10/02 Update on Backwards Compatibility Voting

Welcome to the 11th iteration of Backwards Compatibility Voting. This was kinda of a dismal week as far as voting went with record low percentages and even one title that received 0 votes in the span of a week. (Wow, zero really? Why am I doing this again?) But on the upside, I did play something besides Pinball on my new Xbox One this week. Yeahie! And it sucked. Booooo! Anyway, we’ll talk about that inside too along with a few fun comments thrown in there. Also find out what title I purchased this week that was on sale also inside this article (Experts say that if I give teasers in the header, people will actually want to read the article…I’d say I’m halfway convinced nobody reads this thing. The other half is eating a pastrami sammich). You know the drill, more inside.

If you would like a copy of the file that these votes are stored in, please click here: Backwards-votes

Top 15

Bottom 5

Lucha Libre….*hangs head in shame*  That game is never making BC.  Geezus, I would have a better chance of being elected President of the United States than Lucha Libre AAA has of being made backwards compatible.  Of course, the Republicans are currently trying to nominate a man who would probably abolish the idea of watching Mexican Wrestling in the US, but I digress.

Speaking of awful, I did mention in the teaser that I played another game on the Xbox One that wasn’t pinball. It was the Closed Beta test of Fable Legends.  They had a stress test last Saturday for four hours and I was fortunate enough to play for 2 of those hours.  Honestly, I wish I would have had something else to do.  Fable has traditionally meant excellence, I mean the first through third games are on this countdown and are some of my favorite games of all time.  But in recent times we have seen an XBLA cartoony mess, a Kinect Title and now a free to play disaster.  Yes, Kinect also means awful.  I’m pretty sure its in the dictionary as a synonym.

Anyway, to get off the bashing, you start off by picking a hero and then get plopped into a tutorial type scenario as you try to make it to town.  There are two things of note here, 1)the graphics are gorgeous and 2)this scenario is actually the best thing in the game.  Honestly, if there had been more single player, I would have had a better time.  Anyway, they take you through some basic moves (including finishers) and facing off against some enemies who are fairly easy.  Eventually you get to town.  This is where the shit hits the fan.

So…depending on who you were playing, you are automatically told to pick another hero (one that’s free to play because other heroes do cost real money just not in the beta) and then you are given a multiplayer menu to join a game (or quest if you prefer the term).  You can also elect to play the villain but more on that later.  Once you chose say a quick match, it then spends up to the next two minutes to outfit you with a team depending on who you pick, who has a good ping, etc.

Once it goes through that, it teleports you away from the town into the quest section.  By the way, if you elect to stay in town, there is absolutely nothing to do.  No shops to enter, no people to talk too, not even other players.  You are 100% in your own existence.  Just NPCs walking around in silence and you are left to your own devices in a bunch of menus.  This is a beta test, not an alpha right?

So, the quest opens up, mine was in front of a demon door.  Ooooo, I thought…maybe we’ll get it to open and then there will be a bunch of cool loot.  There should have been a NPC to point and laugh at me.  Yeah, talk to the NPC who was there and then the Demon Door.  After some ridiculous blah dialogue, we walk and then teleport (again) into the next section.  What follows is some of the most mindless and frustrating bullshit one could imagine.

Basically for each part of the quest, you are dropped into an area where you beat a certain # of enemies, maybe eight to ten of them.  Once you beat those enemies with your team, rather than something cool happen, you move on to the next area to beat more enemies with your team, roughly the same number.  Sometimes less, sometimes more.  After you do about three of these scenarios, you are dropped right in front of the demon door again who talks more crap before you go to do it all over again.  No reward (except maybe you have another finishing maneuver now), no nothing.

I go through this scenario 3 or 4 more times.  Nothing changes, I beat up more enemies, I go to more sections, and I come back to the demon door all over again.  It’s the same beeping thing.  Eventually, I ran out of healing potions and I died.   By the way, healing yourself rather than waiting on a heal from a cleric type character is probably the only reasonable way to go because you couldn’t see other people’s lifebars so nobody knew if I was dying.  I then watched my other teammates die too, and then was rewarded with a whole 500 silver.

There was nothing to tell me progress, and there was nothing to tell me what I was doing besides killing a number of creatures.  Oh, when I warped back to the demon door, I could stand around and do social gestures from the older Fable games.  But there was no chat window, nothing to vent my real frustration.  No Fable, I don’t feel like dancing, I feel like popping a squat on this NPC’s head.  Could you please tell me the appropriate gesture for that?

Anyway, after experimenting with a few more characters (and just quitting out after NOTHING was changing), I decided to give a shot at playing the villain.  Your view changes now, it becomes an overhead thing.  I was hoping to get somebody with a mustache who laughed profoundly.  No such luck.  The first ridiculous thing they do is point you to a youtube video (that does not play by the way) and to show you how to do things.  There is not an ingame tutorial, no helpful tricks, just throw your sorry butt into the experience.

So I thought, alright….I have a college education.  My father and wife think I’m the smartest person they have ever met…surely I can figure this out.  I figured out that whoever designed this should be sent back to programming school.  Again, this is in the overhead view and you are asked to start placing units, like a military commander.  Okay, so I’m playing a version of Risk here.  Sort of, except the placing of the units is really pre-defined.  For all realistic purposes, you are picking a strategy against the heroes.

Then once you are complete, you set the plan in motion.  Except you aren’t really playing, more watching the action unfold and by action I don’t mean you are watching the heroes as they fight off your forces.  I mean, you are watching a static battlefield with silhouettes of the heroes running through it and their life bar slowly decreasing.  More than likely they will get through your scenario and then you are left to do it all over again.  It’s confusing, it doesn’t make sense and worst of all, it is downright boring.

To be a villain, you should be on the battlefield with the rest of our army, issuing commands, getting out of the way and scampering off, taunting,  etc.  I want to influence the outcome, not stand over the top of it like some big kid with a Lego set he can’t even touch correctly.  This is Fable, a game with character, a game with style and humor.  Not a big series battlefield where I’m moving some chess pieces.  I quit out after 2 or 3 rounds.  I can’t do it anymore.

That was that, oddly enough they are doing another beta test (this time for 60 hours) this Saturday and I will probably load it up again.  Just because I’m praying for something different.  If I could show you images, I would…but its going to have to improve in a hurry.  I am pretty forgiving about something like quest selection if the gameplay is good, but this was mind-numbing.

Anyway, I did buy a game this week as well for my Xbox 360, NCAA Football ’14.  Yes, Snoop Dogg would approve.  It was on sale for $9.99, a very reasonable price for what might be the last College Football game for a long time.  I played the demo first to make sure it was based off the Madden/NCAA experience that I had messed with for over 20 years.  It was, I played with Texas A&M as I tried to beat Oregon.  I scored late in the fourth quarter to make it 14-13 and then went for 2 (because I did not want to play overtime).  My pass was deflected and that was that.  But it was a lot of fun, and I purchased it shortly after.  I am crossing my fingers big time that EA gives it the nod and I see it on my XB1 ready to install list in November.  If it is, expect it to get a lot of rotation on my XB1.

By the way, before I get into my notes about the top games this week (I know this is becoming more of a video game blog than anything), my Pinball FX2 on XB1 is not recording my achievements properly at all.  Well they pop just fine, but the game is now totally missing from my achievements app and doesn’t show up on Xbox Live.  The only place that I can find the achievements after they pop is either under Notifications or in the game itself under the appropriate tab.

Eventually, in about a couple of days, TrueAchievements records the achievements and I get my credit, but to this point it is still not in my game list on Xbox Live or on Xbox.com.  It’s apparently a known issue on the Zen forums, but no word on a fix just yet.  We shall see I guess.

Anyway, as weeks go by, we see Deadpool starting to slip from its #1 perch.  Partly because its hit a ton of votes, partly because people are figuring out that it won’t make backwards compatibility because Activision rather re-release it in time for the movie in February.  However, the usual two standouts Outrun and NCAA Football 14 are back at #2 and #5 respectively.

Crysis 3 again turned in a strong number as this was the last week of it being free on Games with Gold.  I would say it sticks around for another week or so before going to the middle of the pack.  The same with Crysis 2 which is receiving companion votes as I like to call it.  The original Crysis was #22 this week if anybody was curious.

Murdered: Soul Suspect sticks out as a sore thumb at #4 as I’m trying to sell my sealed copy (Half.com under Magkick) that I bought shortly after Christmas of last year.  I would not expect it to start showing up regularly though.  However, the rest of the list does show us a lot of familiar titles or what I refer to as the two’s.

Divinity 2, Magna Carta 2 (nice to see this one up here after a lot of times at the bottom of the list), Two Worlds 2, and the second iteration of Sherlock Holmes.  I was also happy to see the Driver game here as I have reported before that it was on the “BC” graphic that keeps getting passed around from Microsoft.  I did also want to mention that Capcom Arcade Cabinet keeps showing up near the bottom of the top 15 and I could see a scenario or two where that game does make it.  But I doubt it.  Capcom probably is trying to think of ways to re-release a year or two down the road and add maybe 2 or 3 games to it I’m sure.

The bottom five is a sad tale.  I think I will weed these out eventually.  Anyway, that’s about it for this week.  I know we spent a lot of time talking about Fable Legends but hopefully some of you enjoy it.  Take care and play something this weekend that’s hopefully a whole lot better than that.