360 BC List gets some new games

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I think it's pretty awesome that Microsoft is continuing support for backwards compatibility on the 360.

The following games were recently added to the BC list:

  • Black
  • Battlefront II
  • World Soccer Winning Eleven
  • Darkwatch
  • GTA San Andreas
  • Half-Life 2
  • Fable
  • Fable: The lost chapters
  • Forza Motorsport
  • Ninja Gaiden
  • Ninja Gaiden Black
  • SSX 3
  • Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
  • kill.switch
  • World Series Baseball 2K3

This is really typical of Microsoft, it all makes me wonder why people don't trust the corporation.  The backwards compatiblility that has been added for games highly optimized for the Xbox (Black, BF II) shows that Microsoft probably is capable of porting most if not all of the Xbox games to the 360 -- a feat that seemed almost impossible a year ago. Hopefully this customer-oriented resource dedigation will generate some comfort in people knowing that if they buy a 360 they will be able to eventually play their entire library of Xbox games.

This brings me to another point.  It is really really hard to fill the needs of all of Microsoft's customers.  The tradeoffs are extremely touchy too.  Would our customers rather have new 360 games or support for their old games?  I don't know for sure.  I'm pretty confident that people would get up in arms over either game delay or not having support for their favorite Xbox game (insert game name here).  The same goes with our OSes.  Should we support legacy OSes when we release a new one?  Apple, for the most part, does not.  When we build an OS with backwards compatibility in mind, we inevitably introduce bloat in our code base and customers get up in arms.  Conversely, if a customer's program doesn't run in the latest and greatest OS, they will be pretty angry -- espescially if a newer version of the application is not available or the application is expensive.  The tradeoffs must be very tricky, I'd imagine that Microsoft spends immense amounts of time researching what our customers want.