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[Xbox] 2.75 Gamecubes
Synthesis
Honda Today!Registered User regular
Honda Today!Registered User regular
NO TGS OR E3.
ONLY MAN.
ONLY MAN.
Months weeks before next year's E3 Series X Summer Showcase, it's another Xbox, console hardware and Xbox Live thread! Here we talk about backwards compatibility, play-anywhere support, subscription services, "the cloud", and why internet streaming is better when you're forced to accommodate the schedules of others?
Games with Gold
Since the beginning of time, users with a "Xbox Live Gold" paid membership will have four free titles made available for download for limited timed--two on Xbox One (which require continued membership) and two on Xbox 360 or original Xbox (which are yours in perpetuity). Yes, you do need to actually obtain them within the overlapping four-week opportunity window. Yes, you can get Xbox Live Gold through a normal subscription fee, buying discounted months of membership through vendors, or abusing Xbox's overly-generous reward program. While original Xbox titles are not playable on original hardware (for obvious reasons), all Xbox 360 titles are (more on that below).
Xbox Game Pass for Console, PC, and Game Pass Ultimate
And here's where things get different and complicated! Like EA Access, Xbox Game Pass for Console is Microsoft's own subscription gaming catalog service ("Netflix for video games") with over a hundred periodically rotating titles, making it attractive for digital only libraries and people who want to try first party new exclusives (which will make the rounds on the service at the time of their launch). And now, it's been formally introduced for Windows 10 as Xbox Game Pass for PC, which includes a number of PC-only titles that can be installed through Windows 10's Store App or Xbox App. However, both services come with their own separate fees. If you want them both, you may wish to consider the new hotness that is Xbox Game Pass Ultimate: for less than the cost of the individual services, you can have your Xbox Game Pass on Console and PC and Xbox Live Gold subscriptions in a single plan! Because nothing bad ever came from bundling services! Use the above link to see if you're still eligible for the absurdly cheap one-time charge to upgrade your Xbox Live Gold subscription to Game Pass Ultimate plus the span of your current Xbox Game Pass subscription time. Oh yeah, it's complicated.
In either service, there is no limit on how many games you can download and install from it, and access is for as long as the subscription holds--permanent purchases made from the catalog are discounted 20%, and DLC by 10%. It still does not require Xbox Live Gold (though that is part of Game Pass Ultimate).
Xbox Backwards Compatibility Library
It's not just for the Xbox 360 anymore! In addition to almost six hundred Xbox 360 titles, more than forty 'Original Xbox' titles are now playable on the Xbox One (all models), with some visual upgrades (such as resolution bumps to 1080p and beyond, not possibly on the original console, and improved in-game performance). Pending exact details, Microsoft has promised continuity with the full compatibility program (along with the Xbox One library) going onto Series X (though "perfect" emulation across 100% of the library doesn't exist presently, so be prepared for unexpected bugs). Want a list without the box art? There's one!
Xbox Series X (and probably Series S) arriving in Holiday 2020
After their last two highly successful E3 showings, stay tuned for a summer showcase (and price announcement) sometime in July. Hopefully. Followed by the console launch towards the end of 2020. Probably.
https://youtu.be/XCTPu1aUsTE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ktN4bycj9s
https://youtu.be/0eBaPS3uj-A
https://youtu.be/S82YvCtwfHY
https://youtu.be/qcY4nRHapmE
https://youtu.be/4cmclCjS5jgXbox Game Streaming
Like Google's Stadia that everyone's been talking about and the Playstation Now service that Sony never talks about, Xbox Game Streaming (formerly "Project XCloud") replaces your grandparents' Xbox game from the ancient era of streaming a console over your home network to the sexy future of piping your game in from The Cloud on your mobile devices! Play console-quality games! Take advantage of all the normal Xbox Live services! Drain your phone battery before you know it! Not coming to other consoles (pending some indication otherwise). Still in (free) beta with the following games offered at no cost, full list courtesy of the excellent TrueAchievement website:
- ARK: Survival Evolved
- Absolver
- Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown
- Battle Chasers: Nightwar
- Black Desert Online
- Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
- Borderlands 2
- Borderlands: The Handsome Collection
- Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
- Children of Morta
- Conan Exiles
- Crackdown 3: Campaign
- Darksiders III
- Dead by Daylight
- Dead Island: Definitive Edition
- Devil May Cry 5
- F1 2019
- Fishing Sim World: Pro Tour
- Forza Horizon 4
- Gears 5
- Gears of War: Ultimate Edition
- Halo 5: Guardians
- Halo Wars 2
- Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
- Hello Neighbor
- HITMAN
- Just Cause 4
- Killer Instinct
- Madden NFL 20
- Mark of the Ninja: Remastered
- Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden
- Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition
- Overcooked
- Puyo Puyo Champions
- RAD
- ReCore: Definitive Edition
- SOULCALIBUR VI
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
- Sniper Elite 4
- Sea of Thieves
- State of Decay 2
- Subnautica
- Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition
- Tekken 7
- TERA
- The Bard's Tale IV: Director's Cut
- theHunter: Call of the Wild
- Vampyr
- Warhammer: Vermintide 2
- West of Dead (BETA)
- World of Final Fantasy Maxima
- World of Tanks: Mercenaries
- World of Warships: Legends
- World War Z
- WRC 7 FIA World Rally Championship
- Wreckfest
- WWE 2K20
- Yoku's Island Express
2020 Xbox E3 Games Showcase
https://youtu.be/F7nkg_5ZfrM
https://youtu.be/pTp3W0mlsJA
https://youtu.be/apZ3a4h5C54
https://youtu.be/Ci4n8sE5iZw
https://youtu.be/6bfC-vvlbHc
https://youtu.be/ZkHpw7HArBMPenny Arcade Forums' Game Clubs
Pax Arcadia
Arcade Squad (Gears of War series)
The Bees Knees (Halo series)
Additionally, you can find the forums Xbox Live gamertag list here, and the form to sign up here.
Synthesis on
+6
Posts
Way, way before I started making this threads, considering where I am on the spreadsheet.
Steam | XBL
Probably because I spell it wrong every other time I write it. And Google has ignored my requests to rename the console in singular form, "Stadium."
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
*video is like an hour and five minutes long*
How the hell do you talk about the Xbox One launch for over an HOUR?
Because the Xbox One Launch Event lasted an hour and they're talking over the video.
I'm about 20m in and when they're talking about how baffling the decision was to focus on Movie and TV apps when Smart TVs existed, they're forgetting just how bad Smart TVs were at the time. I got an LG smart TV in 2011 and its UI was dogshit (it used a motion control remote), it was slow as molasses (opening an app took for fucking ever), and its wifi adapter (not built in to the TV) stopped working all the fucking time and you had to remove it and plug it back in to get it to work again. Even with how slow the Xbox One was at loading apps, it still felt faster and more consistent to boot up my Xbox and load an app than to use my TV for it.
Also they don't touch on the HDMI Input that much, but in a similar vein cable boxes were terrible back then. They all had ugly SD resolution UIs that were slow as hell that they'd had for like a decade at that point, so Microsoft thought they could go in and present a modern snappy UI over it to entice you to run it through your Xbox. Unfortunately for Microsoft, literally right after the Xbox One came out, Comcast upgraded all of their cable boxes to their new X1 style that had a modern UI, snapping, and apps, basically making the UI part of their argument as to why you should run your cable box through the Xbox null and void. Basically the Xbox One was 2 years too late for everything it wanted to do.
Yeah, I feel you could wrap that up in a few minutes. Maybe a little more if you tied in some of the PS4 presentation and the bit where they casually slipped in the “oh btw online play isn’t free any more” and nobody paid attention because they were too busy having a laugh at the SPORTS SPORTS TV MORE SPORTS oh and I guess it maybe plays video games?
Load times do suck, I guess. That will be a big difference. But It’s not like 2012-era 360 and PS3 games where you could practically hear the poor things begging for death when you asked them to launch a modern game.
We'll see. I keep insisting that hardware improvements are incremental for a reason. As it stands, Microsoft pretty much won the last two E3 (which is not that much of a feat--Sony skipped the last one, and pretty obviously half-assed the one before that for whatever reason; Nintendo was moving away from the venue as a whole). It doesn't really get much more one-sided from that from a realistic standpoint, and I generally like to manage my expectations anyway. We're looking at features--level asset streaming and ray-tracing in particular that, while obviously substantial feats from a technological standpoint, become very dubious when you try to apply them to any game, compared to "high resolution", "spatial audio", "high framerates" or even HDR. Especially ray-tracing, since there isn't some magic law that says all games need to draw their lighting effects the same way any more than they all need to support HDR10--Control launched without HDR (I have no idea if they added it), how many people playing that game could actually take advantage of its ray-tracing splendor compared to people playing it on HDR-capable displays?
You'll have your Gears of Wars, your Gods of Wars, your Horizons and your Forza Motorsports, sure. But for the other 99% of games--including our existing libraries--everything is going to look the same, and just run faster, run sharper, load faster.
I'm totally okay with that. I can understand anyone for not wanting to drop $500 or more or less for the privilege though. And, provided your game isn't missing entirely, that's an argument for the Switch (especially a cheaper Switch)--"Good enough."
@dporowski (is that Polish? I can't look at that name and not think "Polish") asked me about my Elite Series 2 controller, so I thought I'd share my thoughts a few days later.
All in all, pretty good. No obvious manufacturing defects, etc., though I can't completely exclude that either. It's pretty good, but it could be better. :?
Nuts. Well, either Warframe just made my controller go slightly weird, or I'm insane. And/or Warframe's real bad at vibration usage, which is also entirely possible.
Wish I could easily get it apart to look, but yeah, that's not happening. And I don't think "hey the vibration is kind of weird..." is going to rate an RMA, even with the extended MS protection plan thing.
The thing of it is, not to doubt you, but it's not clear what I'm looking for. The right side does vibrate (that would be pretty obvious)--from either end. But it's not discernably stronger than the left side, it just sounds a little different.
The cable is very long, though I doubt 12 feet.
Yeah, I can't describe it sanely. It's as though a larger mass is vibrating for a given intensity, when compared to the left body motor? Though if you're also noting that left/right body motors sound different, it could totally be me going nuts after that like, 3 hour session of near-nonstop vibration I noted it after, and now I'm just hypersensitive. (Which would not be the first time.)
Well, crap. All this time, I've just been going in and adding them to my account, save for the odd title here or there. I didn't know you had to actually download them, or else it wouldn't count.
Crap.
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
No, you're fine. There's no need to complete a download, the "Get" button is enough. That's what the OP is trying to say, you have to take action enough to add the games to your collection, having Gold during the time period isn't enough.
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
I suspect the idea is that you'd just pop the controller in the charging cradle every night so for most people this isn't really an issue
This is why it's nice to have at least 2 controllers for swapping
Yeah, the correct word should be "purchase" them, you don't need to download them. The distinction came about when some people hoped the service might be automatic (have xbox live gold = accounted is automatically "credited" with the games, not requiring any further action).
I haven't been playing as much as I have of late, but I feel like "every night" is pretty often; this thing has a ridiculous battery so far as I've seen.
To each their own, but I don't want to treat a controller like a phone--I don't even necessarily play my console every day, and if the battery doesn't a few hours (the equivalent of a day's use, at least), it's failed. Which, fortunately, it does. In the meantime, the case gets stuck in the corner cabinet with all my other controllers, and doesn't need to stay plugged in either.
Also they have variants that match most of the Xbone controller color schemes, obviously not Design Labs variants but if you want a matching stand for your Cyberpunk 2077 controller they can fix you up.
Sounds very fashionable.
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
That's the rumor--there's still no indication that either Series X or PS5 will be pushed into 2021, but the "scuttlebutt" further was that Sony was still working on the design more recently. Maybe Microsoft thought they could get the drop on them? I'm doubtful of that ultimately, as interesting an idea as it is, but it doesn't change the fact that they revealed the actual hardware--along with a technical analysis--months earlier, so they seemed to be at least a little bit ahead.
One can also imagine that there was an internal debate within Microsoft--launch the Series X and Series S simultaneously (as Sony will with their PS5 models) or get the Series X on the ground first.
No, I mean as in I charge the thing every few weeks... Little light turns amber, I plug it in for a while.
I meant to quote Hardtarget there, my bad.
I use rechargeable batteries in the controller. They last a surprisingly long time.
They are extremely-locked out. Modding is supported in rare cases like the purpose-designed mod tool for Final Fantasy XV.
There's actually more than one reason for it: namely, unlike most of Steam, a large number of Xbox Games on Windows 10 (a lot of which are on Game Pass) aren't just cross-play on PC (want to play Streets of Rage 4 between console and PC? Xbox is the only way to do so without adventures in tunneling), a lot of them are cross-save compatible, unlike all of Steam. If Microsoft didn't want to already lock the games down, the nature of cross-platform saves pretty much gave them full reason to do so. Otherwise, it basically exposes the ecosystem to the same unreliable, half-assed arrangement with have on Steam, where achievements pop whenever they want to, are simultaneously easily obtainable via cheating and don't work half the time legitimately.
You can actually see immediate examples of this: games like MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries and Undertale (I believe) have no achievements--coincidentally, they are compatible with saves from other releases (if they're the same version), and the files, while hidden, are modifiable. For Xbox multiplayer and achievement games, this would be unacceptable--it has to be as locked down as the console, or it doesn't work. That leaves modding that basically resembles the console-side modding (a reason why I never purchase Bethesda games on console).
That being said, I'd still like it if INI editing were available (though this could be exploitable in many games, especially multiplayer, for things like FOV).
https://www.pcgamer.com/mod-support-is-coming-to-games-on-the-microsoft-store/ also https://www.thegamer.com/pc-xbox-game-pass-games-finally-getting-mod-support/
Cross Save does not get enough credit, especially with how seamless it is (obvious caveat: when it works).
I used it a lot for Halo Wars 2 and Ori & TWOTW. There were just some missions in Halo Wars 2 where, as good as the controller mapping was, I really wanted a mouse.
I've also been bouncing between our living room Xbone and my gaming nook Xbonks for AC:Odd and it's been great, barring the one case where I had AC:Odd suspended on one of the boxen and it popped up a message saying that it couldn't sync the save while it was in suspend mode and I needed to close the game and relaunch it. Which is like, they anticipated this and put in code to deal with it, awesome.
I'm surprised they're doing this given that game demos tend to decrease sales rather than increase them.
Technically, they already do. They're just bringing it to more.
The only time cross-save hasn't worked is when...save-syncing doesn't work (which used to be a serious threat back when Xbox basically invented cloud-saving for consoles). And it still pops up (though at least now the Xbox interface has copious warnings when it thinks something has gone wrong). There were one or two indie games were cloud-saving was outright disabled, strangely, when it wasn't supposed and I suspect that had less to do with something "being broken" and more to do with the developer actively leaving it disabled at that point in time. I use it whenever I play Vambrace on PC for obvious reasons.
If this is true, and rumours of how powerful it is are true, I might be tempted to get a S instead of the X.
Or at the very least, I can get both and give the S to my nephew as an Xmas present.
3 weeks until we find out, hopefully.
It's probably going to look more like the current Xbox One consoles (small, flat rectangular prisms), rather than some sort of perfect cube (as WindowsCentral speculated). Reduced graphical output comparable to an Xbox One X (less, even) translating to less heat management on top of missing the UHD drive could mean a console smaller than that even (though it would still have a bigger footprint than the "tall" Series X).
That being said, even the PSAD-model of the PS5 is still a big, tall console (those curved panels take up space), on top of being more powerful (and generating more heat, even if none of the rumors about Sony's cooling concerns were actually accurate) so it'd look tiny next to that.