With the announcements at E3 still ringing in every gamer’s ears, none struck a more poignant chord with the community that those from both Sony and Microsoft. This has always been a very clearly divided playing field, with PSers and Xboners on each side of the line playing “My platform can beat up your platform” until their mom’s yell down the basement stairs and tell them to go to bed.
Anyway, the big news that got me excited was that the Xbox One will soon have backwards compatibility thanks to an internal emulator for the Xbox 360. This does not mean that all 360 games will be immediately avialable, but Microsoft is working through their catalog. They did promise that all Microsoft games will be ported and that they will release batches of 100 games at a time. They already have a list of 21 games that are available for those players who are part of the Preview group. Check out this video:
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What does this really mean for gamers? Well, when you think about BC for any other system, what that means is that you can buy the older games from their store and download them to your system. Microsoft has instead offered us the ability to put our old 360 discs in the Xbox One and play the games! Millions of Xbox 360 discs breathe sighs of relief as they delay their trips to the local landfills. Hooray!
As an Xbox/Xbox 360/Xbox One owner, I am happy that all the games that I bought for my 360 will now be playable on the Xbox One. More than that, because of the way Microsoft is doing this, I can still play the games and earn all the great achievements, all while playing on a single platform. There are games I bought and only played a few times that I can now go back and revive to complete and boost my gamer score… Maybe some day I will beat my brother’s score. He just has too much free time.
Anyway, between this announcement, the exclusive Xbox One games announced this week, and the strength of the Xbox One product, Microsoft did a great job of stealing E3 2015.
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