Topic: Official Push Square Xbox Thread

@ralphdibny It was Swordfish Studios at the time.

I’ve got a couple of older 8BitDo pads. Unfortunately, it’s it’s wired, I’ll have to pass on that. I’m quite a distance from the actual console.

@SoulChimera ahh fair enough, I'll ask no more as I guess you are up to your earholes in NDAs!

I read an interview in Edge magazine a few years back that detailed the development of 50 Cent BOTS. It was a really interesting read about how the publisher/parent company changed or something and the game got stuck in limbo for a while.

Also apparently, 50 Cent came in to review the game and brought his son with him. The son said he wanted a helicopter sequence so the Devs had to hastily put one together with reused code or something to appease them! I imagined that situation to be akin to the "more cowbell" sketch with Christopher Walken!!

It's a shame that pad is wired. 40 is a steep ask for a wired pad. I guess it costs a similar amount to license the Xbox handshake than it does to use Bluetooth because it costs the same/bit more than the standard SN30 Pro +/2 pads.

Microsoft seem to be quite Draconian in their approach to licensed controllers. I've not seen a third party wireless controller at all which is a big shame.

There are adapters that allow you to use non XBox pads like the CronusMax and TitanOne but they are very expensive compared to the Mayflash and 8bitdo equivalents that are available for PlayStation and Switch.

@ralphdibny I bought one of those adapters to use my PS4 G29 on my Xbox One years ago, worked perfectly. DriveHub I think it’s called.

Yeah, Xbox 3rd party pads seem a bit of a rare thing. Guess we are stuck with the jackhammer to concrete wall official pads. Haha.

So I decided to buy a month of Game Pass Ultimate seeing as how so many great games have come out and are coming out soon such as Forza Horizon 5, Halo Infinite and The Gunk. What I've been most interested in though is seeing how well these games perform on my base Xbox One through Cloud Gaming and I'm pleased to report that Forza Horizon 5 at least runs very well with next to no lag at all. However, the game does this thing where it "refreshes" the screen fairly often when it becomes too pixelated, which in all honesty doesn't bother me that much as long as the game doesn't lag since that actually affects how well you perform at the game. Like I remember when I was playing The Medium through Cloud Gaming on my laptop and it would lag every 5-10 minutes for a few seconds and that was rather annoying. But it rarely ever lags when I was playing FH5 and that's the most important thing for me.

Now I'm curious to see how Halo Infinite will run through Cloud Gaming. If it runs just as well as FH5 then the future of Cloud Gaming is looking very promising. This feature is important to me because I'm not planning on buying a next-gen system anytime soon but with this I can play games like the next A Plague Tale, Stalker 2, Starfield and so on, i.e. games that are next-gen exclusive, on my base Xbox One and I don't have to download hundreds of GBs every time to boot. It's just so convenient considering how games just keep getting bigger and bigger, not to mention that it's a great way to test out games on Game Pass instantly. Absolutely brilliant feature!

@RogerRoger I do think the issue for me is that I don't have a wired connection, not to mention that my router is in another room so that's probably why it keeps "refreshing" the image. I've been talking with another user on Pure Xbox and he told me that he doesn't have this refresh nearly as often as I have it. So tomorrow I'm going to go and buy a network cable and hopefully the games will run much better.

Other than that, the experience has been great. Besides Forza, I've also tried Marvel's Avengers and that game ran just as well as Forza did, i.e. no lag but the image kept refreshing (which was more annoying in this game because there's actually a story with cut-scenes compared to Forza). I also tried Serious Sam 4 on Cloud Gaming since it dropped today on Game Pass and that game was a complete mess, lol. There was lag and every time you would turn the camera, the screen would refresh. Hopefully it's just this game that's like that and not something that's common with other shooters in general. I really want to play Halo Infinite tomorrow and not experience this with that game. Good thing I'm getting a network cable at least so that I can improve the quality from my side.

But yeah, Microsoft has been really working hard to make their cloud feature as good as possible and they've actually been making great progress throughout the year. I remember playing The Medium on my laptop through Cloud Gaming a couple of months ago and it would lag every 5-10 minutes. Now the experience is completely free of lag (for certain games at least lol) and apparently they're working on improving the image quality next. Because the thing is this feature is still in the beta phase so they're continuously making improvements to it. It's not fully ready to be "released" to everyone so to speak, but at least it's an option for those who want to use it.

So I got a network cable today and tried out Cloud Gaming and holy crap, it's like a completely different experience. I played Forza Horizon 5, Marvel's Avengers and Serious Sam 4 again and the gameplay is now flawless with no refresh and lag at all. I've even noticed that the frame rate is higher now than before, not because I've increased it in the settings but because the stream is simply able to output at a higher frame rate. The only problem though is that cut-scenes are still refreshing fairly often, both in Avengers and Serious Sam so I don't think it's a problem with one specific game.

But yeah, other than the game refreshing during cut-scenes, this feature genuinely works exceptionally well now. I'm definitely going to keep using Cloud Gaming in the future, which makes me glad since that means I don't need to buy a next-gen system for now!

@RogerRoger Speaking of Marvel's Avengers btw, this game is heavily reminiscent of the Tomb Raider games, which shouldn't come as a surprise since the developer is Crystal Dynamics. Although I didn't know that going in and I think that's awesome, it feels great to play just like the TR games. Have you played it yet? Considering you love the Tomb Raider games and Marvel, this should be the perfect game for you.

@RogerRoger Yeah I mean despite what people say, the fact that more games are becoming 100+ GBs in size and come out not fully finished, I'd rather just embrace a more online future where I can access hundreds of games without having to download anything. It's just more convenient this way, not to mention that I'll be able to try out games easier that I might not play otherwise if I had to download 100+ GBs.

The campaign of Marvel's Avengers is definitely great so far! I won't bother with the online functionality at all and I haven't noticed anything intrusive while playing through the story. It just feels like a normal superhero game, you know? Now that I'm going through all the MCU movies, this is genuinely the perfect thing to play on the side.

@LtSarge what's your internet speed out of interest??

I get 60mb download at a push on a wired connection and it still does that screen refresh thing. I wouldn't play a single player game like it but it has been good for the reward quest games.

I'm moving next week and getting a 512mb connection at the new flat so I am keen to check it out on that!

I'll only get that speed for 18 months though as it was a black Friday offer and I won't pay more than £40/month for internet to be honest

@RogerRoger Oh yeah, I'm not saying I'm only going to use Cloud Gaming from here on out. I'll definitely be playing games physically but also through the cloud since I just save so much money that way, not to mention space in my storage room. I just have way too many physical games now lol. But yeah, I don't think we're too far off from a future where Cloud Gaming is going to be universally feasible.

If you don't mind me asking, do you know that Marvel's Avengers requires an online connection to play? That's the primary reason why I was against getting a boxed copy of the game as it's just going to be useless to own physically once the servers have been shut down.

@ralphdibny So it varies depending on the system. I'm paying for 250 mbps download and upload, but on Xbox One it's only around 150 mbps download, although it tends to fluctuate a lot. That's the speed through a wired connection, when I had a wireless connection on my XB1 it was around 50-60 mbps. So I do think it will make a huge difference for you if you can get the download speed up to 500 mbps.

@LtSarge sounds promising if you are already getting more than twice what I'm getting!

So I've been playing Halo Infinite for a few hours now and so far it's an incredibly fun game that feels significantly different than previous Halo titles. It's going to be hard to go back to the previous games now without having things like the grappling hook. That thing makes a huge difference, it opens up so much freedom when fighting enemies or just traversal in general. I'm also finding the story to be very interesting and it appeals a lot to me as a person who's played all the mainline games.

It definitely feels like Halo has finally become a modern franchise now with this entry. Can't wait to play more of it!

@RogerRoger Ah, interesting. Apparently you need to have downloaded the day one patch in order to play the campaign offline: https://support.square-enix-games.com/s/article/000001164?lan...

Well, that wouldn't sit right me either way since I constantly delete game apps in order to save space on my PS4 and there's no way to conserve patches without deleting the app. Because if I don't have the patch, the game will be unplayable offline, which is still bad.

@RogerRoger Oh I didn't know that. Are PS3 patches stored there as well or only PS4 and onward?

The point where gaming becomes primarily about streaming is probably the point where I'm going to tap out and just start replaying all of those games I've told myself I'd eventually replay one day.

Thankfully (?), the United States is probably the biggest gaming market in the world, and large swaths of this country are so underdeveloped that they have the internet infrastructure (and political stability, and economic inequality) of a third world country, so it'll probably be quite a long time before streaming catches on enough to become the dominant distribution model for new software (versus an accessible side option for people who want it).

And, by that point, when I'm old and have probably lost a leg in the second Civil War that was triggered when a robotic replica of Donald Trump sent his army of augmented cyborg hillbillies to march on the White House, it'll probably be impossible to find the hardware to play my old physical games on and I'll have to resort to streaming anyway.

@RogerRoger Life in the U.S. has been like a crappy, direct-to-video dystopian/apocalyptic thriller for a couple of years now.

I've been watching the six-part Xbox documentary Power On the past few days and I have to say that it's a really interesting watch. Even if you don't like Xbox that much, I still think it's worth seeing. They do mention PlayStation and Sony a lot throughout the first couple of episodes. Anyway, all six episodes are up on YouTube and you can watch them for free.

One interesting thing they mentioned is that Rockstar apparently wanted to make GTA 3 exclusive to Xbox but Microsoft turned them down due to not knowing how you'd be able to transition from a game like GTA 2, which is in 2D, to a 3D environment. I mean, imagine a timeline where the GTA games would've been Xbox exclusives. That's crazy.

@LtSarge I want to watch this at some point even though I never had an Xbox. I saw the trailer during that Xbox anniversary stream and what caught my eye was how they were clearly admitting there were problems and mistakes. Looked like an honest piece and interesting overall

@Voltan Yeah exactly, it's really nice to see such an open documentary about their history. And I haven't even gotten to the episode about the red ring of death yet!

Currently i have collected 5 XBOX games.

1. DDR Ultramix 1
2. DDR Ultramix 2
3. Carmen Sandiego: The Secret of the Stolen Drums
4. SpongeBob Squarepants: Lights, Camera, Pants!
5. Hello Kitty: Mission Rescue

Finished watching all episodes of the Xbox documentary now and overall, it was absolutely captivating to watch. The first three episodes focused only on the original Xbox and the other three on the rest of the Xbox consoles, so they don't feel as in-depth as the first couple of episodes. But still, it's crazy how much Microsoft went all out on pointing out their mistakes, specifically the red ring of death and the Xbox One fiasco. Interestingly enough, they even interviewed Don Mattrick and honestly, after hearing his perspective on things, I do have a newfound respect for him. He genuinely wanted to do what he thought was right but obviously, the execution was just wrong. But yeah, I'm definitely glad that he left because he just wanted to make Xbox more casual while Phil Spencer brought back the focus on making Xbox the most powerful console and put out games, games and more games. Spencer has been such an important part of Xbox's recovery and he deserves all the praise for his work.

This documentary also made it clear how difficult Microsoft had it when it came to creating the consoles as well as games like Halo. There were so many opportunities where they could've messed up and left the gaming industry but they managed to persevere. It's just so interesting seeing things from an inside perspective and now I really want to see similar documentaries from Nintendo and Sony because they've most likely struggled a lot as well throughout the years. I doubt we'll get them but one could always wish!