For gamers, this is The Week of Looking Forward. It’s a Christmas oasis in the middle of June, and a passel of adrenaline promises as shiny and alluring as a pre-polished (and possibly prefabricated) trailer. It’s actual name is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, a three-ring circus of hype, where major game developers jump on a stage or lurk in a booth to show us the shiny new games they’d like us to throw our money at over the next year or so.
Oddly, unexpectedly, even in the face of potentially cool new entries in the Dishonored, Mass Effect and Dark Souls series, I find myself looking in an entirely different direction.
Backward.
Microsoft, the company that has been getting its ass kicked by Sony in this yet-young console generation, announced June 15 that they’re bringing backward compatibility to the Xbox One. Yes, that’s right — backward compatibility, a concept that seemed to have died with Michael “Kramer” Richards’ celebrity status and standup comedy career back in 2006. That’s the year the original PlayStation 3, with its tiny 20 GB hard drive and supersized $600 price tag, arrived with the ability to also play the entire library of PlayStation 2 discs. Less than a year later, the feature was gone, stripped from the less brick-like PlayStation Slim models to cut costs and simplify the hardware architecture. Presumably never to be seen again.
But now it’s back in the competition’s console, and it’s kind of a big deal. To wit: An entire wall of my basement rec room is covered with Xbox 360 games, many of which — Alan Wake, I’m looking at you — I’m hoping to carve time to revisit someday. Until now, doing so was dependent on, among other things, the health of my slowly aging Xbox 360 — with one Red Ring of Death the only thing standing between me and major reinvestment of cash to access an accumulated library of gaming nostalgia. Better still, the compatibility feature reportedly also includes Xbox Live Arcade games — remember when Microsoft cared about and even promoted cutting-edge indie games?
Details are a little vague, but as described in Microsoft’s E3 press release, owners of 360 games would simply insert their discs into the Xbox One to initiate a compatible download of the game. I somehow doubt even a tenth of the promised 100-plus game titles are going to fit on the Xbox One’s woefully undersized standard 500 GB hard drive, but that’s not the point, at least not today.
Rolling out backward compatibility isn’t just a boon for gamers; it’s also a backhand slap to Microsoft’s chief console rival. Sony’s model for making the more recent PlayStation 3 back catalog available to modern gamers has centered on the monthly subscription service PlayStation Now, a sort of Netflix Lite that, for the not-actually-that-low price of $20 a month, gives PlayStation 4 owners streaming access to more than 100 PlayStation 3 games. A hundred-plus sounds like a lot, until you realize that you’re being asked to re-pay for something you probably already own. And that in doing so, you don’t even get to own what you’re paying to play. Not surprisingly, PlayStation Now has been slow to find and build an audience. With this week’s announcement, I suspect it’s in for some major retooling, or scrapping altogether.
