to see what the majority of 360 owners REALLY want.

Although backwards compatability is handy, it's not as if anyone who owns Xbox games doesn't have an Xbox to play them on. Also, when the PS2 first came out, I thought backwards compatability was an awesome thing but to be honest, the only PS games that I ever played again after getting a PS2 were Castlevania, Worms and Suikoden. I'd be very surprised if there were any Xbox games I went back to after getting a 360.

I haven't tried all of my original xbox games on my 360, but I was disappointed to see that NCAA 06 Football was not compatible with it, which is strange since it did not get a release on the 360 {I bought MLB 2k6 the week before I got a 360, since my 360 purchase was totally impulse, and it is not backwards compatible, which is not surprising since a 360 version was released, just to throw out an example}. I have really only played two of my original xbox games on the 360: Halo 2 and Kotor. Kotor suffers from some slowdown, frame loss, and glitches when characters are speaking, so much so that I stopped playing it after an hour and switched back to the original xbox for it.

My primary complaint about the backwards compatibility is that I don't have room in my tv stand for a PS2, 360, Gamecube, and xbox, so I have my original xbox sitting on the floor off to the side, because I have to keep it plugged in to play my xbox games. If it weren't for that, then I wouldn't care one way or another about backward compatibility.

If it wasn't for the fact that you also listed Psychonauts I'd be driving over to your house to give you a kick in the junk right about now.

As for backward compatibility though, I'm with Shin on this. If I ever have the need to bust out an old Xbox game, I tend to use the old Xbox. Same goes for PS1 games and everything else. The consoles are already owned, and it's not like you'd be playing them all that regularily anyway, with the possible exception of games like Halo 2. Hell, I don't think I've popped anything but Halo 2 into the 360 since I got it. It's a neat feature, but I don't honestly see that many people using it.

It runs HALO, what else do you need?

And honestly, they didn't have any Microsoft employees take a single second out of their lives to make the Barbie game backwards compatible. It simply worked with the basic emulation software without needing any special tweaks, so they threw the game on the BC list. So using the "They have Barbie but not [preferred gamename], how gay!" argument is pretty stupid.

Sure, it was buggy as hell plus let's not foget that it's 'The Matrix' after all. But some of the levels were really fun and addictive.

Panzer Dragoon Orta, Breakdown, Otogi, Phantom Dust, Silent Hill 2/4, Beyond Good and Evil...

...Continued from ^

Street Fighter Anniversary, Capcom vs SNK 2, Guilty Gear XX #Reload, King of Fighters 2002/2003, Burnout 3, Metal Slug 3, Ultra Bust a Move, Dynasty Warriors 5, Capcom Arcade Classics

Really, the only reasons I have an Xbox (and I don't want to choose between re-buying everything on PS2 or having 2 massive Microsoft hunks of plastic, one of which I'd only have for a couple older games).

Although it must be said...I'm probably at least 2 years away from buying a 360 (probably more). My greater concern is the servers for Xbox 1 Live games staying up.

I highly doubt MS is going to disable the XBox 1 games' Live servers unless the game has NOBODY playing it. You're paying for Live, so why the hell would they need to turn off servers just because their new system is out?

Other than encouraging you to buy their new system, that is.

It was just a concern I had, since a lot of the Live games I mentioned aren't as heavily populated as, say, Halo 2. I know Sega shut down their online Dreamcast servers ages ago, so I was kind of basing my concern on that.

Don't you mean Sega?

Anyway, I don't really mind. I'll be getting a 360 in late-2007 and, I'll be keeping my current X-box anyway. I'm just a bit upset that Microsoft chose Barbie's Adventure over Unreal Championship and Phantom Dust, T___T

Edit: I know, I read, Devo. I'm just saying, it was just..upsetting.

Fish has a legit concern Devo, the servers that ran Steel Battalion: Line of Contact's online campaign mode were shut down last year. Now the only online option for that game is unranked random battle play.

Kinda shitty since the online campaign was rad.

Didn't that have to do with the fact that that server required active maintenance and writing of new campaigns rather than the server wasn't using bandwidth or something?

Like all servers, it required active maintenance, but no, new caompaigns and such were not added, it was similar to the online career in PGR3.

The point is that it was the meat of the online disc. Nixing it removes a LARGE portion of that game.

All I know is that they need to hurry up and make Counter Strike work already. Except for Halo 1 and 2, that's the only original Xbox game I made sure to keep. I played CS online a lot more than I played Halo 2.

Considering how poorly recieved that game was for the original XBox, and how its sequel is currently the only one that Valve I think has any interest in keeping around, I'd say you're better off buying CS:S from somewhere.

He has a point. Stop living in the past, you jerks! At some point you have to realize that old games are horrible, and that the present is where it's at. The present is in fact, so great that word is Microsoft has plans to cut forward compatibility as well by saying "hey, that's enough" and scrapping all games currently in development. Customers will be able to forget the pesky past (which Peter Moore has commanded we aren't concerned about anyway) and the annoying future so that we may enjoy Xbox 360's absolutely stunning present and thank Microsoft for it.

Ahahahaha. Fucking ace, Josh.

We all know Moore just wants us to forget about all the things he's ever done in the past and failed miserably at.

Those motherfuckers better add my Daisenryaku VII before they fucking pussy out on me and give up on backwards compatability. I don't have an Xbox anymore, and I want to play it again.

I honestly don't know how they can say they "over-delivered" or whatever. There was a promise that the 360 would be backward compatible with the Xbox, and now they want to just forget about it? Still not nearly enough games to consider the 360 a decent Xbox game player.

I just listened to Major Nelson's interview with Peter Moore, and Peter explained what he meant with that quote.

[33:13] "I want to be clear that my comments were not about 'nobody cares'. Of course we care! And we're going to continue to get as close as we can to our stated target of every Xbox game being back. compat. to the Xbox 360. And I'm hopeful we get there."
[33:50] "I first of all want to apologize for all of the trauma I've caused."
[34:06] "We're gonna get as darn close as we can to that stated goal of getting every title done."

He said "nobody is concerned" because they reached the goal of the "top-selling games" that they aimed for.

That seems to me like his statements caused a lot of backlash, which resulted in ol' Peter there's bosses suggesting to him that he should issue a statement to try to appease the masses.

And let's face it, backward compatibility is not a huge deal to every player, but it is a big deal to a lot of people. I have buddies who bought a 360 and immediately became interested in picking up older Xbox titles that they missed out on by not having an Xbox, which, while not a huge point of profitability for Microsoft I don't think, it is still something to think about.

Of course, as I type this, I am playing Knights of the Old Republic II on my Xbox because a) the 360 did not do a good job of playing the first Kotor and b) there is no simple way of transferring my saved data from my Xbox to my 360. This is actually an issue that I would be interested in Microsoft providing a solution to, but won't cry about should one never come about. Besides a current shortage of titles, this is the only problem I have had with the 360 thus far.

I could have sworn Morrowind sold millions upon millions of copies. How are they at their goal then?

Morrowind was indeed a Platinum Hit. It may even have been a Best Of PH as well, although I can't recall exactly. Maybe someone can fill me in on that.

Moore's retarded anyway though. I like how he did a complete about face.

Hopefully they will continue to improve this though, yeah.

For those of you with 360's and games that are certified compatible how is the playback? I heard it used to be a little shotty. I'm sure they worked their asses off on both Halos, but what about the other games they had to release updates for?

New BC update. Nothing too special.

June 2006 Back Compat titles added:

1. 4x4 EVO 2
2. Amped® 2
3. Bad Boys 2
4. Big Mutha Truckers
5. DOOM 3®
6. Dreamfall: The Longest Journey
7. Fatal Frame™
8. FlatOut™
9. Grabbed by the Ghoulies™
10. Intellivision Lives
11. LEGO® Star Wars®
12. Minority Report
13. MLB SlugFest 20-04
14. The Punisher™
15. RalliSport Challenge
16. Silent Hill® 4: The Room
17. Spawn® Armageddon
18. Spider-Man
19. Star Wars Battlefront™
20. State of Emergency
21. Zapper™

Additional Japanese-only titles:

Bistro Cupid 1
Flight Academy
Othello Seminar
Igo Seminar
Shogi Seminar
Mahjong Seminar

They had the same problem with the PS2 though. I still have about 10 PS1 memory cards full of saved games despite the fact that the whole lot would sit quietly in the corner of a PS2 card barely denting the total capacity. At least you can plug PS1 cards into a PS2. Is there nowhere to plug an Xbox memory unit into a 360?

Also, I too am currently playing KOTOR 2 (again), it's a fuck of a game.

What an awful BC update. Bad Boys 2? Big Mutha Truckers? Come on guys....

Looked good to me. What do you want them to do release the games only you want? Lets have some common sense here. I see 9 titles on there that were highly rated.

Silent Hill 4: The Room is a good addition. I still need to play this game and I'd rather do it on my 360 than my PS2.

Double Post:
I think it has been explained enough times that they don't try to make that shit backwards compatible; it just happens to work as an effect of recent changes made to the emulation engine.

I agree...Not much good in this round. Not only do I not own a single one of those games, I will probably never consider buying a single one of those games.

Except for Intellivision Lives, which I have for Gamecube anyway.

I know a lot of people knock Microsoft's choices for their BC updates such as Barbie, Bad Boys 2, etc but you have to realize the process behind making a game backwards compatible.

The XB360 uses a different CPU architecture and video subsystem. There is no chip that just detects a Xbox game and runs those functions.

Software emulation is a more appropiate verbage for what Microsoft is trying to do. Every game they want to work on the 360 they have to code a software wrapper that takes the original execution and set up a translation that the XB360/XB game can understand.

As they are working on emulation, some titles will be easier to write a wrapper for than others. Similiar gaming engines may allow the work on one title to quickly carry over to 5 other titles. Think how well Mode 7 games worked on the first versions of Snes9x and ZSNES. Once they got the chip down, all the games ran great.

It's not that Microsoft is CHOOSING to do Barbie bla bla bla over Dead Or Alive 3, its that Barbie came free with porting another game or took 5 minutes of effort.

So people would rather they omit games that people feel are shitty rather than include them at all for "Backwards comptability?"

<shrug> Maybe someone's 7 year old daughter somewhere is having a really good time with Barbie. Maybe they just booted the game and it just came up? ;)

I don't care either way. I bought a XB360 to enjoy next generation gaming. Anyone who cared for Halo 1/2 already have an XBox anyways and just about everything else is cross platform. Someone who cared for that generation owns a PS2/Xbox/Gamecube.

I'm not gonna give a damn about Rallisport Challenge when I'm playing Chome Hounds in a month.

BC is a bonus. A nice bonus but should not be a contention point.

Whether "functional" or not, there is PR appeal for saying our list is 300 games! (when people might use it for 10) then 10 games on Xbox works on the 360.

Although he's not stating it, the creator of Psyconauts is beyond pissed, he'd even offered to help with the emulator Code but MS blew him off.

http://www.doublefine.com/news.htm#13JUNE2006

Apprently, "TOP MEN!" are better than the guy who created the damn thing.

LOL, enjoy your Babie's horse adventure guys, ti's going to be a while before you get to play anything of real note.

Interesting, I wonder what that means if Microsoft doesn't even accept free help to speed up the BC process.

It means they're concentrating their efforts on improving the quality of service rather than pandering to the needs of people who if they were really desperate to play an old games, they'd play them on an original Xbox.

Hard though it might be to imagine, it's entirely possible that Microsoft aren't too fucked about backwards compatability and are concentrating on other things.

Oh? And a badly emulated Silent Hill 4 and Big Mother Truckers is "Improving the state of prefromance"?

Tim Shaffer is obviously pissed that Psychonauts is unable to reach an untapped market of that of Xbox 360 owners thus proving the importance of backwards compatibility.

Anyways, there's no denying that Microsoft doesn't care much about backwards compatibility and it's of course their decision in the end. However, I think they're making a mistake when they don't even accept free help to speed things up. Especially now when the 360 lineup is still so thin, in a couple of months from now it'll be meaningless.

Bad emulation is better than no emulation, if you ask me, Conan.

What's the point of bad emulation? Nostalgia?

How is Silent Hill 4 badly emulated?

At least it shows they are making an effort at it. Perhaps it's not perfect now but maybe it will be improved in the future. Being completely unplayable seems like more of a downer than being moderately gimped.

At least, in the worst posisble case scenario, like the person has a 360 and the game but maybe their original Xbox broke, they can still play it as opposed to it just sitting there like a glorified paper weight.

God damn, I recently bought an xbox 2 premium and downloaded the emulation shit and run it on my xbox 2. I was fuckin surprised I can't play Prince Of Persia 2 or DOAU, some of the shittyest xbox games have been emulated to work on the xbox 2. I was wanting to play DOAU while this damn free 1 month xbox live lasted.

Of course they're not going to work. Xbox 2 must be some dodgy HK machine. You know the ones, they look like current gen consoles, except made of low quality lime green plastic and have pirate NES games built in. Super Fabio Brothers, Balloon Dyke, Ice Fumblers, Misadventure Island, they have them all! But you got ripped off big time man, those can be downloaded for free.

Anyway that really wasn't worth bumping the dead thread for sorry. :( Plus updates are still slowly getting there. GONNA CLOSE.

Edit: GONNA OPEN. =D

You have one free month of xbox live gold. Xbox live silver has unlimited free use. You can download games, demos, BC updates, dashboard updates, and post scores as long as xbox live is live. The only thing you can't do with just xbox silver is play online.

If POP2 gets a BC update 6 months from now, you'll still be able to download it with a basic silver account. As for DOAU, I'm sure MS wants you to buy DOA4, so I doubt that a BC update featuring DOAU will ever see the light of day.