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How extensive is Steam's Linux catalog at the moment? Not a whole lot of large budget games there yet, I presume? Or is Valve working on a way to port every Windows game to Linux or something? I'm confused.

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The Steam box is definitely something I can get behind. There are definitely PC games I'd love to play, but I had to gut my gaming HTPC to keep my desktop machine alive some time ago, and also I really struggled with using a keyboard and mouse comfortable on the PC. What'd be great is something I can literally pick up and pop on my desk when I want to play keyboard/mouse games like Battlefield multiplayer, and then stick back next to the TV for gamepad games.

I actually use my laptop in this way to a limited extent, but it's only powerful enough to run a SNES emulator. Still, I've been having a great time playing the Donkey Kong Country and Mario World games via a wireless PS3 controller (which it turns out can be connected seamlessly to a PC via Bluetooth with relatively little pain). You know what? I should try Grim Fandango — does it have any gamepad support though?

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How extensive is Steam's Linux catalog at the moment? Not a whole lot of large budget games there yet, I presume? Or is Valve working on a way to port every Windows game to Linux or something? I'm confused.

How extensive is Steam's Linux catalog at the moment? Not a whole lot of large budget games there yet, I presume? Or is Valve working on a way to port every Windows game to Linux or something? I'm confused.

I think their target is future games more than older ones, re-establishing the PC as a major platform but on a new, free OS. Which makes it a completely different platform really, but I can't say I disapprove. That said, of course older games will continue to be ported over and they may even figure out some kind of insane emulation, I don't know.

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It's interesting to see if they have managed to get the big names to support this endeavor. We already know that Half-Life 3 is going to be a launch title, but what else?

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Backwards compatibility seems completely stupid to me. If you want to play old games, then hook up your old console. What are the chances that you are actually gonna go play an original Xbox game on the new 360 sequel? Less then 1% of people will use this feature but everyone will have to pay for it. I wouldnt even pay $1 more for backwards compatibility of disc based games.

What I do care about is backwards compatible XBLA games, but even then if its not available I will still purchase a new system.

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What I do care about is backwards compatible XBLA games, but even then if its not available I will still purchase a new system.

Supporting XBLA games would have exactly the same requirements as supporting regular 360 games. Either the new console can emulate the way a 360 works or it can't. Of course that doesn't mean XBLA games can't individually be updated to also support the Xbox successor, but that's a completely different thing and you'd probably have to buy them again.

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Backwards compatibility seems completely stupid to me. If you want to play old games, then hook up your old console. What are the chances that you are actually gonna go play an original Xbox game on the new 360 sequel? Less then 1% of people will use this feature but everyone will have to pay for it. I wouldnt even pay $1 more for backwards compatibility of disc based games.

What I do care about is backwards compatible XBLA games, but even then if its not available I will still purchase a new system.

Halo 2 was the killer Xbox Live app until Gears of War came out on the Xbox 360. That's hundreds of thousands if not millions of people playing an original Xbox game on an Xbox 360. I don't know if there's really a comparable situation this generation (maybe Minecraft XBLA?) but it's not entirely unheard of.

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I hang onto my old consoles, but it's not an elegant solution. I don't like keeping them constantly plugged in, so they're mostly in storage and need to be lugged out and hooked up whenever I want to use them.

Of course, there's the obvious solution of console manufacturers doing exactly what they've already been doing for ages now: backwards-compatibility with physical copies of last-gen games, with all previous generations being handled via digital library. Of course, there are obvious flaws (having to buy multiple licenses for the same game like the NES games on both Wii and 3DS Virtual Console; lots of games missing from services, especially licensed favourites like Ducktales or Beetle Adventure Racing; the disturbing recent trend of removing games from services without warning or reason; old games that use specialized hardware like the Centipede Trackball or the Steel Batallion Clusterfuck; etc), but it's easily the best solution available right now.

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Backwards compatibility is going to be a huge mess unless some very careful planning is done. This is the first generation that's really gone all the way back through time to the earliest games, but that's only good for these consoles. Take the Wii U for example: to play the versions of Mario World and whatnot that were released for the Wii, you have to actually put the Wii U into Wii mode where it literally emulates the entire Wii operating system. Only then can you go through the Wii's own different store, get the games, and play them. So in a way, when you're playing Mario World on the Wii U you're using an emulator that's in turn running another emulator that's running Mario World.

It's easy to imagine how as we go further down this line this could get very complicated. Really, each console manufacturer needs to abstract their shops somewhat and have each game show which systems it's compatible with, and then an ongoing effort will be needed to keep everything compatible with newer systems. Unless every future system can emulate each earlier one, which is unlikely because it's far from trivial to do while keeping performance high.

Of course this is where platforms like the PC come into their own, as they can and do handle the above scenarios pretty well due to how flexible games are developed in terms of hardware and OS support. Where else can you play Mario Galaxy in 1080p?

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wo wo wo. My plan for xbox720 launch day.

I buy the console. Transfer my gamer tag and all xbla game licenses. Download all my xbla games. Take old xbox in to my back garden and go all "office space" on it.

So you guy's think we wont be able to bring over our xbla games. Thats fucking nuts

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It's missing quite a few Humble Bundle games which also have Linux builds. I think there are at least 10 missing that could easily be added.

Then there's the missing stuff from Epic (Unreal1, UT, UT2003, UT2004), quite a bit of Id Software backlog could be added (specially the dosbox powered games like Doom).

So with a little investment from a bunch of people the number of games could easily be doubled.

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Razer's stab at a hybrid mobile/console-replacement seems a lot worse to me than Nvidia's.

With Nvidia, it's aiming to be very good at mobile gaming, figuring that it'll be good enough (and cheap enough) in the traditional console role to replace next-gen consoles. And quite frankly, I think it's a good step for strategic reasons around their Tegra systems.

Razer, on the other hand, seems to be coming out with a device that isn't particularly good at any one role because it's trying to straddle all three. Plus it's going to start at $999!

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Everyone always complains about backwards compatibility when a new console comes out -- but no-one seems to really care about it. Both MS and Sony pulled their support for it when it was shown that most players didn't care. I'd like it, but the chances are that I wouldn't go back as often as I think I would.

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How extensive is Steam's Linux catalog at the moment? Not a whole lot of large budget games there yet, I presume? Or is Valve working on a way to port every Windows game to Linux or something? I'm confused.

Yeah, I mean back catalog is one thing, but if I'm buying a new box, I probably want to play new games. Outside of indie stuff (for which linux support seems to be stronger), how likely is new stuff going to run on linux? Seems to me not very unless the steam box is crazy popular.

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Yeah, I mean back catalog is one thing, but if I'm buying a new box, I probably want to play new games. Outside of indie stuff (for which linux support seems to be stronger), how likely is new stuff going to run on linux? Seems to me not very unless the steam box is crazy popular.

I don't think the SteamBox is for you, or any of us. I think it's for the person that buys an iPhone because it's the iPhone! It's for the person that isn't technically competent or well informed. Newell even said something to that affect, calling it a "Turnkey solution" for those who wanted one. I.E. they might not even have a Steam account yet.

And with Linux support suddenly a big thing for many triple A publishers lack of games, or rather new games, might not be a problem. If you want backwards compatibility, buy your own PC and hook it up to the TV yourself. SteamBox is for the type of person that's not going to do that to begin with.

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Everyone always complains about backwards compatibility when a new console comes out -- but no-one seems to really care about it. Both MS and Sony pulled their support for it when it was shown that most players didn't care. I'd like it, but the chances are that I wouldn't go back as often as I think I would.

I think that's different for everyone. To be sure, I don't doubt a lot of players won't care, either because they want to play the new stuff or they don't have a library of old games. But I played dozens of hours of Psychonauts on the 360, Mario Sunshine on Wii and The Wind Waker too. So it's definitely an important thing for me personally.

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Everyone seems to have breezed over my comment re: Halo 2 on Xbox 360. If Microsoft wants to keep their mantle as the premier multiplayer platform among the consoles, backwards compatibility seems necessary as not to lose any momentum with evergreen mutliplayer titles like Halo 4, Gears of War 3, Call of Duty (all of them really), and Minecraft.

Beyond that, Microsoft seems full-steam ahead on Kinect but they still don't have good third-party support. Considering there's a very strong chance Kinect will be built into the next Xbox, it would seem foolhardy to throw away the (admittedly small, but still existent) back catalog of Kinect games. Put it another way, I imagine that Wii Sports sales probably got a little bump with the Wii U's release and stuff like Kinect Sports 1+2 bundle would also see a bump with Xbox 720 + bundled Kinect 2's release.

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I think that's different for everyone. To be sure, I don't doubt a lot of players won't care, either because they want to play the new stuff or they don't have a library of old games. But I played dozens of hours of Psychonauts on the 360, Mario Sunshine on Wii and The Wind Waker too. So it's definitely an important thing for me personally.

Well all I know is that I bought a load of XBox games when I first got my 360, and a few months after MS promised backwards compatibility for every title ("eventually"), they shut down the team responsible for it.

I sent them a few emails asking for information about the games I wanted to see supported, but I don't think I ever got a reply.

Then when Sony released the second version of the PS3, didn't they also not really bother with backwards compatibility?

It seems like it's something companies make promises about, but that most players won't actually care about when they don't follow through.

I was the only person I know who cared when MS reneged on their promise. But I never play XBox games now (even the few that work), so I guess I can't complain too much.

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A friend lent me the Xbox disc of oddworld stranger's wrath and that didn't load... Didn't really wanna play it anyway :)

Joncole has some really good points there that I hadn't really thought about, Xbox has to honour backwards capability!!! I'm gonna start a petition on charge.org :)

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I was pretty annoyed with 360 not offering backwards compatibility. Of the generation before, I had owned an Xbox first off, but as I was finishing a lot of school, I didn't have time to finish most of my Xbox games. In the mean time the drive died and I threw it away. When 360 announced to eventually have all games compatible, I held out on purchasing another Xbox until I was sure 360 had all of the games ready. Just went ahead and bought another used Xbox when they made the announcement that the 360 would not support all games after all. And probably because of that I didn't even get around to buying the console until the beginning of this year, years after I purchased both my Wii and PS3.

I don't know why console makers are so against including backwards compatibility when everything takes a damn DVD now. I was happy to get rid of my Gamecube to use a Wii only even though newer Wiis don't play Gamecube, I like that GBA played all previous game boy games, and that PS2 plays PS1 games. It would have been awesome for Sony to support PS2 for every iteration of the PS3, since it continues to support PS1 games in all models, but I guess that's not as tragic since I have to have a modded PS2 for some games and traded my fatter PS2 to a PS2 Slim, which is so tiny it's not obnoxious. Last year I regularly checked Ebay until I won a decently priced Sega CDX so I could have a nice compact awesome system instead of the ridiculously sized behemoth a Genesis+CD tends to be. Well worth it in my eyes.

I just like saving space and not getting rid of physical copies I already own so that companies can sell me the downloadable versions. It sucks most video game players are not interested in revisiting old games or going through backlogs of stuff they may have missed a generation ago, but I guess that's the nature of retail since last gen games don't coexist with current gen and most gamers would rather just buy digital versions of things now. I understand the decision the companies are making since I am really such a minority in the backwards compatibility camp.

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Shamelessly stolen from gaf, but all of you should check out his Oculus rift demo (skip to about the 20min mark)

In 2-3 years time will I be sat playing a steam box with a VR helmet on? Hmm the chances are quite likely. Dis is da nu shit.

Imagine the walking dead was made for VR (obviously changed to a first person game). Imagine how more immersive and impactful the emotional moments of the game would be. Sitting next to Clem on that train, looking out at the moving scenery and turning your head to look at her. thats exciting. I've gone all molyneux

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Sitting next to Clem on that train, looking out at the moving scenery and turning your head to look at her. thats exciting. I've gone all molyneux

What if you look out the window in the game and see whats outside of your window in your room?! Ask yourself, is life a game? What is game?

-P.Molydeux.

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I don't know why console makers are so against including backwards compatibility when everything takes a damn DVD now.

From what I know, it's a hardware issue, not a media format issue. The original PS3 could only play PS2 games because they literally built a PS2 inside the damned thing. When they redesigned it, removing the legacy components meant that they no longer had to spend a ton keeping up production of parts that were obsolete by nearly a decade.

No joke: Complaining about backwards-compatibility makes me feel spoiled. Keep in mind that the only dedicated game console that was backwards-compatible between the Atari 7200 and the PS2 was the Gameboy line (and the Gameboy Micro dropped that) and now it's an expected feature despite getting cumulatively difficult for hardware producers with diminishing returns on their best interests. Yeah, it sucks that I can't play Gamecube games on my Wii U, but Nintendo kept making Famicoms until 2003. Obviously they care about their old consoles, they're just trying to keep costs down for everyone instead of adding features for only a few.

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