Xbox 360 had a LOT of shmups. I lost track of them all.
@DaveLong even suckered me into buying a disc-based shmup before I realized I didn’t like the genre. I think it was Raiden or something like that. It had a bunch of Raiden games on it, not just one.
That’d be Raiden Fighters Aces.
And yes, Xbox 360 had a lot of shmups, but a lot of the ones on XBLA (and particularly on XBLIG) were unplayable garbage from western indie devs thinking they needed to “reinvent a dead genre.” Strania wasn’t that.
Aw man, Raiden is awesome. Toothpaste laser for life!
The Ghostbusters game was a lot of fun. MP was even fun.
Yo Rock8man - if you’re wanting some Telltale games on Xbox, looks like this week’s deals with gold might be up your alley. You can get Walking Dead seasons 1 & 2 for about $15, and Back to the Future for about $6. I bought both!
Tried Deathtrap out over the long weekend. It’s pretty fun - it seems smoother than the TD levels in Van Helsing 1, but there are also a fair amount of loadscreens on my regular (non-S) xBox 1 which were fairly annoying. I expected it to be a bit more optimized.
There are some interface quirks too. I missed the trap upgrade menu for a few turns, thinking once I’d purchased the upgrades in the traps screen, they’d be automatically applied, and I couldn’t really see where to check it for a couple of maps until I stumbled upon it. Also, make sure you speed up during your trap placement phase - it’s odd that they don’t set you to fastest for that by default.
Still, it’s a fun little diversion - which would be a lot better without the load times.
I also picked up Rocket League on the xB1 over the Countdown sale - any Qt3’ers still playing it on xBox 1?
Same problem as before though: I already own all those games on PC! Even though I haven’t played Back to the Future or Season 2 yet (well, past episode 1).
I did also notice they keep putting that submarine game from Insomniac on sale again and again. It’s on sale again this week on Xbox Live for $7.50. One of these days I’ll actually be tempted by that game, but it will no longer be on sale! :)
You mean Song of the Deep? I love that game! It’s a fun little metroidvania, and kind of a sweet story about a young girl trying to rescue her father from the bottom of the sea.
I do mean Song of the Deep. I mostly got scared away when Tom streamed it, and at the end of the evening he got stuck and couldn’t figure out a way to get past the obstacle. And none of us helping him could figure it out either. I figure if all of us collectively were stumped, what hope will I have by myself?
Sorry, don’t think I watched that one. I don’t recall any serious problems with progress myself - definitely there are puzzles, but I thought they were challenging without being unfair for what it’s worth.
Oh also, looks like Resident Evil 7 is going to be the first third party Play Anywhere game released, if that’s of interest to you folks. I think I gave up on the series back around RE5, myself.
I hope Play Anywhere catches on with all the publishers eventually.
I am curious about RE7. You should try out the demo if you haven’t yet. It doesn’t play like any previous RE game. It feels more like a complete reboot, more of a first person exploration game.
Oh there’s a demo? Well that’s totally different! I almost forgot what those were!
The new UI preview is going out to select individuals.
XB1
Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime
Project Cars Digital Edition
360
SW: The Force Unleashed
Monkey Island 2
Stuff I already have, but a nice mix regardless.
Uh-oh. Digital Foundry has some scuttlebutt on Scorpio that may disappoint some folks:
[quote]
A whitepaper was released on its development portal, entitled ‘Reaching 4K and GPU Scaling Across Multiple Xbox Devices’. It’s a fascinating outlook on Microsoft’s ultra HD plans - and it also reveals more about the Scorpio hardware itself. For starters, Xbox One’s contentious ESRAM is gone.[/quote]
[quote]
“ESRAM remains essential to achieving high performance on both Xbox One and Xbox One S,” the whitepaper reveals. “However, Project Scorpio and PC are not provided with ESRAM. Because developers are not allowed to ship a Project Scorpio-only SKU, optimising for ESRAM remains critical to performance on Microsoft platforms.”[/quote]
[quote]
There are other clues as to Scorpio’s final hardware set-up within the whitepaper. The six teraflop GPU is once again confirmed, with the GPU’s compute power rated at around 4.5 times the capabilities of Xbox One. Four times more L2 cache is also confirmed - a new detail that does not tell us that much, except that that the GPU architecture in Scorpio is at least as modern as AMD’s Polaris line.[/quote]
[quote]
PlayStation 4 Pro has offered several titles with high performance modes running on unlocked frame-rates - and notably none of them has managed to double performance consistently from 30fps to 60fps. Microsoft makes no claim that Scorpio is able to do so either and instead suggests a compromise - running GPU elements at twice the speed, while CPU-bound elements are interpolated. A move to far more powerful Zen cores would almost certainly make such advice redundant.[/quote]
[quote]
“We acknowledge that developers may not wish to spend all of the additional GPU resource of Project Scorpio on resolution, and this is not mandated,” the paper says. “To make the best games possible, developers will inevitably spend GPU resource on other quality improvements such as higher fidelity shadows, reflections, texture filtering and lower draw distances. Another option developers might consider is frame-rate upscaling - running graphics at 60Hz but the CPU at 30Hz and interpolating animation.”[/quote]
Lots more tech faffery at the link.
This bit made me question how they were going to assure full BC for existing XB1 titles on the Scorpio. But hey, if they can make 360 BC work, why not this?
From that description, seems like the Scorpio semi-custom SoC will retain very slow Jaguar CPU cores alongside vastly more performant Vega GPU cores. That’s not ideal, but most games are written for consoles with slow CPUs so it won’t degrade the experience, it just won’t enable it to improve.
Regarding ESRAM, its primary purpose was compensating for slow DDR3 DRAM as opposed to GDDR5. So my reasonable guess is the Xbone Scorpio will come with GDDR5 and just power through the difference with its additional horsepower on non-patched titles.
I think what’s disappointing for platform warriors is seeing that the Scorpio really won’t be all that much more powerful than the PS4 Pro despite the longer wait.