Xbox One Backwards compatability revisited.... Grab a bargain try something you missed.

So with lots of people running about grabbing Switch's playing Zelda, grabbing PS4 Pro's and playing Horizon Zero Dawn or messing around with the whole Virtual Reality thing ecetera I thought I would do a little thing about playing a few games you might have missed on the cheap again.  Way back  on Monday, the 20th of  June 2016 I made a post about making the most of Xbox One backwards compatability which was a reasonably new function for the Xbox One at the time so without further ado this is an area I would like to revist but first here is a link to my original post incase youd like to have a look at it first.

http://kerr9000.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/a-look-at-making-most-of-xbox-one.html

When I talked about this last time I talked about DarkVoid, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Gears of War 1, 2 and 3 as well as Mass Effect, border lands and Alan Wake all of which are still games I feel are more than worthwhile. Since then however the list of compatable games has been widened. 


A full list of current compatable games can be found here http://www.xbox.com/en-gb/xbox-one/backward-compatibility this includes both games that were originally released on disc and games that are and have always been purly digital, as for the digital only ones I wont be touching those at all for the main reason they have a set price you have to pay to download them and there is no real wiggle room to get a better deal (well apart from when there are sales). I will again be talking about Xbox 360 games which can be purchased on disc for very little and can be either played on an Xbox One or Xbox 360.


Seeing as Zelda Breathe of the Wild is one of the hotest games right now lets start by looking at a set of titles which have a lot in common with the Zelda series, I am of course talking about the highly underated DarkSiders games. Both of the DarkSiders titles can be got from various online sights like Music Magpie and Amazon just to mention 2 for £2 to £3 including postage, heck if your an Xbox Gold subscriber then you can currently claim the first one for free as part of Games with Gold. (Yes there are Xbox one versions of these games but there more money and I would argue they dont actually add that much). Imagine a Zelda game where instead of playing the part of a young guy with pointy ears you play one of the horsemen of the apocolypse and you have the DarkSiders games, the style of gameplay is very simmilar with both puzzles to solve and enemies to fight and it has that same style of progression where the further you get in the game the more tools you get ahold of which then allow you to reach places you couldnt before. If you have enjoyed Zelda games and want something with a good story, good length and that kind of style then you cant fault these games and should jump on them.

I have currently been spending some of my time playing Mass Effect Andromeda on the Xbox One and on the one hand I am enjoying it but on the other I cant help but think that it is not really any better than any of the previous Mass Effect games on the previous generation of consoles. Now when you bear in mind that I spent £38 on this game and I am not enjoying it anymore than the original 3 games so if you havent played those then why not give them a crack first, after all the new one will eventually drop in price. I have to admit the Mass Effect trilogy was a lot more well known than DarkSiders so the chance that there will be people who havent played it is much lower than with DarkSiders and Mass Effect the original will cost you £4.50 from CEX, the second will cost you £3.50 and the 3rd will cost you £7 so given this I would go for DarkSiders first if your looking for something to play as there cheaper. I know some people who gave the first Mass Effect a go and didnt really get on with it so ignored the series for these people I would say why not throw £3.50 down on the second now hear me out. The first tried to be a RPG with shooting, the second game is not quiet the same, in fact it kind of swayed things back the other way in some ways with it being more of a shooter with RPG elements. You might say that if you play the second game then you will be missing out on the story, that you might find youself stuck in the middle of things with no idea of what is going on but to be honest the second game is structured really well, it lays itself out in a way where it recaps you on what has happend and then starts a new story, so if you play it without having played the first game then you will still know who you are, what your doing and why.

I could carry on and on like this laying out cases for why you should buy and play various games on the backwards compatability list, instead I will end things here by making a plea that you dont get so caught up in the present, in all of the hot new games that are coming out that you ignore some of the options open to you, especially when some of them offer you both some of the greatest entertainment you can get your hands on but also some of the best value for money you will ever see when it comes to the world of Video games. Did you know that Oblivion is on the backwards compatability list, that you can go to CEX and get this game for as little as £3.50 or failing that you can have it posted to you from websites such as Amazon for the sum of £4.50. So why am I brining this particular game up in my clossing argument for the brilliance of backwars compatability simple my original play through of this game took me 120 hours, and that wasnt enough I have since returned to the game and restarted it several times even if you ignore these replays then 120 hours of fun for £4.50 is insanly good. Yes some people will be shocked that I call one of those invisable dice rolling RPG style games fun but believe me it is, its the kind of game which gives you tales to share with fellow players, I could tell you the story of how a orc much stronger than me was chasing me and I ran for my life only to find that as I came rushing down a hill he rolled past me and crashed down dead at the bottom of it, having I can only reason fell and broken his neck (Trust me it was much funnier and exciting than it might sound).

Games I think get too much hate. 1: Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts.

Ok so today I am going to be talking about Banjo-Kazooie Nuts and Bolts and first things first to get this out of the way, I really like Nuts and Bolts in fact I think I would go as far as to say I love it. I know its a popular game to hate, it seems to attract an almost never ending stream of venom to the degree that it has become pretty much cool to hate on it. I can even understand some of this hate after all it is a sequel which is very different to its predecessors when most people really wanted more of the same. People also feel that some of the comments made in the games opening are kind of insulting to the fans of the original games but I don't really see it like that myself.

For me the opening with Banjo and Kazooie having gotten fat and out of shape is really kind of funny. I mean think about it. Most games with sequels are kind of like a TV show in which no matter what happens the status qua is always re-established at the end of a story or at the start of a new episode. Think about the Simpsons for example yes they go on a crazy adventure and become rich or adopt an elephant but most of these changes never last there universe always seems to default to a set state and the characters never really change or age. If you pick u a Mario game be it the first game or the most recent Mario looks more or less the same well apart from the difference in graphical fidelity at least. Nuts and Bolts with the whole fat joke basically was poking fun at this, instead of 6 years having passed in the real world but time having stood still in Banjo's world they decided to make a joke that since saving the world Banjo had sat around eating and doing nothing because there were no adventures to go on. It might not be the funniest joke in the world but it got a small laugh out of me and I think the hatters like to read to much in to it and are just looking for holes to pick. 

Then there is the whole point where a character in the game basically tells you that no one wants a platformer anymore they want to shoot things, people seemed to view this as the games producers saying ''look we know what's best for you, we will give you what we think is best and you can shut up and like it'' I never personally took it this way at all. I took it more as a comment on the state of the video game world and how it had changed. Growing up for me yeah sure there were games where you could shoot and kill aliens but there was so much more than that, cute platformers had been popular it had been cool to like Mario and sonic and before that there had been some weird games on the spectrum games where you would control a man who just wanted to hide from his wife, or a game where you controlled a music groups management, and even a game where you controlled a plumber trying to unblock pipes before they flooded with shit. Rare had been around a long time both as Rare and as Ultimate Play the Game they had seen this change they had felt it happen around them and this was simply them commenting on it. There is an argument made that it was Microsoft who forced rare to make Nuts and bolts a car based game as opposed to a traditional platformer but even if that's true than this still stands, it is someone or a group of writers within Rare making a point possibly even poking fun at those above them in control.

I think most of the backlash against the game is from people who simply just wanted more of the same and while I also would have been happy with more of the same I really like what we got. I remember playing Nuts and Bolts for the first time and really loving the building aspect to it. I would play it with my 6 year old daughter on my knee laughing and clapping to her it was a video game representation of the lego's she played with. She loved to build her own vehicles to watch me build them and to talk about what we could do, and how we could do it.

The vehicles can be built freely by the player from over 1,600 different components including body panels, engines, wheels, wings, propellers,weapons, fuel and ammo containers. Basically you are met with various challenges and you build the vehicle you think you need to succeed. There is no one right answer , the vehicle you build to do it might be very different from the one I build and this is half of the fun. The physics engine allows the vehicles to behave in relation to how they are built, the sense of weight is somewhat exaggerated but you know if you put more armour on a vehicle it will effect how it moves and if you don't remember to balance the weight on either side/end then its going to cause problems. You can construct vehicles can be paint them, then save them in order to use them latter or to come back to them and edit them. Your always unlocking new parts. So maybe you made a bike and it was fast but its too slippy in the way it handles to complete a new challenge, easy you load up your blue print for it and add the new high gripping wheels you found problem solved. There is a test track area provided so that if you make subtle changes to a vehicle you can test them out before attempting to really use it. One of my favourite things about the game though is that Players can also send and receive blueprints online, so if you have people on your friends list with the game and you think you have built the ultimate vehicle well you can send them it to play with.

Nowadays we are very used to games that have this sort of creativity but I think its important to note that this game launched before the likes of Minecraft got popular. Look at the way Minecraft has become this massive phenomenon this creative outlet which no one can get enough off, its seen as so much more than a game, its a game but its also one of the few electronic experiences that educational institutes such as schools feel like they can get behind and support because of the creative aspects of it. Yet when you look at Nuts and Bolts laid bare it had a lot of the same qualities. Maybe it was simply before its time. Maybe if it had come out a little latter or been made as its own stand alone without the Banjo name it would have fared better

Just look at Minecraft and the way it seemed to take over the whole world. The way it still remains popular and relevant to this day while other new titles fall by the wayside one after another. It seems to have attracted a whole new generation of players to its innovative open-world, sandbox styled gameplay, and inspired so many other games. Now we have things like the Little Big Planet series helping you to build your own levels, and kerbal space programme helping you build space ships to try and travel through deep space. All of these games being considered special both fun and to some degree creative and educational.

So why is Nuts and Bolts hated so much? Its only mistake was trying to pass itself off as a new Banjo-Kazooie game. If people had hated on it a little less and seen the positive side of it well then it could have achieved so much. It was offering some of the creativity that minecraft does before minecraft did. It could have been a creative force for good it could have brought more people to gaming but unfortunately some people just want to moan and complain about what they don't have instead of looking at the positives.

I will always enjoy Nuts and Bolts both as a game and as a part of a whole group of special moments of fun and laughter I got to share with my child. No matter what anyone says to me it is an underrated gem. hopefully with its inclusion on Rare Replay which is released in a few days it might reach a new audience.