Source: https://www.ign.com/articles/is-the-console-war-finally-over
With Xbox exclusives making their way over to other consoles and the current line of Series XSLwhatever not quite hitting sales numbers to people’s liking, there’s a question as to whether Xbox should give up on making their own hardware and just go third-party like Sega ended up doing after the Dreamcast failed. Is it time to throw in the towel and declare Playstation the winner of this console war… and then remember that Nintendo still exists, but are perfectly content doing their own thing (as they should.)
And then word broke that Xbox is considering their own handheld Switch-like device… or maybe it’s more like their own Steam Deck-like device… so maybe we’re jumping the gun on Xbox waving the white flag on hardware.
Oh well, since I’ve got your attention, let me tell you about my Xbox adventure.
I got an original Xbox as a Christmas gift back in 2004… and it was my first real foray into what was then the current gaming scene. Coincidentally, this was followed by one of my last Boxing Day endeavors that had me go wait in line at EBGames (now GameStop) for what ended up being a bargain of Xbox titles. Sonic Gems Collection, Knights Of The Old Republic, a couple spare controllers (Mad Catz, because they were everywhere)… oh and I also bought a copy of Brute Force for one dollar… that I eventually gave away.
There was a part of me that couldn’t help but be disappointed because some of the games that I would’ve liked to sample (the Smackdown series, some of the Capcom stuff) wasn’t going to be on Xbox, but eventually, the console grew on me and I ended up getting a whole bunch of games over the course of several years. Granted, a good chunk of those were compilations of vintage games, but it was Xbox that first exposed me to favorites like Star Wars Battlefront, Midnight Club, the 3D era of Mortal Kombat games, and some other fun stuff. Also, the added convenience of a built-in hard drive meant not having to worry about memory cards or things of that nature. I never did dabble in the Xbox Live, however. I never cared for that expect; we still had local multiplayer fun at home.
And… yeah, I’d eventually get a PS2 a couple years later when they were being sold for dirt cheap and was able to play the games that I wanted to play early on, but I considered Xbox to be my jam to the point where if I was looking for a game that graced both platforms, I’d seek out the Xbox version before I’d consider the PS2 version. Some games simply worked better on Xbox than it did on PS2. I remember playing Midnight Club 3 on PS2 – which I had bought as a birthday gift to a family member long ago – and was rather put off by the atrocious loading times and considerable lag in certain non-interactive segments of the game; things that weren’t apparent in the Xbox version. Even today, I’ll find a game on PS2 and be like “Sure, why not?”, but if the Xbox version is available, I’ll go ahead and grab that because I know in some way, that version will play better.
And then the next generation of consoles came along and… Xbox 360 was somewhat enticing, but the red ring of death put me off on making the jump. Playstation 3 was an overpriced piece of business that has less appeal despite its backwards compatibility with PS1 and PS2 games (back when people knew what backwards compatibility actually meant). And so my next console ended up being Nintendo Wii. Not as powerful as the other consoles and I wasn’t entirely sold on the Wii Remote gimmick (it eventually grew on me), but it was cheaper, it took up far less space than the other consoles, and it had the Virtual Console feature that allowed people to purchase vintage games from past Nintendo and other platforms.
Of course, what eventually got me to buy a Wii was Mega Man 9… but that’s another story.
I never dipped into the Xbox hardware scene beyond that original console. Eventually, I had gotten a beefier PC that let me play all the current games just fine, thus negating a need for Xbox One or PS4. Microsoft even sold Xbox controllers with adapters to use with Windows PC, so I didn’t really need a new Xbox console… nor did I need the Kinect spy camera that it initially came with… nor did I need an always online requirement for playing a game of this or that when I had generally spotty internet at the time… plus apparently, there’s no true backwards compatibility with this thing.
So let me clarify things because the term gets tossed around flippantly and without any proper regard for context. Backwards compatibility, or specifically native backwards compatibility, means that if I buy a new generation video game console, I am still able to play all my old shit from the previous generation console. Examples of this include the Atari 7800 (backward compatible with 2600 library) and the Game Boy Advance (backwards compatible with OG Game Boy and Game Boy Color library). There are exceptions – some hardware limits and such, but the point is that if I have an old Game Boy title and I pop it into my Game Boy Advance, I can play it on my GBA just fine.
What Microsoft calls backwards compatibility – and admittedly, I’m not exactly sure on the details – but this entails you popping in your game disc that the system will read and then what happens is that rather than play your original disc version, you’re actually playing an emulated version that’s downloaded from their cloud service thing. I think that’s how it works; other people can clarify how this actually works (and feel free to do so because I’d really like to know), but here’s the key thing. This backwards compatibility feature doesn’t work with every game and if you pop in a disc that isn’t compatible, it won’t work. Microsoft did make a list available of which games are “backwards compatible” with current Xbox hardware – I ended up referencing a Wikipedia list since it loaded faster – but the point to this whole diatribe of padding is that if I want to play my vintage copy of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy or Evil Dead: Regeneration, I have to see if they’re on a list on “backwards compatible” games and if they’re not, I’m boned… or should I say, “Xboned?” And even if they are, am I play the original disc version of the game or am I played whatever version is available on their database and downloaded onto my hard drive? Am I playing the original, unaltered release or are there any chances made that I wouldn’t have gotten had I been playing off my disc version?
It’s worth noting that this backwards compatibility mostly benefits the Xbox 360 crowd, which makes sense because that turned out to be the more popular Xbox console, but out of the two thousand plus games released for the platform, only 632 were made “backwards compatible” with Xbox whatever, which is roughly 29% of the entire Xbox 360 physical library… and some titles have even been delisted, so they’re apparently no longer backwards compatible? Explain THAT to me, folks, because I can’t figure it out. However, when it comes to the OG Xbox – whose library is a nudge under a thousand games – only sixty-three games were made backwards compatible with Xbox whatever. SIXTY-THREE GAMES. That’s 6.3% of the Xbox game library. That is a fucking joke.
And so bringing it back to MY situation, as of current writing, I own seventy-five Xbox games – all physical and… holy fuck, that’s actually a higher number than I thought. If I were to buy an Xbox One or Series whatever today and that backwards compatibility was still a thing, out of the 75 Xbox games that I own, ONLY FOURTEEN OF THOSE GAMES WOULD BE BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE… and apparently, a couple of those were delisted, meaning that they’re no longer backwards compatible? Again, explain this shit to me.
So Xbox One was never on my radar… I had a new PC that filled in the gaming blanks so to speak, and even then, once I stumbled on GOG.com where they sold workable versions of all the classic PC games I used to play back in the day, that’s all I really needed, kids. Steam was there if Sega released a new Sonic game that was worth a damn or whatever the case may be, but… I’m going off on a tangent again, aren’t I?
Anyway, that was my Xbox story. Got an OG for Christmas, enjoyed the heck out of it while I could, eventually got it modded to play other things, and never looked beyond the later consoles for one reason or another. I almost considered picking up a 360 secondhand a couple times, but then I’d be worried about the thing red-ringing on me. I probably would’ve picked up an Xbox One during its later years when they were made available for cheaper, but the fake backwards compatibility turned that option off.
Why make a big stink about backwards compatibility?
Well, one of these days, we’ll do a deeper dive into that piece of business, but yes… I do consider that a pretty significant selling point in any next-gen hardware. And if it isn’t there, why should I bother?
Let’s hope that I get to tell that story.
dtm666 