The XBOX One

I’m interested in Outcast also, played the original years ago and really liked it.

I played it a little when it came out on a friend’s PC, and it was cool. Then when it came out on GOG I bought it and tried to get it running, but it would only play in its original res (640x480) in the middle of the screen. So I’ve been looking at the remake.

I believe you could play against bots in the original Battlefront games. It was shit.

I just realized that Star Wars Battlefront II was made by Pandemic, so that’s three OG Xbox games made by them available through backward compatibility on Xbox One.

Yet two games they made for the 360, The Saboteur and Mercenaries 2, are not playable on Xbox One. Why? Why, EA, why? Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry?

Oh yeah:

I’m happy. I forgot to go back to Technomancer before it was removed from gamepass. The first hours weren’t great, but it seemed interesting. It’s by the same group as Mars War Logs if anyone was into that.

Do Battlefront 2 & Warfighter 2 have good single player campaigns?

Cool - was interested in Technomancer but I think it got mediocre reviews so didn’t buy it.

Outcast - related to Outlast? Or the Outcast TV series? Never heard of it.

GRAW2 has a decent, but very short, campaign. If you liked the first game, then you’ll like this one too.

It’s a remake of Outcast, a game original made with a Voxel engine in the days of early 3D. It was notable because once you were on an alien world, you saw the alien villagers go about their daily tasks, getting up, having food, going out to till the fields, taking a break, going back to work, etc. Earlier 2D games like Ultima might have done this in the past, but I think Outcast was the first 3D game to do it.

The soundtrack was also notable since it was scored by a symphony orchestra, which was very rare at the time.

Note that even in modern times very few games since then have given the NPCs full daily schedules. I know Bethesda games have it, and the Gothic/Risen series does it, but not many others do.

My kids and I play it regularly. It’s got bots. But the best part of the game is split screen multiplayer. We have a ball with it and have done so since they played it as much younger kids on the original XBox.

Bought it a while back on sale, found it mostly OK but wandered away and played other stuff once I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do next. Old school gaming, I suppose.

Gamepass achievement reward points this month:

100 - Something from last month
200 - Absolver
200 - Operencia
200 - Elder Scrolls Online + Oblivion
300 - MX vs ATV Reflex + Moto 17 + MXGP3
500 - All of the above

Marvel vs Capcom Infinite is up for download now. 60 gb

I realize this is kind of a low content tweet, but good to see that MS is still going strong with their BC commitment:

Sending them my energy…

I’m not really a “fanboy” of any platform (I always own everything), but man, I hope Xbox comes out with a fiery vengeance next generation.

They’ve spent the last six years getting kicked around by everyone, often for valid reasons (such as a lack of marquee quality exclusives), but in the past few years have made a ton of pro-consumer moves, and have built back up their first party studios organization from the scorched earth Mattrick left them. Back compat, Game Pass, Play Anywhere, the embrace of “cross play”, the budding romance with Nintendo - lots of good stuff.

Phil Spencer seems like a good dude, and exactly the kind of guy you’d want leading the industry into the future. His E3 interviews are always a highlight for me.

Basically, while it’s hard to call Microsoft an “underdog” with a straight face for obvious reasons, they really do feel that way to me in the gaming industry right now. And I’d love to see them come out guns a blazing at E3 this year.

We all benefit from healthy competition.

Microsoft is doing some great things already. The Xbox One’s saved game sync is fantastic. If that gets included with the Xbox SDK on Switch and Mobile we’re really going to see cross progression take off.

I’m also excited to see their focus on hardware performance. I don’t want to manage a PC but I do want fantastic graphics.

The studio acquisitions should give them a great first party stable of titles for a while to come.

Looking good!

I’m really excited to see what the next Xbox looks like, internals-wise. Microsoft aren’t going to risk losing the performance crown again, because they saw how Sony got to beat them over the head with it for most of this generation.

I might go so far as to predict that Microsoft goes for big air with the specs, even if it means taking a loss on the boxes for the first few years, like Sony and Microsoft used to do.

I’m also crossing my fingers that the scuttlebutt about XBL on Switch is real, and they announce it at E3 this year. Could you imagine if someone like Miyamoto walked out on stage with Spencer? Heads would explode.

Microsoft are being ambitious right now, and it’s fun to watch. I want to see it pay off for them.

If that’s Microsoft’s takeaway, they’re going to get crushed again. It’s not the the Xbone was less powerful (so were the PS2 and Switch); it’s that it was less powerful and $500 and had no exclusives.

People forget, the exclusives thing didn’t become an ongoing narrative until a few years after release.

The price thing absolutely was a big deal, but so was the underpowered hardware - and it still is to this day, with games that run at 1080p on the base PS4 needing to drop to 900p or even 720p on the One S, with performance issues to boot.

It was all PS4 fanboys talked about for the first couple of years of this generation. The price thing was basically “fixed” after they gave up on the Kinect, but the performance issues have persisted.

I also never indicated that “More Power!” would or should be their ONLY takeaway for this generation (and it clearly wasn’t, what with them acquiring a hundred studios last year) - but that doesn’t make more powerful hardware any less exciting to hear about.

They won’t be trying the stupid Kinect combo so they won’t get screwed on price again. The exclusives angle we will have to wait and see how the new studio purchases pan out and what the new AAA studio they started in San Diego comes up with.