My love (Live Arcade, front end, the fact I can see what my friends are playing when they are supposed to be off work ill) hate (most of the games, the cheapy disc tray) relationship with the Xbox360 continues. The latest development is backwards compatibility. Now I know I've previously said that this wasn't important. I was wrong - in these barren post launch days it is more important than ever. It was bad enough a couple of weeks ago when Psychonauts failed to run on the 360. But cult platformers are one thing, EA's hyped new shooter Black is something entirely different. Surely this would run on the 360? Well, anyone who bought the Xbox version of the pumped up destructo-romp and hoped to play it on their 360 knows the answer. And it isn't yes.
At this moment in time my Xbox is in limbo (the spare room) which, quite frankly, is where the bulky monstrosity deserves to be. Having to dig it out to play the latest titles is ridiculous, especially when you consider the amount of people who sold their Xbox on the basis of 360 having backward compatibility. Sure, there are a pile of older titles that "work" - but there has been no update to the list since December. So what is going on?
In the case of Black it appears that Microsoft were the reason behind the 360 no-show, which is bizarre considering the complete lack of anything exciting appearing on 360 until Oblivion hits. What are they scared of?
Perhaps the bigger issue is the problem surrounding the original Xbox games that are supposed to work on 360. Many of them - Sniper Elite and Fable are just two I've tried - have either crashed or had glitches. Pro Evo 5, thankfully, works well, but there is a big problem here for Microsoft. Adopting their current policy - essentially keeping their head down and hoping that people will forget about all this when 360 games come out later in the year - is shortsighted. Microsoft needs to get on top of this issue or they risk losing the PR battle. In the meantime you may want to dust off your original Xbox - Psychonauts, in particular, is superior to anything currently available on 360. Backwards compatibility then - does it matter to you?
