RadioHedgeFund

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.

@IronMan30 then I hope they keep it that way! There is no way Nintendo are sticking with $80 as an RRP going forwards. Or did they not learn anything from the 3DS launch?

@abe_hikura They’re an average of a tenner each on Apple. VUE tickets are £6 a pop.

@Fiendish-Beaver I look forward to the next generation where every game is free to play or perpetually rented by a subscription because nobody can afford them anymore.

It costs more to make movies now but cinema tickets, digital purchases and Blu-ray Discs are still £10 a pop.

Games publishers, and Microsoft are incredibly dumb. If an average customer sees a Nintendo game for $80 or a 3rd party title for $50 which are they going to buy?

Many of these Switch 2 titles will cost a pittance to port and have been on the market for so long they’ve already made back their costs and turned a profit. In other words every dollar made is gravy.

So instead of being greedy, challenge Nintendo in pricing. Customers and gamers vote with their wallets.

Microsoft should list all their ports for $50 at most. More people play their franchises then see on the Xbox they can buy a console for $299 and play all the games they like for a monthly rental fee.

Nintendo clearly don’t want a market where you buy the cart, gain a digital licence and then sell it on for someone else to do the same ad nauseum.

Hands down the greatest home console I’ve ever owned. Such a varied library, great exclusives and I could watch Sky Sports on it over the internet. The final OS was responsive and the Kinect voice commands on-device and almost instant. Being able to just utter ‘Xbox, Pause’ when you leave the room for a beer was so convenient.

How they dropped the ball on the Xbox One I’ll never know.

Only if it can natively play Xbox 360 titles.

Given Apple changed their tune last year why can I still not stream games from the Xbox app on my iPhone?

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times: if platform holders want true accessibility then it needs to be a publishing requirement that every game has to have full rebindable controls. Doing it at a system level isn’t enough; it needs to be an in game option on ALL GAMES.

(The Xbox for example doesn’t let you swap the buttons and triggers around)

I know they won’t do it, but it would be great to see delisted 360 games on the list.

The article doesn’t seem to take into account most of these handheld pcs are being used in the home. They’re far too big to travel with on a train or plane.

@Dalamar73 I attended a lecture by the producer of Fable 3 and The Journey. The Journey was developed using the tech from Mylo as they could never figure out how to build it into a game. In any case it actually bloody worked and wasn’t some smoke and mirrors tech demo!

I see 3 futures for the Xbox:

1. The console reduced to a chipset which can then be integrated into a variety of 3rd party devices. You will see a menagerie of ‘Xbox Powered’ devices from the sorts of manufacturers who make handheld PCs (ASUS etc). Microsoft will of course make their own. It will support PC storefronts magically bringing all Sony’s PC titles to Xbox.

2. A similar series of Xbox handhelds designed to stream new games and play the back catalogue. Despite their best efforts this won’t work out because x86 games are not built for the inevitable ARM architecture (Snapdragon) powered chipset it would require for half-decent battery life. Switch 2 will instead become the de facto handheld Xbox due to 3rd party publishing but will never get the back catalogue that keeps Xbox gamers jumping to PlayStation.

3. They will continue to push streaming as a solution. When xCloud finally comes to the Apple TV (letting us stream our purchases too) many of us will wonder why we even have a games console at all.

Whilst I would had preferred a remake of the first game that ditched Desmond altogether and just told the story of Altair, this has come at the right time. There aren’t as many genres set in Japan as there used to be and even less ninja games. It will be nice to play as the first historically accurate protagonist too.

@anoyonmus Any of these recompiled games are inherently ‘illegal’ abandonware. They were never meant to be played on a PC.

Additional feature: every recompiled game will work on Steam Deck. Portable versions of Fable 2 or Forza Horizon 1? Sign me up.

If he’s talking about the actual story missions then he’s crazy. Starfield has one of the dullest stories I’ve ever played.

If he’s talking about the Freeform role playing aspects then yes, I would agree.

Whilst I have no qualms with a female protagonist, It would be a shame if they’ve taken a more prescribed character route instead of letting you create your own character and narrative.

@cburg Apple previously wanted to vet every game but got rid of this requirement. Services like Antstream now exist without issue.

I imagine it will be Microsoft wanting to sell subs via the app and Apple taking their cut.

Yet Microsoft, with no more roadblocks from Apple still won’t release a native streaming app for iOS.

Whilst I have no problem with Microsoft going third party I do take some pleasure knowing my Xbox 360 will always be so.

I know it’s not financially in their interests but it would be great if you could stream old purchases like Forza Horizon 2.

A friend had the Jolly Green Giant and whilst I did enjoy co-op Halo there wasn’t anything to tempt me to give up my GameCube and the newfound freedom of wireless controllers.

I was late to the party, buying a 360 in 2012. I’d call it my favourite console of all time. The only reason I stuck with the Series was so I could keep playing my old 360 titles.