[quote name='hotwls13']Gee I wonder why the XBOX flagship Halo/Halo2 happen to make it, yet just about every other crappy game made for the xbox makes it as well.
It all comes down to the $$$$. Xbox wants to sell 360's and 360 games. If everyone is buying the 360 and just playing their original games, Microsoft wouldn't make as much $$.
I doubt Barbie Horse Adventures Wild Horse Rescue, BMX XXX, Chicago Enforcer, Egg Mania or Ford vs Chevy just to name a few were designed in any way similar to Halo/Halo 2. I didn't see too many 8 year old girls standing in line to get their 360 so they could play barbie.
Also, xbox has said they were going to convert/emulate the most popular games. Where did they get this "Most Popular Games" list? Wouldn't they maybe start with "Platinum Hits". These are after all their best selling games.
I'm sure it's a difficult task to emulate these games, but I also think they could do a better job of choosing games that gamers want. Not too many 360 purchasers were hoping for the crappy ass games on that list. It's not really that big of a deal to me, as I plan to use my 360 mostly for music/pics/video, but there are some xbox games I have not opened yet that I had planned to play on the 360. Doom 3 and Oddworld Strangers Wrath to name a couple.
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You are correct that Microsoft is motivated by money but incorrect as to the situation. It isn't as simple as picking which games they want to run under emulation. Logically they want ALL of them to run, especially newer games.
Think about it. MS makes their money from sales of software, both their own and production royalties from third party titles. The hardware is sold at a loss because the revenue potential from the software is so great when everything comes together correctly. Right now the X360 represent a very small user base compared to the original Xbox. A major hit on the Xbox can easily sell enough units to exceed the entire worldwide installed base of the 360. OTOH, the 360 can be viewed as expanding the Xbox's installed base if a game can be made to run under emulation. The X360 user base could add tens or even hundreds of thousands of unit sales to a major Xbox title.much as the PS2 greatly extended the reach of the most popular PS1 games. So is is entirely in Microsoft's favor to make every game run, especially newer ones that would generate new revenue.
The problem is that emulation is hard. Even though the hardware of those old arcade units is decades old with code bases measured in kilobytes, it took several years for MAME to really become a solid and reliable app. The gap between the Xbox and the hosting 360 is far smaller than that between a 1981 arcade machine and a 1999 PC.
Microsoft started with Halo since it is the flagship of the Xbox. From there they tested to see what games would run and added those to the list. Then they sought to address the area of the emulator that was the most common point of failure and added a few more games to the list. And so on. It didn't what the games were. Every time they have a new version of the emulator the entire list has to be tested since there is always the risk that some existing titles on the list could stop working. Such is life for software testers. It's an extremely laborious and time intensive process. If Microsoft had final Xbox 360 hardware available a year before launch they probably still wouldn't able to run everything. The list would merely be longer and more satisfactory than it is now.
Give them a chance. March may add a lot to the list of supported titles or may add only a few. But don't think they aren't trying for the former.
(.
I picked up a cheapo copy of World Series Baseball 2K3 today. It's supposed to be the only baseball game playable on the 360. I've been wanting to play some ball and need to learn the WSB controls so I was happy with this instead of spending more for a newer baseball game on the GC.
