Sol76

@Ricky-Spanish

Thanks , and I will let you know if anything shows up here.

No code received … I am getting a little bit afraid there is something wrong on MS end because I also did not receive any code for Horizon 3 and forgive me i forgot the exact game but …. Another game before that.
Is there somewhere I can report this ? I reached out to the customer service but damn , they are not willing or able to say something smart or relevant and just say : you will have to wait …. ( until the promotion is over , then it is not our problem anymore )

I also thought there was nothing wrong with the WRC titles from them. It almost felt like the codemasters game was designed around the existing games but with a little EA sauce. Personally I am not a big fan of that flashy presentation.
Anyway , codemasters have been crap with capital letters lately. They absolutely destroyed the GRID and project cars franchise with their versions. They sold their soul to the devil when they went with EA and until today no good came from that. So I am kind of happy they lost the license.

When I start this retro thing on an Xbox and play ZORK , a text based DOS game for crying out loud , and I get a blurry screen when it loads another line of text , I say NO to cloud based games.

I was never a big fan of the game and thought it was not one of the best to say the least. I moved on way before the season pass characters released and never played it since , so … not much lost.

“But most of the deals aren’t great”
I think we have a nominee for understatement of the year.
It is difficult to justify the tag DEAL because it screams RIP OFF.

Maybe I am missing something.
You need a subscription to play something for free that is included in the subscription anyway?

The first two Project Cars games were ok. The series showed some promise until they pushed out the turd/third one.

Iconic XBOX characters ? I guess an “Xbox exclusive” wallpaper would be a empty background by now.
I see what MS is doing but still ..

Wasn’t it Sony that cried about exclusivity? It feels kind of sad now if you make a game multiplatform except for Xbox when PS players can enjoy a lot of great games that were MS exclusives.
In a couple of years we hear Sony cry again because MS is making so much money with their multiplatform strategy and their own IP’s sell less and console sales do not cover the loss of revenue.

Playing it on a (almost) daily basis but as long as I keep going back to 2020 if I want a smooth , bug, glitch and problem free flight , there is still a lot to be done. It is kind of funny , before 2024 i thought 2020 was still filled with little bugs but now , it feels like smooth sailing compared to 2024.
The last sim update was a major step in the right direction but there are still a lot of little quirks and ( for me ) game breaking bugs. ( like a lot of my planes fail to steer on the ground which makes taxiing nearly impossible. ) Even with my strong internet speeds occasionally I have cybertruck-like vehicles on the airport , planes that look like square tubes or other graphics that pop in.

The career still needs some balancing. They toned down the penalties but flying for a couple of hours without skipping and just get 2500 credits for your efforts seem a bit harsh. Especially in the beginning before you have your own business.

However , IF it works and everything falls into place it is a marvelous game worth putting time into. It is just too bad that there is almost always something that bugs out.
It could be the ATS just stopping completely to (mentioned above) parachutists not jumping after 45 minutes of preparing and flying to flying 2 hours and your landing gear just does not work. That is just frustrating.

Thank you for pointing out the worthy games out there. With all that garbage coming out it is very hard to see the REAL games that are new. 2 versions of exactly the same “game” with 4 title updates to rack up your GS for 5€.
Nothing wrong with boosting your GA from time to time , I’ve had my share of easy GS titles too , but the invasion of those so called games is getting out of hand.
I used to browse the store and buy games that I did not know of but looked Allright , now I browse one small bit , see 20 out of 24 games that are utter crap and shut down the store. I just gave up.
Could Xbox please make another section where they clutter all this gaming diarrhea and keep the new games section a bit cleaner so people looking for actual games can find them ?

It has been said a million times before but getting the games to run is not always the biggest problem. It is getting all the licensed stuff and digital rights sorted out.
They can probably run a lot of those old games but getting a license renewed from company’s / brands / songs from 10+ years ago is very difficult. Even first party games like forza are being delisted because of rights coming to an end. So how amazing it all sounds , bringing those games back is harder than just making them run on new hardware.

This sounds great. But I am afraid there is a bigger hurdle to take with expired licenses. Even in their own games. Ingame music , licensed cars , brands and so on that are expired need to be renewed. Getting them running is one thing , getting everything legal to bring them back could be another problem.

There must be a very complex agreement made behind closed doors if you look at the timetable and release schedule for those old COD titles. It is outright shocking to see that only a few games made it to gamepass up until now.

To quote Marcus Fenix : BRING IT !!!

I have been doing the exact same thing the last couple of weeks.

Just playing through the trilogy , now judgement and I will definitely start with 4 and 5 after this.

Strange no one asked me about an upcoming original trilogy remaster..

@Tasuki
Yeah , that’s something that I would like to know too. Most of the deals are games I already own in some form or upgrades for the games I got the gold of ultimate edition of. I guess it is completely random or they need to recheck the algorithm

@Ricky-Spanish

Some people just call that a Friday night

If there are is one game that I’d love to go to the PS5 it would have to be Flightsim dusting off my psvr2 that would be amazing!

I’ve played it last night. Pretty fun but I have to get back to it. Apparently my ability to notice anomalies is not up to par at 4 a.m. so I have to get back to get the last 2 achievements.
If you know what to look for it is pretty easy but somehow I managed to miss some.

To be fair , this series X is the first Xbox that I didn’t have to replace multiple times because of an RROD , broken discdrive , extreme loudness of the fan or another broken part.

Even with the explanations given , I think it’s pretty weird that 3 out of the best 4 games were not very well received by the reviewer.

So they have not been on pc at all ??
Well MS , time to give us a nice Christmas present by putting them up on gamepass this holiday season.

Well , this is about the safest game to port to the Xbox possible. It is still a typical Lego game only built around a Sony IP. It is not in the same league as porting over an Indiana Jones or a Sea of Thieves. Nice , but not for me.

@gollumb82
Almost the same here , Indiana Jones and on ps5 I try to finish Horizon , but the remastered version of zero dawn.

It happens quite often. Shutting down my Xbox with an X amount of games and the next day starting up with a couple of games more or less in the library. In the end I’ve never missed anything that I wanted to start but there are definitely games dis- and re-appearing from the games list. Maybe just the older ones. Because it is a back and forth thing I’ve never went after it and with a certain amount of games installed it is very difficult to go through that list to find out what is missing.

I have been playing a couple of hours since yesterday and cannot find myself in the critics at all. I thinks it is a great game so far.

@themightyant
You might try the career. There you can learn the ways of the planes. Otherwise , try activities. There you will find the same tutorials that you play in the career.
OR you can put the settings to full assist , and you can switch on on screen guidance with every step.
It is all such a mess in the menu’s. 2020 was clear , easy to use .. I have no idea how to bind buttons without a step by step instruction video on YouTube

If it works it is amazing but there is always something that is not working correctly. Absurd penalties in career , flightsystems not correctly working , a plane that starts smoking from the get go and has weird throttle values , CTD , pop in , objects or complete menu’s fail to load / stream , ATC stuck / does not register commands , flightplans differ with navigation and all the 1000-s of other problems I did not mention.
So yes , you can start a flight and maybe , just maybe you get lucky and have a smooth flight but most of the times there is at least 1 thing that does not work / load properly.
Oh … and did anybody tried to change the controls ? The person that worked on that should be penalized with very short arms and a lot of itches…

I will probably switch between Flight sim 24 and total frustration because of playing flight sim 24 ..

Amazing game , great step up IF ( and that is a HUGE IF ) everything works and in 8 out of 10 times it just does not. Nevertheless , I keep playing it.

@Blue_Rover

Ironically, career was the only mode that was playable for me.

Yeah , partially fixed.
I could login immediately but it still alerts me about low bandwidth and warns me for long loading times , I can not start a proper flight and if I stay too long in the menu’s I have the inevitable ctd.
It works better and it certainly looks much better. Yesterday I got the feeling that they’d downgraded the graphics massively, but that was probably a low bandwidth graphics stream with all the problems.

So far I have tried to fly several planes but so far no luck. Infinite loading… looking top down at some pretty but very boring clouds for the past 15 minutes. After that the game is frozen so needs a new start up.
It all feels very fragile , menu’s don’t load properly , pointers are missing in menu’s , navigation is shaky , the planes in these menu’s look like I’m playing a need for speed version of flightsim. This is all a part of getting used to but the first impression makes me want to start up the old one that at least works and feels more solid because everything loads from the ssd instead of streaming from the internet.
Next week we don’t want anything else but this first hour is a real bummer. Hopefully when I can finally get a flight started it all feels less like an internet game.
In the meantime I tried again but I give up .. I will try again tonight because now it is not even working at all. No possibility to start a flight because of infinite loading and freezing. And yes , I have very fast internet so that is not a problem.

“In the palm of your hand” scares me a little bit. I certainly don’t want it to be something small like a phone type of device but a proper handheld with a fair screensize.

@Nicstockes
It was not the most exciting games for sure but I kinda liked it. Did you manage to finish it in a weekend?

One of the best exclusives ? Nope , not for me. Didn’t like it that much. I really tried to get into it but this one is just not for me.

@nwassassin
As far as I know the free play days games are always full games. No trials or time limited versions.

If you really want you could finish Under the Waves in a weekend. Especially when you don’t wander off like I usually do. Stick to the objectives and missions and you should have no problem finishing this.
I thought it was a well made , pretty easy game and definitely worth playing through.

“They have seen the interest , they have noticed people talking” ….. there really are some Sherlock Holmes types in that department isn’t it??? My god , I really would be ashamed to admit this. It just perfectly shows how well EA listens to their customers…. People are literally screaming for a new fight night for over a decade but EA didn’t listen to them at all. They put all the money on the UFC and were blind and deaf for all those years. Now they see that someone else is having quite a success, they suddenly wake up and dare to say with a straight face : yeah … maybe it is a good idea to dust of that franchise. You think ???
But yeah … keep pushing out those yearly NHL / NFL / NBA / FC ( fifa ) games that close up their servers after 13 - 15 months .. probably because they are soooooo popular.

@FraserG
Thnx , it is mostly the music in the menu’s.
The game is nice. It could use some TLC to iron out some quirks like weird arm movement when punching up close or Dhalsim arms when you are just a little out of reach but your review nails it completely !

@FraserG

Small question , did you also had to crank up the volume ? I had to double my usual volume and even then it is pretty quiet especially the music in the menu’s.
I put my volume rather low during the day , but for the first couple of minutes I really thought it was a game without any sounds. I checked the settings but they are all standard 100% and restarted the game and console but without any luck.
I was just wondering if it was the same for you.

To be honest , I still start up FN:Champions from time to time. Even though it looks like it lost a little bit of the WOW factor between the work in progress footage and actual game , I am still looking forward to begin a career tomorrow. The focus on a more realistic approach compared to fight night sounds only better to me.
Just about everything you just mentioned in the review appeals to me and when you say there is a huge “one more fight” feeling , I am more than happy. Cannot wait!

It indeed was one of the first stealth sections that was the hardest and the most frustrating one that almost put me off. But … From that one it got only better and learning the way to play through them makes them a breeze further in the game.
I do have some other small things that come to mind. Textures fail to load after a longer play session which make it look like an early 360 game. Exhausts of the trailblazer become square , you could see through parts of the spaceship and the whole world just becomes a bland dull environment. A restart of the game fixes this quick and painless. Another thing is the way the missions are presented in the menu. They go from expert intel to an intel string to another part. It all is very illogical even though at first it looks very structured. Maybe it is just me but more than once I was looking for the follow up ( side , expert , intel )mission that was replaced.
Other than that , very good game , great atmosphere , fun story and more than enough “Star Wars” for the fan.

Is this the game that goes to PlayStation?
Or… Cinco de mayo is very explainable now as a new Xbox game.

Well I probably will but actually I am still waiting for my free voucher as I’ve bought the ultimate expansion , played it through gamepass and downloaded all of the DLC that was available but until this day there is no voucher to be seen.

Oh , I see that I am not the only one still waiting …

I started Shadow Warrior just yesterday to try and finish it before it leaves but …. What is that game ?? LOL complete chaos and craziness crammed in a hack and slash / fps. It is mindless fun and for a gamepass game it is good to play through but it is a kind of weird one.
Nevertheless , it is a pretty short game and easy to complete within the given time before it leaves.

They already took away and deleted my life long gamerpic from …. Chromehounds ?!?!? a couple of years ago. Just woke up , put on the Xbox and all of a sudden my SOL gamerpic was gone. Nowhere to be found. Yes it was old , yes it looked crap but it was unique and I loved it.
Still feel a bit sad about losing that one.

Sorry , what ??? Seasonal content ??
I completed the game a while ago and enjoyed it a lot but … seasonal content ?? I absolutely did not know this game got updates in this form.
This just made this game even better.

@UnusedBabyWipes

I have a sub from day one recurring every month. No pre paid or any loopholes used.