Atariboy

Since my bought new 360 disc isn't eligible, I'll buy the PS4 disc used so as to not support that anti-consumer move and just enjoy the upgrade over on the PS5.

So disc owners will be left out. Classy move.

I'm surprised that there's anything for EA to shut down. I thought these just used Microsoft's servers just like the vast majority of 360 online games did.

Most online multiplayer capable 360 games, including many that never had active online communities, remain online capable to this day since they just relied upon Xbox Live for matchmaking and the players themselves hosting the matches. Nothing was handled server-wise by the publisher and thus they remain kicking since there's nothing for the publisher to discontinue hosting (and will continue to survive until MS one day kills off XBL support for the 360 library).

Evidently that's not quite the case here though.

I did the slog for the online experience based achievements in Grid 1 and Dirt 2. Then the realization that I wasn't having fun made me stop achievement hunting. When 90% of the field thinks that the best way to get around the first corner is to use the rear bumper of the guy in front to get yourself stopped, it just wasn't fun for a sim racer like myself. I "learned" to play by such silly rules as that one, but came to my senses and just did the fun single player achievements afterwards for games like Dirt 3 while leaving my online multiplayer racing to more serious concerns where people at least generally try to drive cleanly.

Clicked on this thinking that I should finally buy Quake 1 and Quake 2, but they're not part of the Quakecon sale I see...

Since I have all these Doom releases, I guess I should wait on "Doomcon" for a sale on Quake, lol

Kidding aside, I'm sure I'll see these on sale again sooner rather than later (They've been heavily discounted several times before, but something else always caught my eye and took precedence).

Too bad Doom 3 isn't at least here. While the BFG Edition is BC and fine, I'd probably pick up the latest release of it here if it had been on sale.

Give me Wolfenstein 3D and Spears of Destiny. And if I want to dream, toss in a port of the 3DO Wolf 3D as a bonus feature.

The XBLA release of Wolfenstein 3D is backwards compatible and great, but so was XBLA Doom and Doom II. Yet we've seen those old backwards compatible ports be surpassed in virtually every way possible. A fresh look at Wolf 3D is way past overdue (and is something not available on PS4, PS5, and NS).

I'd also love to see Digital Eclipse get a chance to finally resurrect Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein.

@NeoRatt Interesting. I wonder if a bug in the 360's operating system is the culprit.

To me that would seem to make the most sense. You're able to basically rule out aging 360 hardware. And given that it sounds like the game wasn't the recipient of post-release support from the developer (where a bug inadvertently was introduced) yet worked okay when it first came out, I think the issue has to be at the OS level.

It's really a shame how buggy the 360 OS has become. For instance firing up the custom soundtrack feature used to be quick, yet now is agonizingly slow. And good luck to anyone downloading or transferring game licenses in the 360's download history. It's so slow just to scroll through the list and if you go too quickly, it just locks up. Hopefully today's news about a 360 OS update extends past just some cosmetic adjustments and addresses some of these things.

I also love the Colecovision. Too bad that it was so reliant on licensed games though (such as the 1st party output which mostly was arcade ports from various companies like Sega). But if AtGames could navigate the maze of licenses to assemble a decent selection for their Colecovision Flashback plug & play a decade ago, it's definitely not an impossibility to do the same with a console compilation.

Would be nice if delisted games and Xbox Originals would again display their artwork in the game library, but I'm not holding my breath that this longstanding bug finally got fixed.

@NeoRatt Not familiar with Double D Dodgeball, but I'd bet money that it's just poor programming. Did it ever work for you? Maybe it received a fatal programming flaw with a patch, in which case deleting the title update and declining to update it might return it the living.

It has happened here and there, like the Midway arcade classics in Lego Dimensions for the 360. They worked fine when new, but a late title update wrecked them and they're now filled with graphical garbage.

Barring the obvious examples that simply refuse to go past the title screen due to an always online mandate and discontinued support, the most regularly repeated XBLA game that's said to be broken in actuality isn't. That game is Game Room, Microsoft's early attempt to cash in on Nintendo's success at the time with the Virtual Console. It still works to this day and can be redownloaded via one's download history, despite repeated claims to the contrary across forums and the like.

It tries to call home. If it's a fresh download of it, you'll be facing something like 60-90 seconds of it trying to contact the long discontinued Game Room server. But it does eventually give up and then plays fine (other than the online features like the leaderboards, obviously). And it doesn't insist on trying to phone home again the next time you fire it up.

But people see that screen for a long while, give up, and jump on the internet and declare it as dead.

@Kilamanjaro I don't know about the Street Fighter game, but Gauntlet was never made backwards compatible and was delisted many years ago. You'll need a 360 to download and play that XBLA game.

All of the Midway games like Gauntlet got pulled when the corporation imploded. Only XBLA Joust came back under Warner control. I believe it was relisted at the same time that it joined the XB1 backwards compatibility program.

I thought for sure the remainder would return during subsequent BC updates, but it never happened and XBLA games like Gauntlet remain exclusive to the 360 (although there's at least Midway Arcade Origins and the unlockable arcade classics in Lego Dimensions to help fill the gap).

@ScalenePowers It's the Imagic game for the Atari 2600. It's basically a clone of the Williams arcade game Defender.

@Kilamanjaro @NeoRatt All your delisted XBLA purchases are in your download history, can be redownloaded, and will still work (unless it required a connection to a now discontinued service, like Dorito's Crash Course 2). And if one is having lots of game crashes it's due to failing hardware, not because a game was delisted years ago.

When 99% of the hurdles here revolve around licensing and legal constraints for the many non-BC Xbox and Xbox 360 games, I don't see it being a game changer when streaming likely doesn't alter this situation in the slightest.

While there's surely some degree of technical constraints with some Xbox and Xbox 360 titles that prevented their inclusion, I very much doubt that it's a horsepower issue that can be worked around by moving the processing chores off-site to a server farm. We're likely looking at the roadblocks being things like the ability to interface the Steel Battalion controller to a newer console, the inability to interface Kinect to the Series X/S, and so on.

These are the sorts of technical hurdles that I believe the quote is referencing. I'm certain that we're not looking at a situation like Project Gotham Racing 2 pushed the original Xbox to such a degree that their emulator just can't handle the game even on the Series X.

Rather it's all those long expired automobile licenses, expired music licenses and so on that make this example that I'm using to illustrate my point sadly an impractical addition. And you don't need to be a lawyer to realize that those constraints don't just magically disappear if the game is streamed.

The only possibility that I see is a new legal team at Microsoft that reexamines the situation and decides that they're legally in the right to allow all original Xbox and Xbox 360 discs to be played on a Series X (after all, games never had to be cleared in the past on a case by case basis when a console was backwards compatible).

But with disc drive equipped consoles looking to be on the endangered species list, I wouldn't hold my breath. The ship has sailed for their legal team getting gutsy enough to clear this step to enable it to be fully opened.

With a large selection of BC 360 games, I don't understand why the same small group continues to be pushed. For just one instance, Space Invaders IG regularly pops up. Yet when was the last time that Arkanoid Live and Qix++ were on sale?

There's a fair bit of XBLA content that I'm mildly interested in now that I own most all of what I really wanted, but not interested enough to pay full price. Sonic the Hedgehog 4 for instance. I recall the demo turning me off with the physics, but if it went on discount at this point, I think I'd buy and see what my opinion would be today.

Of course most all of it has been on sale before, often many times through the years. But over the past couple of years or so it feels like it's the same 24 games or so being rotated in and out of sale. Midway Arcade Origins for instance feels like it's on sale more often than it's not.

@abe_hikura DS and DS Lite only were backwards compatible with the GBA (which was eliminated entirely with the launch of the DSi). No Game Boy or Game Boy Color backwards compatibility on the DS.