Sure they do... it follows the "once in a blue moon" and "when pigs fly" schedule.

Yeah, this was made well-known in their "How to Under-promise and Over-deliver" pamphlet of 2006.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=11868

Chris

Thank God... I stopped playing this online because of this. I got screwed two or three games in a row and it destroyed all the fun for me.

Also cool. I hated that "Can I play this one... no. Ooh, can I play... no. Okay, another one... um no."

Well I took a risk and decided to download a movie today in HD from the Market place, so far so good about 20mins gone by and 12% complete.

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-...ath-217686.php


Click on the link to see the video.

Chris

Well, it seems my luck has run out with my 360. It's been freezing occasionally the couple of weeks, but last night it froze and when I restarted it froze again at the load up animation. Tried it several times with two different games, online and off, with and without the hard drive. Freezes all the time, so it's definitely the console. It's a launch system so up until last night I felt very lucky to have a working 360. Sucks though since I was still going through GoW.

Well at least yours is a launch console. The warranty has been extended for 1 year so Call MS asap!

So I my wife started a new profile for Viva Pinata. At work I created a live profile using the same name. Is there a way to have the online profile merge with the existing one?

If not, can I delete the online profile and make the local one a live account?

Yeah, I called already. They should be shipping a box soon. I had purchased the warranty anyway so, whatever.

win the ultimate 360 pack here: www.xbox360winitall.com

Yes I was asking about backward compatibility updates.


Have you guys ever done programming before? I took a basic programming class in college and it was so mind numbingly tedious and time consuming. I would imagine that re-programming advanced programs like Xbox games to get them to work on completely different hardware would be extremely tedious and time consuming. If you have noticed, MS has gotten BC updates out about once every 3 months or so. I would say that getting a handful of BC games out every 3 months is pretty good.

But what do I know. Maybe re-programming games with millions of lines of code to work on hardware it wasn't meant to work on is extremely easy and MS programmers are just lazy mofos.

Oh please, is someone actually doing Microsoft apologetics? I don't doubt it is difficult and a total pain in the ass. Which is exactly why, perhaps, i might not have promised total BC They did however and i have this sneaking suspicion that Microsoft may, just may, have access to a couple programmers and the resources to do a job they promised. The fact that the updates have been so slow highly irritates me and is one of the big black marks imo on the 360. Had they not said a thing about BC i wouldn't have cared at all - but they did. Many of us kept games to finish or even start on the 360 that we bought near the end of the regular xbox life cycle based upon their "promise."

Backwards compatiblity is not an issue with me. I still have my old xbox hooked up to another TV and I can play non-BC games on that system anytime.

Double Dragon announced for XBLA

www.oxm.co.uk

MS is not reprogramming every game. They are certifying titles against their emulator and then updating the emulator to let the title be played.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/back...ibilityfaq.htm

It is for me because my XBOX finally died not long after I bought the 360. I still have 9 or 10 XBOX games left that I didn't trade and only about half are BC.

I held onto quite a few games for the original Xbox figuring that they would be made backwards compatible, but I'm not hopeful any longer. I had held onto games like Blitz: The League and Mercenaries thinking they would be made BC as they sold well when the came out. It does not look like that is going to happen with the new release of Blitz: The League for the 360, which by all accounts is a straight port with upgraded graphics. Almost the same thing is being done with Mercenaries, so I may just get rid of all those games I held onto with the foolish hope that MS might make them backwards compatible.

There are also a couple original Xbox games i never got to play like Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil. Had Phantom Dust been on the original list i might have held onto it as i loved playing that game online. The same with Bard's Tale. I had started it right before i got a 360 because i found it for like 4.99 and the game was a blast. I didn't want to keep the old Xbox just for a couple games because i thought if something wasn't BC originally it would be soon due to the promised 100% BC.

Now i don't really think about this much because i play far more 360 games than i really even have time for... but when the BC issue is brought to my attention is reminds me how much their handling of it irritates me.

I just want to play RalliSport Challenge 2.

Sweet! This was one of my favorite arcade games of all time.

GAH DOUBLE DRAGON!!? I loved that game! one of the few arcade games I actually finished.

(to quote Miguel Ferrer's character, Albert from Twin Peaks)
"Oh look, he's trying to think."

I've been, (and still am) a software developer for over 25 years.... coding in languages that would make the hair on a new developer starting out curl up and fall out. I've done everything from numerical control data for manufacturing robotic testers to cross-platform distributed Eclipse-based desktop applications, and everything in between. I'm all too familiar with what it takes to develop and maintain applications... thank you very much.

I don't usually partake in pissing contests, but something about the whole "I took a basic programming class in college once upon a time so that means I'm an expert" attitude really irked me this morning.

They are not rewriting the code for these games. They are testing the games on their BC emulator code.

If it passes the tests, then they certify it and add it to the official list. If not, they examine the emulator code to see what needs to be tweaked, make the changes, then they have to re-test (regression test) all of the other games that are currently supported to make sure that they still work. THEN they can publish a new list.

Microsoft promised full BC (this was before launch) and then had to back off to say that they would be aggressively working on 100% BC. But as time goes by, more 360 titles are released and interest in the older games wanes. It is my opinion that Microsoft is not working on BC as aggressively as they implied or stated. Microsoft is hoping that by now, or at least 6 months from now BC will be a non-issue and they can stop the work on it.

That doesn't help those of us who never owned an XBox but want to play some of those older titles. (There are about 8 titles that I want to play, none of them are on the BC list)

at some point maybe it'll be cheaper to include an old xbox when you buy a 360 as part of a 'retro gamer' pack

An Xbox Attachment for the 360 maybe? Much like the HD-DVD drive.