Busy Gamer News

I have to admit I'm of two minds about the Xbox 360. On the one hand, it's going to have:

• Wireless controllers that you can charge and play - and hopefully they'll be as reliable as the Nintendo WaveBird, only with vibration and a place to plug your Xbox Live headset
• Custom soundtracks in any game you like, with in-game sound effects cleanly mixed in
• Customization options for your dashboard and online persona including skins, avatars, an online gamer card with your stats and achievements, and even a removable faceplate for the system itself
• Some very promising launch or near-launch titles, such as Perfect Dark Zero, Dead or Alive 4, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, Call of Duty 2, Quake 4, Project Gotham Racing 3, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Final Fantasy XI - and sometime in 2006, there's the promise of Halo 3 and Resident Evil 5
• Hi-def graphics and 5.1 sound for every game
• A progressive scan DVD player (finally!)
• Remote PVR playback - if you have a Media Center PC with a tuner card, you can watch your TV shows anywhere you can plug in a 360

That's a lot to be excited about. But I know I won't be the only one who's extremely bummed by the underreported news that the 360 will have zero options to transfer your original Xbox saves. (So far, this news has only been spotted in an Official Xbox Magazine FAQ, buried amidst a sea of other questions.) That's right, even if they eventually emulate every Xbox 1 game for the Xbox 360 (which is doubtful), you'll have to start each and every one of them over if you want to play them.

All of your tracks, stats, and carefully decorated cars from Forza Motorsport? Gone. Those hard-earned DOA Extreme Beach Volleyball swimsuits that you spent weeks or maybe even months trying to get? Like they were never there. Your 100 hours of Morrowind progress? Forget about it. You're back at square one picking out a name and distributing skill points.

It's like the last four years never happened.

This little piggy went to market
I can see why Microsoft wouldn't fight too hard to enable you to port over your saves. Given a choice between playing a new title and starting an old one over again, which would you choose? Except for a few select games (like Halo 1 & 2), you'll probably choose the new stuff.

On the other hand, a rich library of high-quality original Xbox titles might slow your focus on acquiring the latest and greatest 360 games, reducing Microsoft's return on its loss-leader hardware investment. You do know that console makers lose money on every system they sell, right? They make it back by selling you games and accessories. If you mostly play the stuff you already own, they make zip.

Truth be told, Microsoft has never been fully behind the idea of backward compatibility. They've waffled on whether to include it for years and only seem to have tacked it on at the end when their focus groups no doubt insisted it be there or their credit cards would remain in their wallets. The official response has been if you really want to play your Xbox games, keep your Xbox.

That's fine, except for two things:

1. Not everyone is rich enough to keep every console they've ever owned
2. MTBDF

Some of you are nodding your heads about that second one, and the rest will need further explanation. It's important, so listen up.

Failure is inevitable
MTBDF is "mean time between disk failures." It's an industry measurement used to determine the durability of the spinning magnetic media that we store all of our digital crap on. Anyone who's owned the same computer for more than about 5-6 years knows that as inevitable as death and taxes is the fact that all hard drives fail. They'll always fail, eventually. It's just a matter of when.

The best drives have a high MTBDF, maybe 6-8 years. Some last longer, and some fail much faster. It's just an average. Even with a high MTBDF, your drive could fail after just one or two years. If you have important data, you should back it up or store it on a drive array (like RAID) that can protect against a single point of failure.

Basically, without a way to backup and preserve your hard earned Xbox saves, you're eventually going to be screwed. If you broke the rules and modded your Xbox, you're probably in the clear - you can back up your saves and keep backing them up to newer drives more or less forever.

The rest of us can transfer some of our saves to memory units, but odds are we can't afford to back everything up to these expensive though durable cards. Plus, some files won't fit because they're too big for the largest available memory unit - Knights of the Old Republic, anyone? Also, Microsoft allowed developers to lock their saves if they wanted so that they can never be backed up, at least not legitimately. DOAX, Steel Battalion and, for some reason, Transworld Snowboarding and Whacked! fall into this last category. [UPDATE - Nov. 21: I was wrong about Steel Battalion - it's game saves are unlocked. But the others were correct, and there are many more including Burnout 3, Forza Motorsport and Ninja Gaiden. See related Blog entry.] 

The customer is always right
Come November, everyone is going to wake up to the cold reality that their Xbox saves are useless or at least doomed to eventual loss. So, what's the answer?

Well, again, you could mod your Xbox (not that I actually advocate doing so) and then hope that the hackers eventually find a way to move them to your 360. (They will. That all security measures will eventually be broken is also inevitable, though it could take years.)

Or Microsoft could simply step up and do the right thing.

At minimum, Microsoft should offer an inexpensive peripheral for the 360 that supports original Xbox memory cards. Sony introduced a new memory card format for the PS2, but they still supported the legacy PS1 memory units right out of the box. I'm sure it's because they knew that if they had tried to force everyone to restart all of their Final Fantasy games, there'd be a mutiny.

I also suggest that Microsoft should permit the one-time transfer of all of your Xbox hard drive contents to a single Xbox 360, even the locked ones. I don't care if you'll need a crossover cable or a temporary storage locker on Xbox Live. Just get it done.

Our Xbox hard drives aren't getting any younger.

-=Gamewatcher

UPDATE - Oct. 18: Wow, I'm amazed at how many people completely missed the point. This really isn't a matter of backward compatibility, per se. It's about preserving your weeks and months and years of data. If you lost your Word documents, music, family photes and p0rn everytime you upgraded to a new computer or operating system version, you'd be pissed. But people seem willing to toss aside their game progress like it's nothing.

I've posted a followup to my Blog, including a summary of the response to date. There are rumors that Microsoft is quietly working on something, but nothing official yet.

[Read full Blog entry]