RadioHedgeFund

Forza Horizon 1
Fable 2
Geometry Wars

It took me 2 seconds to answer that

The little time I have to play games makes Game Pass pointless. It’s cheaper to wait until a game is on sale, buy it (to keep) and then play it for the next 3 months.

I wish they’d port the Xbox 360 dash to the Series and bin the current one.

@nomither6 With the rising costs of development it won’t end any time soon

@themightyant Amen. I have one just because the other 2 4K consoles are hideously large and would look ugly under my TV.

I’ve yet to play a Series S game that looked or played terribly and I’ve been through every major 1st party title. Forza 5 and Ghostwire looked lovely.

The Xbox platform has always had a gaping hole in it where family games are concerned. Parents generally buy Nintendo or PlayStation platforms to play games with their kids, although there will be exceptions.

Build it and they will come I suppose but there isn’t really a market there. They’ll sell 10x the copies on Switch they would on Xbox sadly.

Counterpoint: it’s endless grindy campaign, unholy squashed Map and loot box mechanics for every. Damned. unlockable. makes it the worst in the series.

5 writers a lot of the wrongs with an avatar creator, the ability to buy clothes and a really good campaign.

@awp69 It’s not just you! We found it a bit dull as well. The Colorado map was much better.

A great game let down by 4 daft things:

• An actual ending to the festival campaign which was arguably the worst in the series.
• A way to unlock avatar items outside of the bloody wheel spins. It was so frustrating having to grind the game for loot boxes just to try and get the shirt or trousers you wanted. There is a running joke with my kids that everything I ever got in that game was some sort of garish pink sparkly item.
• A character creator. The pre-designed avatars represented a very narrow set of players. There was no ginger/redhead options. No east-Asian male or subcontinent female. No non-blonde white guy or girl options. I’m all for diversity but it’s either all or nothing. Whoever signed off on them all should have been fired. How is Mr. Mosby going to make himself?
• A silly map that attempted to squash everything between Edinburgh and the Cotswolds into 5 square miles. They should have set the whole thing in the Lake District instead, a nice facsimile of everything between Carlisle and Barrow-in-Furnace, the M6 to the Irish Sea. They could then have done a Manx TT DLC with motorbikes!

Oh, and mixing the Lego cars into the regular map was dumb.

Apart from this it was an ok game but I’d say it’s easily the low-point of the entire Horizon series.

Knothole Island was a hoot

Not that I’m bothered because none of those games have any appeal to me personally but I think they’ll be drip feeding them in over several months rather than dropping them all at once.

@Lup ^^This

What’s the point in Fable if you can’t create your own narrative? That was half the fun of the Fable 2 and what still sets it apart from more modern RPGs.

Don’t bother. The driving mechanics are strangely ‘gravelly’ and the festival shtick comes off as a bit try-hard.

At the end of the day don’t modders deserve to get paid?

My only complaint is that I don’t really like Gears of War. I would have loved to see something Forza Horizon related. They did naff all for the 10th anniversary back in 2022 and FH5 is getting a bit long in the tooth. Even a rerelease of 1-3 so that we can actually buy and play them would have been ok.

@LocalPenguin It was a throwback because just like the original title it took Dom 5 minutes to kill one enemy 😉

@NEStalgia If they can make it run a miniaturised version of the Xbox One chipset then it has 100% backwards compatibility with your entire Xbox library without streaming. I’d happily play a portable with Fable 2 and Forza Horizon 1!

I love how some of the tweets think there is an actual first party title called ‘Shadow Drop’ on the way. It’s kind of sweet.

If Witcher 3 can run on the Switch and somebody can program bacteria to display Doom then the barrier isn’t the Series S; it’s the ingenuity of programmers.

The PC market is great but being able to pass the spec ceiling costs onto gamers has made developers lazy. What happened to the stories of devs reusing raw code to create static and save a few Kb of RAM or the Ocarina of Time sky cube illusion?

Given the state of their last few games and patches together with Microsoft’s axe wielding they probably need it.

@CutchuSlow Stereo is fine. Were talking about some light incidental music, the directional voices and speech here not John Williams.

Definitely recommended. I would love to play* it at the cinema with the full Dolby experience.

*I say ‘play’ because of the actually gameplay bits the combat is tense but too frequent and the puzzles a chore. Had they have gone with a Dear Esther/Firewatch/Rapture-style linear storytelling experience interspersed with the odd tense boss battle I think it would have been a much better experience. Putting the combat on auto does help.

As a piece of interactive art it’s unparalleled. The sound design is wonderful and it’s very pretty in a bleak sort of way (but not as nice to look at as Forbidden West) The 1-1 fights are intense.

But the puzzles don’t add anything to the experience and after 7 years of development you’d think they could have added a bit of facial variety to the enemies. Remove the combat (which you can automate) and you have a great short film.

And for some reason they forgot to add in a setting to flip the y-axis which is just dumb.

I think a 7/10 is about right. I think it has more in common with games like Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, two games I really loved which I know are not everyone’s cup of tea.

I fell right for Microsoft’s vision when I got my first Windows Phone 7 device. My little Avatar lived in my phone and my mobile gaming counted towards my profile. I bought a 360 a bit late in the day and never looked back. Games like Fable 2 and Forza Horizon 1 I replay at least once a year.

I stuck with the Xbox One because of backwards compatibility and the promise of new Fable and Forza. Horizon has gone on to become Microsoft’s tentpole franchise and they made a dumb mistake shuttering Lionhead.

I stuck with the Series S out of price, legacy purchase access and its physical dimensions. It’s a lovely little console with some great games.

@rustyduck It’s a human killing other humans.

Maybe they’ll finally get around to releasing Final Fantasy X on the iPhone!

If Xbox became Steam and suddenly every purchase I had made over the years was compatible with the PS5, Steamdeck or perhaps my iPhone, I’d be very happy.

I can see them quitting hardware because it’s a loss leader. Or rather a future Xbox console will just be a small PC made from off the shelf parts rather than some custom silicon.

To play devils advocate it may be that HiFi Rush just didn’t do very well at all from an engagement perspective.

$60bn for a match-3 mobile game and an FPS designed by an intern with a set square.

So… don’t bother? Warzone is F2P and nobody cares about the campaign. The older games are cheap as chips. Nobody is calling for COD on Game Pass and it’s not going to tempt over any PS5 owners.

And yet whoever made Starfield stays open

@Fiendish-Beaver I would happily buy a Switch-sized console that could play all my old Xbox 360 purchases. Fable 2 and Forza Horizon would make wonderful portable titles.

@Fiendish-Beaver Xbox could just become a PC you stick under your TV that happens to play games. Microsoft could then open it up to 3rd party storefronts like Steam, GOG and Epic.

If they did make it like a PC it would then be compatible with all Sony’s PC releases. There’s definitely a market there.

“Dammit, Microsoft: we want more something for nothing!”

Some sort of planetary vehicle and expanded ship combat. The mechanics are really good yet there isn’t enough of it!

A rejuvenated skill tree would be nice. Not having simple stuff like a large ship crew locked behind hundreds of hours of grinding would be better.

At first I was on board but their comments are hypocritical. They claim to want Xbox on every screen and yet won’t release an xcloud app for iOS despite this being unrelated to the EU stuff.

Basically they admitted that they only released xcloud on Android to crush Stadia because otherwise why bother at all?

Dev unlock
Dolphin
PSO

See Metroid Prime?

Do that, but Halo.

I am here for a Series S-powered handheld.

I reckon this will be further reaching than expected. I fully expect every 360-era exclusive to launch on PS and Switch. A portable Fable 2 would be sweeeeet.

1. Do I need Xbox live?

2. Can I use my PlayStation login on the beta?

Whilst as gamers we do week out exclusive titles to give our purchases meaning and let us be ‘one of the tribe’ this hasn’t been true of the Series X since launch. Against Sony’s lineup of exclusives and variety of titles for the PS5 the Series X had….. nothing.

@XboxistheBestBox Microsoft would do well to listen to the complaints about the PS5 from gamers and get more single player adventure titles and weird Japanese curio titles out the door asap.

Sony are spacing out the single player games but the PS4 existed on a diet of PSP ports for its weirdness. Sony have since closed their Japan Studio

Honestly if we end up getting an xcloud app for the Apple TV I don’t think I’ll need a console at all.

I imagine he doesn’t want to be in a Pedro Pascal position where they just use your voice and get stuntmen to do all the acting. Fair play to him I say. It really doesn’t matter if he removes his helmet, boinks or even laughs at a joke because it’s an /adaptation/ of another piece of fiction. If it were the same fans would moan about that!

@BIG3 Don’t get me started on the camera resetting every time I sit down.

@Raw_Dawg Summing you’re a few dozen hours in your ammo stockpile should be massive.

You’re in for a treat, Xbox players. It lacks all the F2P trappings games like PSO2 use. There is an online store so you can level skip to miss the first part of the story or buy some cosmetics but it’s on a web page and not accessible in-game.

The base game includes the Heavensward expansion. The rest are extra and include a few classes.

I really wish Microsoft would use Azure to back it up so you can stream it on any platform.

I wonder if we are due a developer direct soon? We don’t really have much information about what is out and when. Some concrete releases and a few surprises can’t hurt.

Wow, all that money for a few more shooter franchises? Really?!