Double plus ungood, as they say….
First, some history. Microsoft’s first game console was named the ‘XBox’. The second, the ‘XBox 360′. creative.
Internally, they are both just PC’s that run a special version of Unix. really. Between the two, they have a lot of similar hardware and the games written for the older one will *usually* run on the newer one. Unless the developer did something really crazy, it should work. For a long time, Microsoft was providing updates to the XBox 360 in order to patch things for XBox games that did not work on the newer console. Good support. But, then again, that was one of the marketing angles – “It will play many of the original XBox games!” No shit. It damned well better.
Well, here we are, years later and I learned something. In my library of 100+ XBox games, the ones that don’t play on the XBox 360 are the games where there is an XBox 360 version available – to purchase for $60. Hmmm, that’s “odd”. I did a little checking – not much – and it appears to true for others too.
That’s a pretty fucked up marketing strategy. They’ve made a product that doesn’t work with the older versions of the software if they have a newer version they want to sell. I’ve never been a big fan of Microsoft’s business methodologies. Now, even less so.
That sucks! We can play all of our Gamecube games on Wii (I think — we’ve only tried a few, but we haven’t heard any complaints). Hopefully, when there’s a new Wii version, they won’t do the same thing MS did.