I can't decide what to think of it. It wasn't on letterhead, and I don't know about what it says. MS actually de-listed some games?

On last week's 1up Yours a forum poster on 1up posed the question to the 5 voices, who included Geoff Keighley and N'Gai Craol this week, what they might be doing if they weren't covering games form their current perspectives. The idea of game journos covering games from behind the scenes at studios, or covering the activities of some of the higher level executives from some of the publishers was an interesting topic.

As I listened to the cast further, I was excited by the idea that instead of seeing the constant PR that we get form these companies, we could have a Lester Bangs (there I said it, of course this is old news!) giving us the skinny on if deadlines were getting met from the foxholes, and what project milestones were being missed. We could have interviews with devs that don't get the attention that they deserve to see on the newsreels when we go to see the new Prince of Persia movie.



But wait! The idea of the embedded journo, with his khaki cargo vest and Kevlar cover more than likely would get fragged by the public relations groups with nary a pause. Companies, in particular publishers, are too highly concerned with perception and attitude of the customers. The idea of being open with information is something that is clearly not in their perceived best interest and would leave us in the dark to watch CNN for most of our game news like we get our information on the war in Iraq.

Is it all just a fantasy to see behind the curtain? Would you like to get all of that information?

Last night, and then this morning, downloadable content has been on my mind. The first thing I noticed was on Major Nelson's site:



I'm not so familiar with Rock Band, but I think that if I accidentally downloaded a track more than once I would be pissed. Has anybody had this problem, and were you okay with an 80 point mistake? Do we really live in a world where this can't be fixed?

Rock Band also got me thinking about the amounts of downloadable content. I've been looking forward to PixelJunk Monsters getting a boost for time later this month, Puzzle Quest getting an add-on and spent about an hour playing the new Rocky and Bullwinkle board on Pinball FX:



The picture is from a Date East table I have played in the past, but the new Pinball FX table is a lot of fun. I've gotten to where I expect a great deal of DLC for the games that I play, and have been pretty satisfied. Which ones have too much or not enough? When does something like Rock Band reach the saturation point, or is it more like karaoke? The more the merrier.

I run this BC stuff into the ground all the time (ask any blogger, journo, or PR guy that will even open my e-mails, thanks N'Gai!) but it's about that time again. One of the links I've gotten used to checking every few days can be found here. Every quarter MS was updating the list at the link, and it generally made news each time, but here we are with no update in about 5 months. Who cares? Well as someone who never trades anything in (and conversely never buys anything new either), I've still got a number of games I'm looking forward to playing again.

I would have thought that when Xbox Originals hit, Microsoft would have come out with a definative statement on what the future of disc based backwards compat would be. Would we still get updates? Would we see this list put in concrete, but then only expect that these games were capable of play on Originals? Or finally could we expect future downlaodable titles on Live that would increase this total number of Xbox prime games? Potentially I could still play a lot of cool games on system link like Project Snowblind and Timesplitters 2. I can play all of my PS2 games on my triple, why not xbox games on the 360?

So in conclusion, I think all we need to see is something final on the issue. With as many people making statements back and forth on the issue over the last couple of years I think that is reasonable.