Feel My 'Roth

It's been a while since I've posted, and some pretty monumental things happened in the past week. Let's see what happened at this year's Game Awards!

image from Know Your Meme

Whoa, Sephiroth skewered Mario?

image from Know Your Meme, again

...or maybe he didn't. Anyway, he'll be a downloadable character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, so he'll have plenty of chances to improve his aim.

What got me excited is the news that Capcom will release packs of its old arcade games for the Switch. You can see the full list of games at the always trusty Tiny Cartridge web site, but it's probably worth mentioning that many of games in the last two packs will be redundant if you already own the Capcom Beat 'Em Up Bundle and Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection. Also, there's no Darkstalkers or its two sequels, which strikes me as one heck of a missed opportunity. 

Nevertheless, I'm eyeballing the first pack, which contains Forgotten Worlds and Ghouls 'n Ghosts, two favorites on the Sega Genesis that weren't included in the Switch port of Sega Genesis Classics. Plus you get 1943 as a free appetizer, which beats the heck out of the stale pretzels at the local bar.

What else? Apparently the long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 was a phone-in on home consoles... if you want the real experience, you'll have to buy it for a properly specced PC. If you bought it for a home console anyway, you'll have to wait to get updates that bring the port up to speed with its PC cousin, or wait to get your money back... or wait for the inevitable "remastered" version on next generation consoles.

It begins, folks... people with Xbox Ones and PS4s are already being left out in the cold, just one month after their successors were released. Why, I remember back in the days of the NES, when Nintendo was still making quality games for the system years after the Super NES was launched! These days, the current generation of systems become doorstops the moment the next generation is on store shelves.

Oh, you think that makes me sound old? Kids get off my lawn, why are there so many battery sizes, Werther's originals. There, NOW I sound old.

While we're on the subject (of next generation consoles, not me being old), does anyone have the straight scoop on backward compatibility for the Xbox Series X and S? At first, it sounded like every game from the past three generations of systems would work on the new machines, then it sounded like only the games that already work with the Xbox One would work on the Xbox Series, and now, I'm looking through Game Pass and noticing that very few of the Xbox One games listed are stamped with X/S. Is there an official list on what works and what doesn't? Because I'm confused over here, and not just because the names of the last gen and next gen systems are so similar.