One Last Trip Back

It's Microsoft's twentieth year as a console manufacturer, and they've celebrated the occasion with a backward compatibility update, the first they've done in years. Regrettably, it will also be the last... Matt Kim reports that the Xbox manufacturer has reached the limits of what it can do with the service, thanks to legal constraints and also the vast architectural chasm between the Xbox One and Series, which use x86 hardware, and the Xbox 360, which chugged along on the dated PowerPC standard. (The original Xbox also runs on x86 hardware, but it's really old hardware, and challenging enough that Xbox emulators have only recently started to surface on home computers.)

It's a bittersweet farewell to backward compatibility, but at least the games in this final update were well chosen. Verge has the entire list, and I'm both surprised and delighted by the selection, which finds a balance between the fondly remembered and the unjustly forgotten. Case in point: the two Otogi games. These lushly illustrated, bitterly difficult action titles were released in the lull between From Software's more successful Armored Core and Dark Souls series, but they're also worth your time. You can fling exploding spiders into each other and tear down two story pagodas with your bare hands... what's not to like?

Nothing to lose, especially for that price.

More predictable but nevertheless welcome are the additions of the Max Payne trilogy and the Dead or Alive, uh, sextology to Xbox backward compatibility. I bought games in both series for a pittance at thrift stores and pawn shops earlier in the year, and I'm itching to give them a spin on more modern hardware (read: I'm too lazy to blow the dust off my last two Xboxes and play them there). Dead or Alive 3 was a stone cold stunner on the original Xbox, far superior to its Xbox 360 sequel, and it should have come to later systems in the lineage a lot sooner. Max Payne I'm somewhat less excited about, but I logged some quality time into this gritty, time-bending third person action game on a PC years ago, and for the sack of pennies it cost me, I'm happy to get re-acquainted with it.

It's been ten years and Mortal Kombat 9 still
looks great. It's less realistic, but more stylized
than later entries in the series.

Some other highlights include Mortal Kombat 9 (finally!), TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, the peculiarly entertaining cover shooter 50 Cent: Blood in the Sand (you'd understand why I said it's peculiar that it's entertaining if you played the previous game, Bulletproof), and shockingly, Mini Ninjas. The game is a frustrating mess to install and run in Steam, and while I never would have guessed it would come to later Xbox consoles, I'm relieved that I can play this lighthearted action adventure without that Herculean struggle. Really. Mini Ninjas. If you had told me it would be in a backward compatibility update two days ago, I never would have believed it.

Games I don't care for but will have to grimly accept include Manhunt, a stealth action title that represents the nadir of Rockstar's poor taste, a handful of titles in the F.E.A.R. series of survival horror games, "Mass Effect if Mass Effect wasn't good" Advent Rising, and Binary Domain, which annoyed me to no end on Xbox 360 and won't be revisited on the Xbox One seven years later.

On the plus side, there are dozens more games
to play! On the down side... we all have to put up
with Aquafresh Kasumi again.

Overall, this is a pretty strong send-off for Microsoft's legacy consoles. Did I get everything I wanted from this update? Of course not. Darkstalkers Resurrection, Capcom vs SNK 2, and Blur are still off the table, and some of the games Microsoft did deem worthy of inclusion seem to have been picked out of a hat. Seriously, Cloning Clyde? Disney Universe? Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad? (Okay, I think we all know why they picked that one.) Still, we're getting Otogi and Timesplitters and Dead or Alive 3 and one of the best Mortal Kombat games in the whole damn series, and I can definitely live with that. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have games to install.