Looking back

I tried out the Xbox 360 backwards compatibility (BC) with the original Xbox this morning. I threw in Rainbow Six 3 and watched the console patch itself, again - actually it downloaded an emulator. Then I quickly checked out the singleplayer, which worked fine. Although it has to be said that having played next-gen graphics, albeit on a STD TV and only for a couple of days, the last-gen graphics seemed pretty much extinct.

So on to Live! At this point I got a last-gen notice screen and a prompt to download more patches. This took considerably longer. One that was out of the way, games were found quickly. As this was the first time I ever player R6 on Live, I got my ass handed to me repeatedly. I did get into actual firefights, but it seems awfully hard to kill a guy with an assault rifle on fully automatic fire at the range of less than five meters. I mean, I emptied a whole clip at center mass (I think), to no visible effect, at least twice. Some warping was evident, too, but it din't really bother me.

All of the players were decent (and better than me), although there was quite a bit of cursing pouring from the headset.

The game looked and felt exactly like it did on the original Xbox. The comparison with the 360's offerings, say the new Ghost Recon, are horribly unfavourable to the last-gen stuff. I didn't really expect to be this shellshocked by it, but it's hard to go back. Of course, right now I'm just content to play on Live, but it seems inevitable that there won't be very much of going back to the history for me.

Other titles I'm going to check out are Dead Or Alive Ultimate, Halo 2, Crimson Skies (if there are still players out there), Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Burnout 3.