RadioHedgeFund

It’s not like there has been a popular game out for the last 3 years with a Battle Pass mechanic they could have just copied wholesale from.

Counterpoint: Microsoft's acquisition of Activision was a protectionist move.

In recent interviews Phil Spencer has become wary of outside companies like Amazon, Google and Netflix moving in on the games industry.

Microsoft brought Activision with the goal of continuing to support Nintendo and Sony so it can maintain the current status quo. In effect it sees itself as the keeper of the Games Industry's integrity to outside companies that might see videogames as a 'feature' rather than a whole thing by itself.

Microsoft have been making lateral moves of late, publishing its own games on Nintendo and Sony platforms as well as pushing companies like Epic and Bungie to support cross-play between console platforms.

This may be the larger play to make sure nobody outside Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo tries to upend things or devalue gaming.

@ralphdibny MECHWARRIOR!

Why continue to pump resources into MCC when they could just port all the old maps to Infinite and call it a day?

@Banjo- Were there no chip shortage and they found a way around scalpers it is likely shops would still be struggling to keep the PS5 in stock alongside the Xbox consoles.

And make no mistake Sony will have their engineers working around the clock looking at how to slim down the PS5 or maybe offer a 1080p version but the chip shortage will be putting them from putting it to market.

Gamepass is great value of you play a lot of games but for people like me who only play 2-3 games a year due to time commitments it is a liability to perpetually rent a title for £11 a month when it is likely I can get it in a sale for £30 (and if it's a title you really like you end up buying it anyway when it's gamepass time ends)

I do wonder with FH5. Is it popular because it is really good or because the Xbox is so starved of exclusives?

FH5 is better than 4 but not a patch on the first 3. At 8/10 game at best which is certainly fun but does lack a certain something.

It was only over when Microsoft backtracked. I wanted theat all-singing, all-dancing media centre Xbox One together with a raft of 1st party exclusives.

What I eventually got was a VCR that played 360 games supported by a company that had shut down all its good studios.

@Kienda I appreciate it when Ubisoft put in the ability to turn off the blood in Assassin's Creed!

Family games have long been neglected by the industry at large and it is telling that most of the games on this list are oooold.

Family titles have always been a weak point for Microsoft, particularly when Sony gets it so right. They launched the PS5 with Sackboy and Astrobot and followed it up with titles like Bugsnax. The Series X? Not so many.

The PS4 has a great selection of family titles too as well as the forgotten genre of party games. Playlink (using phones as controllers) was a genius idea for solving the issue of never having enough joypads knocking around.

If you don't have Hexic downloaded them what are you doing?

After many years as an Xbox gamer I got a PS4 😅

1. It's a bit of a laugh. Some people need to lighten their mood.

2. It's difficult for a lot of gamers to hear but most people play Fortnite because it's a really a fun game with a nice adventuring aspect and an utterly chaotic gameplay loop.

3. Seriously, it's a laugh.

Deserved. It is more of the same but its still a bloody good same! The return of more of a story over the 'videogame map' of FH4 was most refreshing. My only real concern is the seasons don't really add anything to the game compared to 4.

However FH5 does ultimately feel tiresome by the end and it is probably the 4th best in the series. Whatever form 6 takes needs a rebuild from the ground up.

I do wonder if this is another classic example of a minority of fans thinking they speak for everyone. Microsoft will have done their market research to see what people actually used the Xbox 360 for and it may have been that 50% of that was watching video content.

By 2012 I was watching ALL my TV in the UK via the Xbox 360 Sky TV app supported by DVD, Netflix and Amazon. I used the Kinect voice commands all the time: "Xbox, Pause" was a lot faster than fishing the remote out when I needed to make a cup of tea.

I was sold on the Xbox One was soon as I watched the original presentation but it took a few years until I could afford it. By then Microsoft had torn out all the cool features like Skype and Snap, killed Kinect with slooooow server-side Cortana interactions and burned their 1st party studios to the ground.

It was actually backwards compatibility that sold me as I looked at losing all my PS3 games or keeping my 360 ones.

I think a lot of it reeks of entitlement.

Is it fun to play? Yes, yes it is.
Is it the best Halo multiplayer since H3? Yes, yes it is.
Does the fast pace and sheer sense of fun make a refreshing change to po-faced shooters like CoD? Yes, yes it does.

What more do you want? Who cares about Battlepasses and progression? If I wanted that I'd play Destiny. How is it not enough for a game just to be fun to play just for the heck of playing it?

The cover to Generation Zero always makes me laugh. I always imagine the 2 rednecks talking to each other like Cleetus from The Simpsons.

"Hey Brandine, looky here at this funny walkin' tin can thing."

"I've sat down and played the game constantly for the last 2 weeks and now I'm bored." - Some gamers (probably streamers)

"Did you think about playing it for only a few hours a week in between other titles like most gamers do with racing games?" - Commentary

"Er...... No."

I've spent the last 2 weeks driving on every road to unlock that achievement. I've still got every event to do!

I think a lot of this comes from the fact that actually playing multiplayer Halo for 2-3 hours at a time just isn't that much fun compared to the random chaos that you might get in Fortnite.

That's not to say that the gameplay is rubbish because it's bloody good; it's just better in small hour-long bursts than a constant stream.

In Destiny if I get bored of PVP I can at least go do some quests or join a raid or something. In Halo, once you have finished the campaign your options once you are bored of multiplayer is to play another game.

They are aware that purchases are optional and 343 aren't holding a gun to their heads?

@F1at8mot0 Its definitely the law of diminishing returns but I still think FH5 is an amazing game, its just they knocked it out of the park with the original.

FH2 made obvious improvements to the open world like weather, better graphics and the awsome bucket list challenges but 3-5 haven't really added anything to the series.

The first game is still the best. Going off road is overrated, the soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal (and reduces in quality with each release) and the fiction festival schtick right on the nose. Opponents had proper names instead of 4th wall breaking random gamertags. You felt like a competitor in a real life event rather than a player on a videogame map.

But for me the absolute star of FH is Colorado in the fall. The map is massive by Xbox 360 standards and yet I could draw the whole thing out for you, such is my knowledge of it. The environment and foliage is stunning to look at but it really comes alive in golden hour when the sun sets over the mountains and you get all sorts of bloom effects in the camera. Compare this to the barely noticeable sunset in FH5 and pardon the pun but they are night and day.

The online was better in FH. You just picked a track and raced opponents. The festival was yours and yours alone. No convoys or eliminator gimmicks; just the track and opponents.

I enjoy the whole series and 5 is still a great game, and if nothing else a return to the quality of the 2nd game (which had that beautiful rain effects with the storm coming in and then going leaving reflections over the track).

It's a FPS and therefore all cosmetics are largely for the benefit of your opponents. I. Reality you quickly forget what your character looks like during gameplay so it really doesn't matter.

The banter, the radio station DJ's and all the other cheery nonsense is BLOODY BRILLIANT. They not only finally decided to bring back the festival schtick from FH1 but they improved it as well. I for one love it.

@Artois What hype? They announced ahead of time that there wouldn't be anything new. I'd call added value to games you already own, the ability to play more classics from the Xbox/PS2/GameCube generation and the shadow launch of the Halo Multiplayer pretty exciting stuff.

For OG Xbox games this is a shame but not unexpected. The only real game left to release is JSRF and that's stuck in so much licencing hell I'd be amazed if Sega don't just make a 3rd game first. SSX3 is a much better game than Tricky so that's not a big loss.

There isn't much left from the 360 that isn't out. It would have been nice to see Transformers on the lost but the disks still work. Rez still isn't BC and there is no sign of a non VR port of Rez Infinite on Xbox.

@Damjam Yeah, Nintendo lol!

@Magabro I remember. But I am first and foremost a blue-blooded Sega kid from that era. It will be a cold day in hell before I admit Nintendo made a better 16 bit console than Sega did!

Wait until you try the one on the roof of the hotel!

I would happily put the OG Xbox up there with the PSP, Dreamcast and Wii as one of the most (if not THE most) successful console launch lineup of all time. Within a few weeks we got Panzer Dragoon Orta and JSRF too.

The Xbox 360 would have come close if it wasn't for the fact that the campaign in Perfect Dark Zero was terrible and Microsoft split their launch market into happy customers who brought the Pro console and unhappy ones who ended up with the terrible Core unit. Also you forgot Hexic.

The Xbox One launch was actually better than I remember and the console launched with so much promise. Then Microsoft chopped off lots of cool features like Snap, cancelled all their 1st party games and, well it took them 3 years to bring it back.

The Series X had an embarrassing launch IMO. No great console exclusives and nothing you could let buy elsewhere compared to the new titles and clever hardware tricks of the PS5. A year later however and this is Microsoft's best Christmas since 2002 in terms of software.

Whilst I would happily argue that the Xbox 360 is probably the greatest console ever made, I reckon the Series X will be the best simply because it also works with all the previous ones.

I'll grab Red Dead Revolver in a heartbeat.

Here's hoping SSX Tricky gets a release too.

Bloody brilliant bar the inability to preview car decals before applying them.....

What if they offered the emulator they use for BC as a beta download so you can play all your old disks without any bother?

For the record BST ended a week ago and now we are back to GMT

"Even amidst a competitive racing field, Forza Horizon 5 is a finely tuned supercar." - GameInformer

What competition? This isn't the Xbox 360 days when we were drowning in racing titles. There are some good quality indie racing titles like Horizon Chase but apart from sub-par efforts like The Crew 2, can anyone name a big racing franchise that isn't Forza, Gran Turismo or Mario Kart?

@Alduin I give it a few months before the sale is finalised. With any luck Microsoft will demand a few franchises as well like Legacy of Kain which SE will never do anything with. Its doubtful they will let Tomb Raider go though.

More of the same sounds good to me. There isn't much more that could be done with the open-world racing genre anyway. The Crew 2 succeeded at using alternate modes of transport but the map was too big and featureless.

Maybe one day Sony might make some sort of Blade Runner-esque open world WipEout (which would probably be terrible) and surely Nintendo are building a Mario Kart World open kart racer but until then, we haver Forza.

I remember babysitting my neighbours kid one night. I was playing their import copy of Silent Hill at 1am in the dark and all I can hear is the footsteps of their doberman plodding around the garden outside. Scary as.

@Bobobiwan Its not just that. How hard would it really be to put Rez on the B/C list?

I imagine the game will still look good on the X1. Forza Horizon 1 still look great in my eyes and the weather in number 2 is gorgeous. Playground wouldn't make a duff game.

Rockstar isn't stupid. They know that everyone's favourite GTA is Vice City. Why do you think this isn't on Game Pass or PSNow?

The original hasn't aged well and San Andreas is both too big and too of its time to be considered a classic. Yeah you can highjack a jumbo jet but the story hasn't aged well.

The 1980's satire of Vice City will never get old and Tommy Vercetti is one of gaming's greatest leading men.

@mousieone They could just read out 4 letters and close the stream:

J

S

R

F

They only need to add one game. Just one.

Jet. Set. Radio. Future.

Charge $50 if it's going to cost this much to relicence all the music but make it happen!

I don't see where this fits in. If you want a more serious BR game you play Warzone. If you want a more anarchic almost cartoon-like experience you play Fortnite. If you want to BR on your phone PUBG is a solid bet and if you want quick play games Butter Royale is a hoot.

Its like they just copied Warzone.

I can understand why you missed off GoldenEye. It’s a much better Bond game than anything since but it was massively surpassed by Perfect Dark which is still the greatest FPS ever made (I’ll hear arguments against though)

So I voted for Everything or Nothing. It was a pretty decent game elevated by EA’s Hollywood production values. They even had a Bond Theme composed!

So that’s a purchase of Crystal Dynamics on the cards for Microsoft then.

I wonder who holds the Legacy of Kain licence these days….🤔

Cheat codes in a modern video game? You mean I don’t have to buy them as DLC?! Madness!

This is the year Halo finally gives them both a kicking.

Let’s be honest: every game is in some way a superhero game. As the protagonist of the story you likely have something special that sets you apart from the common enemies and NPC’s. In many cases it is your human reactions that set you apart from the AI making you super heroic in that world (like Captain N!)

How for example is Wolverine any more ‘super’ than Sparrow from Fable 2 or Sonic the Hedgehog?

All I really want is a small dongle that will let me use my old 360 controllers on the Series X.