It seemed pretty good from the ~6 hours I played on a free weekend. Gameplay was mostly the same, but better, and no more need to rush satellites. I’m definitely going to be picking it up when there’s a complete bundle with the DLC.
I wonder if the absymal framerate has improved?
Hmm, maybe I’ll take one for the team and find out. What’s one more in the backlog at this point?
I got home today, really looking forward to watching The Orville tonight. I turned on my Xbox One so that I can tune it to Fox. That way it will keep recording for 30 minutes. That way I can start watching after the program starts, and then rewind, and skip all the commercials, just like usual, right?
Well, the TV tuner is not working today. I turned in a bug report, thinking maybe it’s a weird hardware issue, maybe my TV tuner gave up the ghost.
But no, apparently, the same thing happened to a bunch of other people today:
https://forums.xbox.com/en-US/thread/432d35db-aa2e-4399-b5bf-a88f8299e4f1
Sneaky Microsoft. I bet it’s a bug they introduced today. If it gets fixed soon, I’d say it’s a case of “oops, sorry about that”. If not, I bet this could be another move to prevent the Xbox One from being your central entertainment device. They’ve been systematically doing that over the last two years, maybe this is just the next step.
By the way, an update: this was fixed last night by Microsoft. I started getting TV signal again, but after The Orville. So I’m still a little mad at them. But thank god this wasn’t on purpose.
One little thing to pass along - looks like Mass Effect 2 and 3 are now available for digital purchase from the Xbox Marketplace. This is notable because prior to today, you either needed to own physical copies of the game or have an EA Access subscription tonplay digital copies, but you can now buy and download direct.
Also wanted to add that from reports from random folks around the Internet that frame rate is drastically improved playing on Xbone. Anecdotal info to be sure, and I haven’t tried it yet myself, but it’s a good sign I think.
Fired up Gears of War Judgement yesterday for the first time is played a Gears game on the Xbox one.
I’d forgotten how much fun these games are. Looking forward to Gears 4 enhanced on the 4k oled.
I never played judgment. How is it compared to the others?
I didn’t play it too much, but at launch I did play through a chapter or two. The best way I can describe it is that they took Horde mode and made a single player campaign based around that type of gameplay. And since Horde mode was my favorite part of Gears, I thought that was a brilliant idea. OTOH, after I returned the rental, I never felt an urge to go back, since I got busy with other stuff.
Yeah, that’s Judgment in a nutshell, basically a series of horde mode arenas. If that sounds like your cup of tea, I imagine you’ll enjoy this. I got pretty tired of it quickly but my friends I was co-op’ing with were loving it.
That’s cool. Though I really disliked the hoard mode sections of Gears4 despite liking hoard mode on its own. Weird.
Horde. A hoard is a vast secret trove of gold coins, silver goblets, and objets d’art buried in an underground lair, typically guarded by an unusually large and aggressive lizard. Horde is a bunch of barbarians attacking a wall of some sort.
… I couldn’t help myself. It’s a sickness.
I’m trying to imagine a true hoard mode now. Maybe that’s what you call how I play RTSs?
Just an FYI - Larry tweeted that back compat releases are closing up shop for the rest of the year. Every week I keep my fingers crossed for Renegade Ops and Mark of the Ninja, guess I’ll wait a few weeks more.
A couple of notes about this over this weekend.
- Polygon had an article about the games we got for free for PS+ this year, and GwG. And they said that the PS3 entries in PS+ has been scraping the bottom of the barrel for a while now, but they started giving away games two years before GwG started. So their prediction was that in two years 360 games given away by GwG will be the same way, and maybe they should end the program before that happens.
This got me thinking about how large my 360 library actually is. I think I have over 300 physical games for the 360, and many digital ones. I bet I could come up with 500 games I own for the 360, maybe more. And I don’t even own all the big 360 releases.
- Polygon posted a top 500 games of all time list.
This again, made me think back to the above, where I was thinking I owned 500 games just on the 360, probably, and could have owned many more. You could create a top 500 list of just 360 games without starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
It’s kind of crazy, but the whole thing just made me realize: holy shit, the 360/PS3 era had a lot of really great games in it. I disagree that they need to start scraping the bottom of the barrel any time soon on 360 games if they could get access to good ones. The only problem could actually be the access though. Who knows if publishers want their games given away. Unlike PS3 titles and XB1 titles, the games given away for 360 under GwG are yours forever. Even if you stop subscribing to Games with Gold.
Btw, it’s pretty cool to see Digital Foundry look back at 360 games that actually look better than they did originally, on the Xbox One X. Even though I don’t have that machine, I hope whatever next generation Xbox eventually comes out (Xbox Two), it retains this property. I love the idea of a more powerful console actually making older games look better.
This is especially so after seeing it in action myself. I played some more Ninja Gaiden this weekend. It’s an original Xbox game, and even on a launch Xbox One, it looks way better than it did on the original Xbox. I love the improvement. The game still looks and feels the same as the original, but has crisper visuals, and the higher resolution makes it look good on modern TVs.
Yeah I don’t own Ninja Gaiden (not my thing) but I did try out Knight of the Old Republic and it’s got a pretty crazy facelift too. Though I think I played it through something like 19 times, not sure if I have another run in me.
Are we expecting another DDOS attack this Christmas? Was that last year?
Would it help to download updates beforehand and play offline, or does it still need to phone home anyway? Asking to make sure an 8-year-old family member’s Christmas goes smoothly.
I will need to figure out how to borrow an 8-year-old’s Xbox One to play through Ninja Gaiden Black. This could be tricky.
Yeah, those Lizard kids pencilled in a denial of service attack for the afternoon of the 24th. I love polite hackers.