RadioHedgeFund

It makes a lot of business sense for Sony. These titles have achieved saturation on PS4 and are on PC. Why not port them to Xbox?

These all sound like incredibly positive moves!

@CaptainCluck I have always argued that the Series S should be the default. If this happened all your PS5 and X games would actually be resolution and frame rates they claim.

Yeah they should be concentrating on lowering the cost of development (without hurting staff numbers with AI) and thus game prices whilst making the console more accessible. The biggest mistake they made this gen was not making the Series S the benchmark.

My Series S generally serves me well as an Xbox 360 that plays Fortnite and Destiny 2. There are precious few modern titles that I bother with but having access to my older purchases keeps me around. I think the Series S is my favourite dinky console since the GameCube.

But I experimented for a few months just using an Apple TV and Gamepass streaming (using Onecast) and the results were so good that I'll probably just use that going forwards.

But they already released Croc….

I’m going to go with Microsoft announcing the Xbox mobile store launching in the EU before Q1/26 with the next ROG Phone as the launch vehicle.

All those Android gaming phones might finally get some titles to push their power!

Relicence and rerelease Forza Horizon 1-4.

@Valhura Destiny is essentially Halo crossed with Phantasy Star Online already

I want the space travel and exploration of NMS, the combat of Destiny and the freeform RPG elements from Starfield.

Somewhere in the Venn Diagram of Destiny, Starfield and No Man's Sky is the space faring game of my dreams

Perhaps more worrying is that tweet saying it's an 'Xbox coded game' by which he means a grey-looking zombie game.

I wonder if this is the backwards.compatkbility plan going forwards: the next console only plays native PC games from your library and streams everything else?

The final 360 dashboard is still better than anything they've launched since.

The on-device voice commands were incredibly handy.

There are a lot of PS4 titles that would run really well on the Series S that us single-player starved Xbox owners would devour. I'm not expecting Horizon anytime soon (unless....) but Infamous Second Son and Spiderman wouldn't go amiss.

Given the current big tech blunders going around I wonder how long it will take Microsoft to completely bugger up Call of Duty?

In many ways it's the end of an era. There was a time when the Xbox 360 was the centre of my media ecosystem, with streaming and live tv (via Sky) complementing rentals and purchases. I'm actually sad to think my my Xbox as 'just' a games console.

As a storyline it's utterly terrible. Some of the missions take upwards of 2 hours to complete and the lack of a way to teleport to the surface of a planet after a lengthy dungeon baffling.

But if you immediately ignore the storyline and play it as a freeform space RPG it's fantastic. There are so many great questions, loads of factions to work with or just roleplay anything from a space pirate to a greengrocer.

A studio is ultimately only as good as their last game.

This is great news! Finding your old purchases used to mean navigating a rather slow list at the bottom of the settings screen.

I really do miss Metro. I think that looks better than the Series X dash!

@Jenkinss That's because most people bought both!

They'll graduate to a streaming service that publishes individual titles on other platforms. I'd be amazed if they bother with any exclusive hardware going forwards, instead just licencing their brand to other companies like they do with Windows. This allows anyone to build an 'Xbox'.

The days of first party hardware are over.

@Jenkinss There is clearly room for all sorts of devices across the market. It helps to keep things healthy. But as consumers we have a finite amount of time to devote to recreation and everything that might eat into that time, from sports to video games to writing to reading to gardening is all in competition with each other on some level.

Sony and Nintendo are both big fish in the same pond.

Microsoft can polish it all they like but they're now a 3rd party publisher who just happens to have a perpetual rental service on their own agnostic hardware.

Sony and Microsoft are going around in circles trying to chase what is becoming an increasingly niche market (the 'Frames Per Second' gamers) whilst Nintendo continue to eat their lunch.

I'm not saying all consoles need to be the Switch, but what Sony need to concentrate on next gen is bringing the cost of development, software and hardware back down. Hobbyists are going to go to the PC regardless and the majority of their PS5 userbase are your FIFA/COD crowd who play titles than run perfectly well on a phone.

I don't mean to sound derogatory there: there is room for every sort of gamer on platforms! But making another expensive technical marvel to run games that still play perfectly well on a PS4 is rather ludicrous.

Imagine what it’s like being a Space Invaders fan. I’ve been waiting over 45 years for some DLC.

6. It’s size and weight remind me of the old OG Xbox!

No Xbox 360 games, no dice.

Given the muted reaction to Motorsport and the bazillion in sales Horizon gets surely its 6.

There’s still too many FPS and overly violent ARPGs for my personal tastes. Super Meatboy 3D looked ace!

The biggest news was Phil Spencer’s cryptic hint at the end for 2026. Fable and ‘New Forza’ (which I assume is Horizon 6) and ‘classic from the beginning’. Will we see Halo 7 next year as well? Or is it something else?!

Final Fantasy XVI

Game Pass

Today

Blur had the unfortunate timing to come out alongside split/second which was a better game.

The original Perfect Dark is still the greatest FPS ever made. It’s got more ideas in 5 minutes of gameplay than most other shooters have over an entire series.

Why have other games never stolen its customisable multiplayer bot AI? The way the level objectives also scale with difficulty? The way level objectives are not just ‘kill everything’? Campaign co-op where one player is all the enemies? Tight multiplayer levels built for 4 players, not 40? The ability to disarm opponents.

And then there are the guns! Assault rifles that can be paid down as proximity mines or sentry turrets. Tranquilisers designed to blur your opponents vision. Grenades that bounce off walls almost indefinitely until they hit something. Snipers that can see through walls. Robocop’s Pistol.

And you can play the multiplayer as Dave Perry vs Shigeru Miyamoto.

One word: Halo

NO ADVERTS, please

THEN WHERE THE HECK IS FFX ON MOBILE?!?

Modern high end phones can easily run Xbox 360 era titles.

Sell them to us!

Er, Dolphin has been on my Xbox for years!

@dskatter and the Killzone 2 trailer was ‘running on a PS3’. I’ll still wait for gameplay.

Really? Because all I saw was a bunch of albeit impressive cut scenes probably running on an RTX5090 with 128gb of RAM or some such.

I’m not knocking GTA for a decent mess around, but I want to know what Rockstar have done to actually move the template instead of building another ‘GTA3 with better graphics’ which if we’re being honest was all 5 was.

These are fun titles for sure, but if we’re going to beef on Nintendo for reselling the same game with better graphics for umpteen generations I’m sure as hell going to hold R* to the same standards.

Nintendo reinvented Zelda with BOTW. I’d like to see some suspiciously absent gameplay to see if GTA6 does anything different.

@SaltySpitoon957 Makes you wonder if they’ve got a whole list of 360 titles waiting for the port treatment. Fable Trilogy? Forza Horizon 1?

We live an era of fast-paced shooters. Halo, CoD and Fortnite do not lend themselves well to plodding gameplay, bullet sponge bad guys and sitting behind a wall.

If you’ve played Gears of War recently you’ll know this is exactly where it finds itself, a slower-paced game for a bygone age. Whether it has aged well or not depends on your levels of nostalgia.

Now the Switch has parity it makes the argument for the other consoles rather irrelevant. Microsoft’s first party tortures will be coming which leaves maybe 3-4 PS5 exclusives you can’t play anywhere else.

If a game comes along you want to play, a month of game pass will stream to pretty much any device you own with a screen, many of which can be hooked up to a TV.

@VoidPunk It’s certainly inspired by the 19th Century french aesthetic in the same way that Fable is inspired by medieval England, or a parody thereof. But CE:E33 isn’t set directly in France any more than Fable is set in England.

@VoidPunk isn’t saying this is set in France like saying that FFVII is set in Tokyo?

So long as they hold fast on the monthly price they might find thrifty gamers jumping ship.

They should bundle 6 months of ultimate with the Series S

Being able to stream your owned games into a console is a game changer for massive titles like Final Fantasy XIV that require the internet anyway but now save you from installing regular updates.

I’m definitely testing out streaming 360 titles to my iPad later today too. Does remote play require a local WiFi connection or does it work anywhere?

Jet Set Radio Future finally added to the backwards compatibility list!

Remastered versions of Forza Horizon 2, 3 and 4 making them available for purchase again.

Nothing comes close to Balatro, really.

Ultimately nobody asked the industry to go all in on £300m+ development costs. The best game of the last decade is Balatro and I can only imagine how cheap that cost one guy to make.

There is an internal argument that the £85 in total I paid for Perfect Dark (£60 game plus £25 expansion pack) was ultimately worth the money. But I could also use that expansion pack with other titles.

£80 is only worth it if they throw in a year of the online sub with the price.