@Dezzy I know, right? i swear half my X1 collection consists of newly bought 360/XBOX games. I just love building up my digital library with the games I liked or wanted for the past 18 years.
It's actually tempting me to buy the FF games on X1 instead of Switch just so I can have them long term in my library rather than buying them every generation (but they'd be sooo great on Switch...)
I just get worried that that goodness won't last forever because it will be too problematic to keep backward compatibility going long term, and/or publishers will realize they make a lot more money selling the same game every 7 years at full price than selling it at reduced price digitally, endlessly, once to each player.
Just in the last 6 months months, I added FFXIII trilogy, Brutal Legend, the older Mass Effects, Dragon Ages, Castlevania LoS games (except Los1, not digital), BG&E, the Rare games, the Fable games, lots of Sonic games, Jet Set radio, Overlord, Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey (thanks, Thanos! ) I might even be missing some. There was a huge BC digital sale in August or September with lots of goodness on it.
I really hope perpetual BC remains a thing. Sony will probably copy it, (and oh boy the backlash if they don't....), but it's really a great, if not the greatest, feature. One giant library of 2 decades of games on one box is just amazing.
@Delibheel No, Skyrim is incompatible. Bethesda never bothered since they were making the enhanced version for the X1. Morrowind and Oblivion are ok though, so you can get the whole post-Daggerfall TES collection on one machine at least. Morrowind has aged very badly though.
@Dezzy What's wrong with Xbox 360 graphics? Nothing, if you ask me. A lot of games can still look and play pretty damn good, and playing them on the Xbox One/One X makes the experience even better, as you've now found out.
But don't stop there: you should buy OG Xbox game Black as well. No, seriously, ask @NEStalgia...
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
@ThanosReXXX@Dezzy Just nod and walk back slowly without any sudden movements...just say you bought Black....it's better that way.... he'll leave you alone. Seriously though, it's a neat kid of retro shooter if you like the Golden Eye type experience. Thanos is pretty big into it. For me, it's not a must have, but it's a fun, well put together trip to what seems like a dead subgenre of shooters.
360 graphics....honestly they're kind of hit or miss depending on the game. That era had a lot of volatility. Fable 1 is remastered and looks great, Fable 2 looks really blurry, they were into those bloom shaders at the time....they looked bad at the time, and they look really obsolete now. Fable 3 looks excellent. Brutal Legend looks rough.... Dragon Age 1 & 2....ok, lets face it they looked bad even on PC at launch.... BG&E looks great. It really depends on the game and how abusive they were with bloom.
@NEStalgia Sorry, couldn't help myself. Glad you're enjoying Blue Dragon, though. Or, if you haven't played it yet, glad you bought it. If you're an RPG fan, then this game borders pretty close on being a must-have, if it isn't already...
And true, Xbox 360 graphics can vary, but on average, most of the games still hold up good enough, in my opinion. And there's even some that still look pretty good, and on which they did a pretty good job with the emulation and graphics on the Xbox One.
@dezzy Was only half serious, although all joking aside, I'm kinda sensitive to the whole "last gen games look like crap" ideology. Not saying that you're one of these whiners, but I hope you get what I'm trying to say. Sometimes, it feels like I'm just about the only person that is able to see these games in the right frame of reference, and has no desire to diminish their worth or entertainment value by comparing them to shiny, new 4K games, because that battle is already lost even before it has begun...
@ReaderRagfish Yup, it was, @DarthNocturnal beat me to it...
The Xbox version looked better, though, and the current version available for Xbox One is based upon the already slightly improved Xbox 360 conversion, a console for which it was also made available through backwards compatibility, and it is now 4x upscaled on Xbox One S and 8x on Xbox One X, and it still looks pretty damn good, and is a really entertaining game, in my opinion, although I do have to agree with @NEStalgia, that some of the gameplay, and perhaps even the controls, feel a bit old-fashioned.
But then again: it's an original Xbox game, so that isn't really all that strange. I just see it as a more arcade-like fps, if you compare it to the COD's and Battlefields of this world.
@ThanosReXXX I haven't tried it out yet, though I do intend to take a look at the intro. I try to limit myself to 2 RPGs going at a time, so, naturally I currently have Nier: Automata, FFXIII, World of FF, and Elder Scrolls: Online simultaneously running, with Let's Go Pikachu soon Poor Octopath got pushed aside. And what am I playing? Smash. (Seriously, I'm not really a Smash fan, but Ultimate is so darned fun! I did not expect this addiction from it. )
Regarding last gen games, some of it comes from where you come from in games, too. For me, personally, I was PC-only at the start of 7th gen, so when I decided to step away from that and move to console, I was, even during the gen, knowing I was accepting a huge step down in graphics from what I was already used to. 8th gen finally brought me back to where I already had been at the start of 7th gen, graphically, and 8.5 gen finally pulled ahead of where my PC had been back then...so revisiting sketchy 7th gen graphics when both prior and after I had better is often jarring. Imagine if you already had an X1S 10 years ago, got an X1X now, and then looked at Fable 2 in between..... But it does depend on the game. Some look great with some 1X up-scaling. Some still look like early '00's PC games.
I'm just grateful for the full X1X remasters of Jade Empire and SW:KotR that look way better than the PC editions <3
@NEStalgia Yeah, I hear you. I fully agree with limiting the number of RPG's at any one time, seeing as it could potentially make an incomprehensible mess of the various story lines, or it simply takes away from the immersion of the titles you're already fully engrossed in.
As for "it coming from where you come from", I can never completely get on board with that, so I'll only ever partially agree. In a very black and white setting, that would theoretically mean that someone could never play and/or enjoy ANY old games, from before whatever platform/generation he or she first got acquainted with games.
That is also exactly what I meant with seeing things in the right frame of reference. You can't compare a NES game with a GameCube or Dreamcast game, and you can't compare an Xbox 360 game with an Xbox One or PS4 game. That's not fair to the game, and it obstructs the person playing it from appreciating the game for what it is, and that is not, nor will it ever be, a brand new (semi-)4K experience.
But that isn't necessarily a bad thing, nor is it a must in order to be able to enjoy any one of those games.
And sure, there's a considerable amount of games on any one platform, that hasn't really aged all that well, or at all, but for their time these games looked more than fine, and some still do, especially considering the platforms they originally ran on.
As a gamer and a factual person, I can always appreciate and enjoy that, simply by not blocking my own view of reality by putting on or watching things exclusively through present day goggles...
I know that this is either hard or impossible to do for some (or probably most), but for me it's only logical to do so, for the aforementioned reasons. And that is also the only thing that makes sense to me. I first stepped into console land with the purchase of an N64, and I can still to this day enjoy these games, albeit now in 480p on my Wii's USB Loader...
I recognize that the graphics have massively aged, but the games are still fun to play, so I don't really mind the crude 3D graphics. Punch through that (and the sometimes clunky camera), and there's still plenty of enjoyable gameplay moments to be found...
As for PC being better than consoles: well, not always. I still vividly remember the first batch of Xbox 360 to PC games, and although a lot of PC Master race people were claiming that the games were downgraded on purpose, they simply looked better on the original platform. Could of course also have had something to do with going from PPC to normal PC architecture, but still...
And I don't know what they're doing exactly, with the Xbox One X, but some of these old games go through some kind of magical rainbow tunnel, and come out looking almost better than should have even been possible, and on hardware that is only marginally better than a mid-range gaming PC.
@ThanosReXXX It's different from not being able to enjoy older games. Enjoying games that were the state of their art at the time, after the fact is one thing. But the thing with 7th gen games is the same games, mostly were just reduction ports of PC games, and the console version was very stripped down from the actual way the game was meant to be played. Take Oblivion for example. I played on PC. Upgraded my rig just for that game. The foliage needed to be maxed (I have a thing for foliage ) Then take a look at the same game on PS3 and X360..... it's hardly the same game, visually. It's tremendously cut down. Meanwhile the visual and immersive landscapes were becoming the center focus of the reason to experience a particular gameworld. It has more to do with that specific period of time, where consoles didn't have the quantity of unique console games they did in prior gens and instead were becoming machines to play PC games in a vastly inferior way. You can go back and play Luigi's Mansion and enjoy how good it was. But it's harder to go back and play the 360 version of Oblivion knowing that wasn't the best the release had to offer, it was the stripped down version. Like playing Splinter Cell on a 3DS. Flash forward to the X1 and especially X1X and Oblivion looks as good as, or better than the PC version did back in the day. It's enjoyable to play again in a way that on the PS3 and 360 it wasn't. Not because it needs great graphics to be fun but because that's the graphics it was actually meant to have and designed to be played with at the start, but on the console platforms had to be stripped down to minimum. It's mostly a 7th gen problem. 6th gen had a lot more unique games (though XBox itself was intended to be a PC crossover at the start so it suffers from that more than GCN/PS2.) Where prior gens the "old" graphics represented a game designed to be played with that particular aesthetic, 7th gen games by and larger were designed to be played with PC aesthetics, and delivered a cut down version for console gamers. Only with 8th gen did consoles catch up to not need that level of problematic limitation compared to the enhancements available on PC. MS was too eager to push the vision of PC gaming on a console before the hardware really was ready, and PS was too busy in freefall from their disastrous PS3 launch to amass their traditional catalog, and thus took the quick route of "copy MS!" I like to think of 7th gen as "a collection of games that were waiting for 8th gen to be played"
I don't see that problem existing with 8th gen. Yes most of the games can run prettier/smoother on PC, but especially with Pro/X, it just plays like a PC game with a mid-range card and some graphics settings disabled rather than the 7th gen issue where it often was a very stripped down experience from the original intent. And 7th gen (XBox being kind of an outlier, but it was a short lived console as well) having more "unique console games."
It's not a "present day goggles" thing so much as coming from the same games or types of games on PC, knowing what they were supposed to look like, then experiencing less. Games like FarCry3 were not meant with 360 graphics in mind....but FarCry3 through FarCry 5 feel perfectly "as intended" on X1.
But I do think that anyone who moved up only through consoles without a PC detour will see it as a progression rather than a regression in the 7th gen. Round N64 time, PC and console really diverged in two different paths. 7th gen tried to merge them, and did it prematurely and thus badly. 8th gen finally got it right.
Ahh, yeah I was PC Master Race during that 360 era....and that's part of what killed the PC experience for me for good There was another issue at the time. nVidia wet the bed. They went all in making the OG XBox GPUs and missed a generation in PC. They came back in with those ill fated FX series leaf blower cards for obscene sums of money and it created a mess for a long time. PC gamers learned to curse the name XBox for doing that to us, though it was really nVidia's blunder. Oddly that was mostly 3rd party issues. Jade Empire, Mass Effect 1, Deus Ex Invisible War ported nicely (IW was a problem though because designing for OG XBox killed the level design the PC game should have had....) Of course XBox gets screwed by Deus Ex now......I never win whichever team I'm on
But I do agree with the "magical rainbow tunnel" of the X1X! Not all the games come out looking great, some are just salvageable with low res textures or polys), but yeah, so many of them come out looking amazing. As good or better than a high-end PC from the time they were released (Oblivion is a full 1X enhanced game but it blows me away that my $2k rig had worse AA and half the frame rate of the 1X ) same for Assassin's Creed 1. And Mirrors Edge looks almost identical to Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, the actual X1/PS4 sequel.
@NEStalgia Oh, hell no, not going to step into another foliage discussion with you. I've already made a mental note of that after our Forza Horizon 4 debate...
Coming from PC, especially high-end machines, I can understand the sentiment, but most whiners that
I see online, complain about going from console to console, and the previous generation of them suddenly having become completely useless and/or irrelevant once the shiny new toy has arrived.
Games they loved and played, and considered to be looking just fine or good, are now all of a sudden ugly, non-4K, non-HDR, un-anti-aliased and whatever other flashy catch phrase they can come up with, and personally, I can't even find words nor express myself in ways that make it comprehensible for an outsider how annoyed
I am by this and how sick and tired I am of this kind of behavior.
It's the epitomy of the disposable society we're currently living in, and they let these companies lead them into it like a bunch of mindless sheep, without ever wondering what the actual downsides are. Much like with the whole digital and in the cloud only thing, that is looming in the not too distant future, which might very well mean the end of my gaming hobby, or at least the end of me buying any new consoles, if I can't find a way to once again gain control over what I buy and how I would like to use/store that for future reference.
@DarthNocturnal Um.... because Black is WAY more fun than any of those titles, or even all of them combined?
@Dezzy Hm... generationalism to me would imply that this happens with every generation of consoles.
To an extent, it does, but it has never been worse or more vile than it is now. I never experienced having this much of a feeling of disgust for people like that. Must of course also have to do with the rise of the internet, because back in the day, when all people either had a SNES or a Megadrive/Genesis, there were of course also plenty of fanboy battles in the school yard or elsewhere, but still...
The reason why I call it an ideology, is because it is an ever-growing, zombie-like behavior, that's simply echoed by everyone, regardless of whether or not they've actually taken the effort to form their own opinion on it, because you're supposed to think about older stuff in a certain way, so you can't go and have a different mind set, lest you find yourself stuck in the dark corner with the other non-popular kids...
The current situation is, in my honest opinion, also far more disposable one. A lot of these hive-minded individuals have no idea who they are or what they want to become, other than thinking that all of them can become filthy rich off of YouTube, and can become an influencer, and they have little to no sense or respect towards what has come before.
And that's both in general as well as in matters concerning consoles. Oh, well... guess I'm not going to change the world for the better any time soon, so I'd better just take another sedative, and calm myself the f*** down, before
I veer even more off-topic than usual...
@ThanosReXXX LOL, at least I'm only on about foliage. Back in the PC golden age it was all about the water!
Yeah, my view is looking at it of the huge downgrade from the same games on PC to the same gen consoles in the 7th gen specifically (the same doesn't hold true in 8th gen. It's a visual/performance downgrade, but in line with high end vs. low end PC rather than PC versus well below any PC spec where consoles were back then.
But yeah, I do agree with you about the whiners about not wanting to go back to prior consoles. Though I suspect that thinking comes primarily from the Team Blue camp where the company decided you're not supposed to like prior gen games (because our hardware can't run them....) Team Green has built it's image on the whole idea of playing old games, and Team Red seems intent to refuse to let anyone play old games even while they scream and beg in number to do so.
And, of course, on the 1X, even those old games are anti-aliased with supersampling
And I agree about the disposability. Especially in gaming where the old games go away and are replaced continuously with the new ones in a neverending cycle. It's just weird how that evolved to me. And it's new. Old school gamers are the ones yelling at Reggie to give us SNES and N64 games. And the ones upset that the PS classic is a joke because they wanted those old games again. Back in the day I had my NES and SNES right next to each other and played them interchangeably, though admittedly the SNES games were much more "special" to play at the time. So "early gamers" definitely don't suffer from that....in reality, it's the universal problem that plagues all things on Earth:
@NEStalgia Ah, yes.... the 'realistic water' discussions. Thanks for reminding me of those...
Missed most of those, luckily, but of course, with having an N64, I often found myself in (online) discussions about how all the various PSX Jet Ski games stacked up against the invincible Wave Race 64. Of course, none could compete, and even if some might, in some artistic/aesthetic way, approach a better look for the aquatic environment, none surpassed or even closely matched the feel of the for the time ridiculously accurate water physics of Wave Race 64.
And of course, to me, the physics mattered WAY more. After all: why make it a water based racer if you can't capture the essence of how that's supposed to feel and respond to your steering efforts?
As for team Red: I'd argue that they actually did choose the right path, initially, but then they wrongfully decided that THEY will direct which previous gen games the retro lovers can play, instead of just going the Microsoft way and giving us a variety of 10 titles or more from all previous platforms every other month, to choose from ourselves. Some of us just want to play SNES, N64 and GameCube games. Enough with the NES-only offerings already, Nintendo, for cryin' out loud...
Nice to see we're largely in agreement for once. A rarity, in my opinion, when in online discussions...
Don't know what the deal is with Millenials, but there's always been the older generation calling the younger ones 'good for nothing' whatevers (I mean: there was generation X, generation zero, and neither of these were considered to be any good either), so that hasn't really changed, but this generation truly IS different, and I don't know if it's just because of the faster world and the internet, or if there are other factors in play here.
We should bring @rjejr into this part of the discussion. That is, if he still maintains the whole broody 'now get off my lawn' attitude. He might have something even more acidic to say about it than us...
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