The XBOX One

And we finally get our July GwG announcement:

Was Conviction already backward compatible? I loved that game!

I haven’t heard of the Xbox One games. Hope they’re good enough to tear me away from Slay the Spire.

I think it was. Blacklist still isn’t though.

Oh that’s right. Never played Blacklist.

I loved Conviction’s “active stealth”. I’ve rarely really liked more traditional stealth games.

I never played Blacklist either. I think that’s the one where they ditched Michael Ironside and that didn’t feel right to me.

Assault Android Cactus is an anime-styled twin stick, bullet-hell shooter. Gets intense, lots of variety in selectable characters with different power sets. I liked it enough to buy it on XB1 before it became a GWG. Dammit.

Cool. Based on all the 10 Ton (Crimsonland/Neon Chrome devs) games I own, I like bullet hell games, so I’ll play that first.

Besides 10 Tons games, this new game will sit along side other great games like Enter the Gungeon, Geometry Wars, and The Bug Butcher.

Yay, SWOS finally showed up in my library.

I believe with Liberation, all 360 AC games are now backward compatible. And it’s also the only 360 AC game I didn’t play, might have to pick it up now.

It’s the first AC game I played through after punting the original after a couple of hours. It was pretty good and I liked the main character, but it took a lot of AC gameplay knowledge for granted that I had to learn the hard way. Plays pretty much like AC3, which is not surprising since there’s a post-ending team up mission with Connor.

I don’t know if anyone finds this sort of thing interesting besides me, but here are some new de-listings of Xbox games:

July update incoming:

I like the groups. It only took a few minutes to make big ones for the backlog, and GWG / Pass games I haven’t tried yet.

Yeah, at first I hated it, because there was no explanation or anything, just one day the Add to Pins was gone, and replaced by Add to Groups.

But then one day, when I had Game Pass, it seemed like the perfect time to separate those games out from my pins.

I don’t know if a backlog one is necessary. Once my game pass expires, everything else is the backlog, and I can get rid of the Game Pass group.

I may have to start grouping things like that- Game Pass/Owned/co-op, etc. I was trying to find something new I was in the mood to play yesterday, and I started with GP games, then moved on to the rest. A few I just uninstalled after playing 5 minutes- Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate especially. I found that I just couldn’t do parkour like that after Dying Light actually made you do it ‘for real’, instead of just holding a button and pressing up on the stick. But I digress.

On a related note, something I’ve been thinking about recently. I remember when the Xbone was first announced, with the all-digital-all-the-time thing going on, no disk drive. I was just as upset as anyone- not really because I sell my games, but because I tend to buy them used months after release. As it turns out after owning this thing for three years, I own… wait for it… EXACTLY ONE DISK. Witcher 3, incidentally, that I got for free when I bought the box. I have ~80 games available on ‘my games and apps’, either installed or ‘ready to be’. Some (15?) are digital 360 games. Some I got via GWG- though I usually go months without downloading any of them- I don’t ‘purchase’ them unless I’m at least vaguely interested, which is seldom. A very few I got with GP (probably 8? I’ve only been on it a few months). A few I did pay full price for, but nearly all the rest I bought on sale, or when they were discounted via Game Preview. I just keep an eye on the sales (GWG/weekly) and bite when I see a good deal. Certainly easier than hunting someone down via Craigslist. That fear turned out to be totally overblown. Yeah, the sales aren’t nearly as good as on Steam or whatever, but if you’re keeping your eyes open, they are pretty good. Plus, the ability to buy them for peeps on your friend list is great, too. So hey, I’m a convert to our all-digital future.

Another perspective on digital games. I’m buying for 4 these days - myself and my 3 boys are all big gamers. Buying XB1 digital games lets me buy only 2 copies of games, Xbox Live, and Gamepass. Then I can share my purchases in such a way all 4 of us can play online multiplayer together. This works even when I’m working it of stete for weeks at a time!

This would cost dramatically more to do physically and be much less convenient. And Gamepass makes it even more affordable since we get the same games for a reasonable monthly price.

The reason I own only one Switch is I can’t do the same thing on Nintendo’s platform.

I saw @divedivedive playing Super Luck’s Tale, so I decided to buckle down and give it a serious try. On the PC I was turned off by the Unity engine and the insane loading times.

Today on Xbox, it was the same thing, but … I don’t know, it’s easier to wait on a perpetual loading screen when you’re sitting on a couch for some reason.

However, the game itself just feels terrible to me. The setting is cute and all, but I have a lot of trouble staying on the narrow bridges and not falling down, and jumping on the little balloon jumping points. I pretty much had to stare at my character’s shadow circle at all times to try to discern where he was in the world. And the little shadow circle is less prominent than it was in Super mario 64, so it’s hard to go by that in this game.

Anyway, I gave it a good college try, but I’m done. Another disappointing platformer.

Ha, I was going to say something about Super Lucky’s Tale in the weekend game thread, but this works too. But I like it! I mean, it’s pretty good, takes me back to playing stuff like Super Mario 64 but even easier.

I mean, I’ve been playing off and on over the weekend and I’m halfway through the third world, and I think there’s only four. And you earn lives faster than you can lose them, plus checkpointing is pretty generous, so I’m just breezing along. I imagine I’ll see it through unless it gets crazy hard for some reason.

Also jumped into Defiance and by god it is janky. I mean worse than the beta test a month or so back. You shoot a guy and suddenly he’s several feet to the side, and I don’t mean dodged, he’s just popped, teleported. Makes getting a bead on dudes way more complicated, kind of a problem in a shooting game. Hope that gets sorted out.

Just came across this article, interesting info but only really if you’re on the alpha ring for updates.