The XBOX One

5 years of graphics improvement! It has a complete story mode too, where you play as a boxer named Bishop.

I noticed this morning that both Rainbow Six Siege and Fallout 4 are free to play until Sunday night.

Now I’ll have to decide if I want to continue my old Fallout 4 save from before survival mode was added, or my new survival mode save from last time that there was a free weekend.

Just in case anyone is interested, another edition of Inside Xbox happens today at 3:30pm PST. Looks like mostly talk about State of Decay 2, but sometimes there are surprises.

A rant about Xbox Live Rewards.

MS, you can have the rewards program you see fit to run, or not have one at all. But can I at least ask you not to actively screw with me in the process?

In the process of merging XLR into regular old MS Rewards, you abandoned a new and ambitious program called “My VIP,” which gave “gems” to people for doing various things online. Some things were as simple as earning another 1,000 gamerscore, some involved giving MS money, such as buying a month or year of XBL Gold or XGP, just buying stuff (1 gem for $1 spent) or pre-ordering a certain number of games. Some won’t ever be achievable, such as keeping your XBL Gold subscription active for 12 consecutive months, because the program won’t exist that long. Pretty standard rewards program stuff, really.

Then, MS changed its mind (which is the only real constant about MS, their corporate ADD is legendary) and decided to end the rewards and the MyVIP stuff. Which is perfectly within their rights to do, that’s not the complaint.

No, the complaint is that the MyVIP program was stealth-closed a long time ago, and MS is pretending that it’s not. That chipper email announcing a “new MyVIP perk” is just reminding me that you shut down any significant benefits to this program a long time ago and you aren’t being honest about it. Because no matter how many “gems” I have, you won’t redeem them for anything. Despite this, you keep sending me emails about how I need to hurry up and use my gems before June 15. It’s ok to close a program, but why fuck with me repeatedly in the process?

Let’s say you have a couple of thousand gems (they are still accumulating according to the plan rules), and want to do exactly what the emails are telling you to do and use some of them for rewards. What you will find is that you can get some FTP crap and nothing else. Oh, there’s lots of stuff listed, but anything not related to a FTP or lootbox game is “out of stock.” But that’s not credible, is it MS? Because there is no way in hell you can ever convince me that you are fresh out of 3-month or 12-month Xbox Live Gold Subscriptions. You aren’t out of rewards credits either, you just don’t want to let the people who signed up for your program, responded to your incentives, and earned your special play-money have them. Instead, you want to let them convert to far less valuable reward points at a much more favorable ratio to you when the program ends in a few weeks.

Now I’m not saying that you can’t do this. Obviously you can, and have done so. What’s making me feel like ranting is the fact that you won’t stop reminding me that you are being complete dicks about this program that you breathlessly announced less than a year ago. Every time you send an email, you sucker me into looking at your program, and remind me of your “we’re going to pretend we are out of stuff but we really just don’t want to bother following through with this thing” policy.

I’m OK with you ending a program, and I’m mostly unconcerned with you ending this program gracelessly with pretend stock shortages because fuck you guys for believing us.

But do you really need to send so many follow-up emails to make DAMN SURE I got the original “fuck you”? Because I got it the first time, stop it MS.

Battlefield 1943 added to back compat today:

Also announced six new games coming to Game Pass in June:

Hopefully more to be announced since 25 games will be leaving end of May.

Wow, they’re still making MotoGP games? I used to love the couple that Climax made. I didn’t know someone else started making them too.

I wonder if Rossi is still your main rival?

Been playing Doom 3 BFG on my XBOX One X and have been getting a lot of freezing and slide show performance. Anyone else get this? I hope the problem is with the game and not my new XBOX.

June GWG titles (German source for now):

XB1 Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: Russia
XB1 SMITE Gold Bundle

360 Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed
360 Lego Indiana Jones 2

I can’t read that as anything but “screw you here’s some old FTP shit.” But that reaction may be related to my rant a few posts back.

Yeah, that’s a pretty weak month. I never played the LEGO Indiana Jones games though.

Sonic Racing Transformed is really, really good.
I’ll have fun playing that again with people in multiplayer.

Google translate: “Exclusively for gold members, the Smite Gold Bundle offers over $ 100 worth of free content, including twenty additional gods and over fifty bonus items such as skins, caster packages and more.”

I found Sonic Racing Transformed pretty underwhelming actually, but to be fair I only played it single player, which is a bit silly for a kart game.

That’s cool, I never played the original Saint’s Row.

No idea there were TWO Lego Indie games. Only thing that looks good next month.

That’s a bad looking month for both Game Pass and Gold if you ask me. I’ll give Wasteland 2 a try, are the controls bearable on console?

Re: Wasteland 2. I don’t know, but it is a turn-based game, so surely they can’t be that bad.

I paid full price for it on PC and found it unbearable after 30 minutes. I went back a second time much later and lasted 15-20. But a lot of people love the game.

I count it as my shortest time spent with a full purchase.

Sure they can. Turn based games especially when ported from pc can be really frustrating with a controller if not done properly. I totally gave up on The Banner Saga due to its horrible console controls.

Interesting. I haven’t played that one. The only console ports of turn-based games I can think of right now were the XCOM games from Firaxis, and those are done well. And then there’s turn based JRPGs from the 360 era that were all done well. And the indie games from Double Fine like Costume Quest and Massive Chalice.

If it matters, Playstation 4 Plus members are getting putrid junk like:
X-COM 2
Trials Fusion