Xbox Game Pass has a really mind-boggling amount of content. If you’ve ever scrolled through the service, you’ve likely experienced the same delirium that I have. The idea that everyone can ping pong in between Gears of war 5, The Master Chief Collection, and Rainbow Six: Siege in a single session is hard to imagine. It reminds me of the first time I looked through an iPod. After years of dealing with CD jewel cases and unreliable walkmen, suddenly I had … all the albums I would ever need? In the palm of my hand How did we live before?
But honestly, what drew me most deeply into Game Pass is not access to super games like Fate 2. It is really revealing that the subscription is hosted though Halo Infinite On day one – a remarkable move that signals a broader change in the industry – my favorite thing to do is dive into the dark underbelly of the cloud to find the most interesting Xbox detritus I can find.
A typical example: Reis: son of Rome is on Game Pass. Notice Ryse? It ended with a 60 on Metacritic though looked really pretty at E3 when they unveiled the Xbox One. There are elsewhere Fuzion Frenzy
That brings me to my bigger point: Phil Spencer, if you’re reading this, you’re putting all the old mediocre Xbox platformer on Game Pass. Don’t keep the streets waiting any longer.
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You know what I’m talking about when you play around the turn of the millennium. Microsoft entered the market to compete with Sony and Nintendo, two companies that had made a name for themselves in part in 3D platformers. In retrospect, that’s funny – imagine a market built on the back of Crash Bandicoot instead of an endless line of prey shooters that you should let play for 10 years – but those were the marching orders back then.
Because of this, Microsoft hired a ton of studios to bring out their own incarnations of Mario in the hopes that the brand new system would fly off the Walmart shelves. The result is like a rogue gallery of terrible mascots. Who could forget that Blinx The Time Sweeper? Or Voodoo Vince? Or the sad, diminished 3D incarnation of ToeJam & Earl? Or Tork: Prehistoric punk? (Not to be confused with Tak and the power of juju, a different Stone Age 2000s platformer.) Long before Marcus Fenix and the Horizon Festival, this was the face of Xbox.
None of these games were particularly good. I’m pretty sure I played Voodoo Vince and have no tangible memory of it. (If I remember correctly, you could set yourself on fire and make enemies do the same.) Instead, they represented the ultimate flotsam in deliberate blockbuster rentals and GameStop bargains everywhere. Nobody gambled Blinx
The story is best understood through the forgotten chaff on the fringes, which is why modern archaeologists are digging through the proletariat’s old garbage heaps rather than mapping royal bloodlines. I subscribe to the WWE Network, another comprehensive database from an extremely inconsistent company, and while the classics are fun to revisit, it is path more entertaining to find a coincidence Raw from 1995 to see what a terrible mess Vince McMahon was currently pursuing. The video game industry should give us the same chance.
I emailed Xbox HQ for this story to see if it gives hope that one day we can all play soon ToeJam & Earl with the oomph of 16 gigabytes of RAM. It essentially told me to kick stones with “nothing more to share that I can share at this point”. I understand where it’s coming from. A fledgling service, Game Pass is also Microsoft’s best hope of taking the lead in the console wars. Therefore, it is likely to focus on more important functions such as optimization Skyrim for his debut.
Even so, I hope that as publishers near our inevitable subscription-based gaming future, understand how much good they can do by preserving the glorious scattershot ensemble of their back catalogs. There really is a market for that! Yes, most people jump on the Game Pass so they don’t have to pay for the next one transmission or what ever. But I can’t help but think of a YouTuber like Nitro Rad, who dedicated his career documenting the mediocre platformer of the 2000s. When his video review analyzes the exact handling of a Latter-day Konami Frogger Game can garner over 150,000 viewsThen of course I’m not alone.
We can already see some movement here. EA Play offers six different random numbers Driving me crazys, and I dream of a timeline where I can pull up the 2003 edition whenever I want to walk around as Michael Vick. And Cameo: elements of power, a game with one of the most tormented original stories in living memory, can settle on the X-Series hard drive at any time. With a little luck, the publishers will double and everything old will be made new again. I’ll sign up for Game Pass and spend an afternoon playing games Blood awake, or Greg Hastings’ paintball tournamentwith my idiotic friends – like we did all those years ago. No publisher should be afraid of all these funny, outdated mistakes.Bees and never. Trust me, they are far more charming than the IP holders seem to attribute to them and would find plenty of curious, even appreciative, players today.
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