Additionally, we’ve got a new game added to Xbox 360 back compat today: Vanquish!
edit: oops, I jumped the gun - also, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light and Brave (part of March GwG).
Getting closer to NG2! I can feel it!
Great news, I love that game. Could definitely go for another playthrough soon. Vanquish is nice too.
I wasn’t sure if Trials of the Blood Dragon was the Far Cry spin off. Apparently it isn’t, and is rubbish. It’s a Trials spinoff, of all things.
Yeah, Tom streamed it once. That’s when I knew I didn’t want to pay for it. But I might try it for free. It’s like Trials, but you can fire weapons and stuff. It looked silly.
That was Tom’s stream. The Trials part of it still looked like Trials, so I wanted to try it for that.
I’ve played every iteration of Trials, including the mobile one, and I’ve never once wanted to be able to shoot stuff.
I don’t much like the Trials games but I did love Blood Dragon so I’ll definitely give it a go.
So, here is a strange question. I told my brother about the game pass deal. He wasn’t targeted with the deal. Last night I had an ad that would let me send the deal to others, but at the time didn’t know he needed it. Is there a way to re see ads that showed up on the landing page of the Xbox?
Hey guys look, an actual Japanese game is getting ported to Xbox One! I know, I had to make sure I wasn’t taking crazy pills too!
“I’d been in the role a month when I had the oppurtunity to speak to everyone in the team at an all-hands meeting,” Spencer recalled. "The team was in a world of pain, we hadn’t done our best work with the announce of Xbox One, the product we’d built wasn’t meeting the expectations of our customers, market share [was] taking a nosedive and it was painful to read all the headlines. Plus, most importantly, the [Xbox] team thought that the leadership team had gone totally tone deaf about what our customers were demanding from us.
That about sums it up.
Don’t be silly! A Japanese RPG for the Xbox One? Ha! You so funny!
I know, I was all
Yeah, the reversal is weird. The 360 had so many JRPGs, and the Xbox One has had … none I think?
Final Fantasy XV and Monster Hunter World both seem to have sold really well on Xbox One
I knew I had to be forgetting some. :) You still got my point though.
Yeah, but Final Fantasy is like the Madden of JRPGs. It’s like Star Wars, everybody plays it. Well, not me, but you get the idea. And I don’t know what the hell Monster Hunter is all about. Getting a bunch of cat chefs to make sushi for you, I think.
It’s because the market is completely different today, and the JRPG space is almost unrecognizable compared to the beginning of that generation.
The Xbox 360 had so many JRPGs because Microsoft was in a unique spot back then. They were able to launch ahead of the PlayStation 3 and the Wii, and after the original Xbox’s utter failure in Japan, Microsoft put a lot of money into netting exclusives and new IPs from Japanese devs to try to break into the still-valuable home console market over there. This led to new and still-exclusive JRPGs like Lost Odyssey (a new massive and story-driven JRPG from the original creator of Final Fantasy, on four discs like in the PSX days!) and Blue Dragon (a new JRPG from the “Dream Team” behind Chrono Trigger!), otaku faves like The iDOLM@STER and the massively popular Steins;Gate, and even more niche fare like shmups and a handful of western titles. As the generation continued, the PS3 turned its fortunes around after its infamously rocky start, the Wii shot off like a rocket in a different direction, developers that previously would have provided the “mid-tier” games that filled out the JRPG genre either went out of business or moved exclusively to handhelds, and the Japanese market made it very clear that they still didn’t want what Microsoft was pushing from outside Japan. Games that began life as Xbox 360 exclusives saw PS3 ports with new features, additional content, and significantly higher sales numbers, and after a while, the Xbox 360 in Japan was little more than a platform for Cave shmups and a few weirdos wanting to play western games.
Unfortunately for those of us who own Xbox Ones, it picked up in Japan from right where the Xbox 360 left off, and outside of a few early releases like Crimson Dragon and D4, and the rare few ultra-high-profile releases like Final Fantasy XV, Monster Hunter World, and the upcoming Kingdom Hearts III, Japanese games in general are few and far between on the platform. Mid-tier developers that moved to DS and PSP back then moved to 3DS, Vita, and smartphones when those all became viable choices, and many of the developers that stuck with traditional handhelds are now moving to PS4 and Switch, with mixed results. (Quite a few anime tie-ins and RPGs that previously saw Vita releases are getting PS4-exclusive sequels that aren’t even reaching 50% of the previous title’s sales numbers, and while we haven’t seen too many third-party Switch JRPGs yet, the most recent ones have been mediocre titles like Nights of Azure 2 and Lost Sphear.) Nothing’s lined up well for Japanese games on Xbox for quite some time, and no matter how sincere or enthusiastic any new initiative from the Xbox team may be, they’re not getting those games or that market back any time soon.
I’m going to reveal to you all one of my odd hang ups because hey, it’s fun to point and laugh at whackjobs, am I right? But while I don’t care all that much about the size of my gamer score, I do have this need for, I don’t know, the aesthetic value of a score that ends shall we say evenly, otherwise known as a value of 5 or 0. And when I say need I mean, I will work to ensure that my has such a value. Not that I will avoid a game that has oddly valued achievements, I’ve played quite a few, but I will make sure that the end result is that they cancel out, or resolve to a final value ending in 5 or 0.
Now I’m not totally loony, I know this is a silly thing to get hung up on, but realizing this doesn’t make the hang up magically go away. The reason I bring it up is because I always figured I was alone in this, or at least in a secret minority. But the folks at TrueAchievements.com understand folks like me, and are here to help -
Now if any others out there have ever harbored this secret woe, there is an answer. One less niggling concern worrying your subconscious at bedtime each night. Alas, it isn’t so great for one like me - I need each game to resolve evenly, not just the larger aggregate gamer score. But I did want folks to know that there’s help for us, even if we are ultimately batshit insane.
And I thought I was OCD about games…
For me, I just need to stop buying games in the ‘bargain bin’ thinking “some day, I can play this and add to my gamerscore”. For some reason I still occasionally have that thought, despite my massive backlog and the reality that this will never happen. I will never get to that game. Like Rockstar Table Tennis. Sure, it might have only cost $2-$5 or whatever, but what the hell was I thinking? Well, actually that’s exactly what I was thinking: “some day, I can play this and add to my gamerscore”. Idiot.
Most recently I did this with a bunch of indie games in the last sale. To be fair, there is a chance I’ll actually get to these, but I had that exact thought when buying them. I need to redflag that thought, and if I hear it, to hit the big red abort button in my mind. ABORT! Get out of there Bish!