Joystiq has a good breakdown. It’s less than what threespeech claimed.
Still not as pathetic as the X360 BC though. But to be fair, Microsoft never promised anything (or did they?).
Didn’t they though?
I seem to recall their story being the same. Promising everything, modifying it
down with each new interview. I was never impressed with the original Xbox
selection, anyway. Got two of the three games I wanted for PC, and got the last
Bioware title for 50 of the king’s crowns.
So, all the better for the Wii, as the only nextgen console whose backwards compatibility works.
Unfortunately, there aren’t really enough great GC games for it to matter a whole lot.
I think BC is a nice feature if it basically comes for free, like on the Wii, but I don’t care enough about it to get my panties in a bunch if it doesn’t work because of radical system architecture change. There’s a point whereby maintaining backward compatibility becomes a liability because it limits forward movement, and I’d always rather see hardware manufacturers break with the past and move on if it comes to that. I still have my old consoles if I really want to break out the old games.
In any case, I guess I’d be theoretically interested in how good the PS3’s emulation of the PS2 is. A lot of the 360 games people claim work perfectly fine have noticable timing issues that are obvious if you play the game on a real Xbox 1 and then on the 360 soon afterward. For some games this isn’t a big deal, but we still keep two Xbox 1s around for the bi-monthy Halo LAN parties because Halo 1 on the 360 has some serious constant timing/frame-lag issues that are really frustrating if you’ve been playing that game on the Xbox 1 for years.
I need to develop some quicktext for this.
What was promised before the 360 launch was that the top selling games would be BC, which most people took to be Halo/Halo 2. After 2 or so updates Peter Moore says “Nobody cares about BC” and the internet explodes, and then he corrects himself with something similar to (if not exact) the phrase Jake mentions above.
So, considering what was originally promised, and the rate of releases, I think they’ve done a decent job of holding to what they said they’d do.
Also Jake, it’s not like they gave a lot of information (as in 0) before each of the prior BC updates, so I don’t get way you’re saying zilch in big capital letters like it’s some surprise.
Well, if they make Def Jam: FFNY backwards compatible I can finally play it with four players (assuming that I had a PS3 with 4 Controllers. And three friends). Awesome!
Hah, Barbie Horse Adventures is on the fully compatible list. It’s deja vu all over again.
True, but as far as I know that is the exact quote. Timeline:
MS: Best-Sellers to be BC
MS: Basically delivers on said promise
Moore: We’re basically done.
Internet explodes
Moore: “We’re going to get darn close to that stated goal of every title done.” As far as I know, the above is an exact quote. Which basically means he stated a new goal, that being…
MS: To come close to having nearly the entire back catalog made BC
If you can find a different quote with another source (the one above comes from Kotaku), please post it.
But whether he said or he didn’t isn’t the real issue. The real issue is that when it comes to gaming, there are best-sellers and there are fan favorites. And MS has done a great job of - without question - of delivering the best-sellers.
It has fallen short of the fan favorites, IMHO.
You misread what I wrote. I’m not saying they’re providing ZILCH because it’s a big surprise. I’m saying ZILCH to express frustration over the fact that Microsoft doesn’t communicate - at all - about BC. As I’ve said before, simply saying: “There will be a BC update in the Spring” and even following that up with “That update has been delayed” is better than not providing any information at all.
This is basic psychology. You put people on a train platform with no information on when the next train is coming and they’ll get pissed. You put those same people on that platform with information on when the train is coming and they won’t be - even if the train is delayed. Repeatedly. To be clear: they’ll still be pissed, but not as pissed.
Let’s put it this way, next time your car breaks down and you take it into the shop to be serviced, imagine how you’d feel if your mechanic took the car and then never uttered a word other than, “yeah, we’re working on it.”
are you fucking joking? I think a pc can run gradius 5 at a decent clip with amateur software, wtf is wrong with the ps3?
I don’t see how that’s different than what I said. I wasn’t saying your quote was incorrect, I just wasn’t going to bother to verify it and gave you the benefit of the doubt.
Good thing that they never promised to get the fan favorites done first.
Cause having BC updates not being announced is exactly like having a broken car. Except, you know, a car is used to transport yourself to work and to get food (and also entertainment!) and fixing it requires you pay the mechanic, while BC updates are done to entertain you and are free.
Why not compare not getting updates about BC to Nazi germany not giving information about the concentration camps to people? I mean, they’re like exactly the same, no information is given out in either example!
edit to add a response:
Eh, my bad. I would have worded it differently, but I’m probably just hyper sensitive on this issue (but so are you! HA!).
Short memory, dude.
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=652893&postcount=59
Xbox.com: What criteria do you use in choosing which Xbox games will be backward compatible on Xbox 360? How far back into the Xbox game library are you going to go?
Todd [Holmdahl, Corporate Vice President of the Xbox Product Group]: When we say Xbox library, we mean the entire Xbox library. This ranges all the way from our launch in 2001 up to games that haven’t even shipped yet. As we’ve said before, we prioritized the top-selling titles and those games with a large Xbox Live following for launch, and we’re going deeper into the portfolio every day.
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=652910&postcount=61
“Backward-compatibility is not the reason people buy a new system,” said David Hufford, Microsoft Xbox group product manager. “The perception is that it is significant. We’ve put all our energy into new titles, but since our consumers have asked for it…we’ve made it a goal to make all titles backward-compatible.”
I’m assuming the silence is based on this: If MS started promising a BC timeframe, then they’d get locked into a date that would either (1) slip if any problems were encountered with the work, or (2) cause them to remove titles from the list in order to make the date. Thus, they limit the updates to “the emulation ninjas are hard at work.”
As for letting people know the titles beforehand, the title list can change after the internal beta. Psychonauts almost made the BC update prior to the one it actually shipped in, for instance, but the internal beta found issues. So they held it to the next update to make sure everything worked 100%.
I didn’t say it was like having a broken car (and frankly the Nazi germany example was offensive).
I did say the lack of information on BC updates is frustrating and compared that to a stubborn unhelpful mechanic who refuses to tell you when your car will be ready - and of course no analogy is perfect; that’s why they’re used for illustrative purposes.
Two questions:
In general, are YOU satisfied when companies - that you do not work for - don’t offer information on products you have purchased and promised to regularly update?
Secondly, while initially Microsoft offered only to support “best-selling titles” the last official word from a Microsoft official was that they intended to get damn near close to having nearly ALL xbox titles made BC. Are you saying that is not the policy?
I guess my point was that you are terrible at making analogies. Do you not remember the last time you tried to use one regarding 360 BC?
To answer your questions:
In general, are YOU satisfied when companies - that you do not work for - don’t offer information on products you have purchased and promised to regularly update?
That’s a complicated question - did the update have a major or minor influence on my purchase of the product? Were promises about certain timelines given and not kept? Were the updates that were given substandard? Did I have unreasonable expectations about the updates?
I know you’ll see this a dodge, but I can’t give a simple yes or no answer, so sorry.
Secondly, while initially Microsoft offered only to support “best-selling titles” the last official word from a Microsoft official was that they intended to get damn near close to having nearly ALL xbox titles made BC. Are you saying that is not the policy?
Wha? Where the hell did you see me say or even imply that? Just to make it clear: I do not work for the Xbox Division, MGS, or Xbox/XBL support.
Said the guy who brought Hitler into this discussion.
But as to the rest of your post, yeah, I’d say that’s a dodge.