Comments 1,114

Re: Poll: What Do You Think Of The Spyro Reignited Trilogy On Xbox Game Pass?

carlos82

I was always disappointed that this, the Crash Trilogy and Crash Team Racing all targeted 30fps when the equivalent Mario games are all 60fps on weaker hardware, so for that reason alone I was never particularly impressed by these and would give them a 7 at best.

That said I would put the Spyro games above Crash but still feel they could have done a better job bringing them to modern consoles

Re: Xbox Boss Provides Multiple Reasons Why A 'PS5 Pro' Competitor Isn't Necessary

carlos82

Let's be honest, if Xbox's console sales were in a much better position, then they absolutely would be launching a "Pro" console.

As for the Pro itself, is it needed? Not really, but personally I'm very happy with it. I had started to buy my games on PC as I wasn't entirely happy with the performance/image quality of many console games and the Pro has solved this

Re: Is Xbox Successful Right Now? Phil Spencer Shares His Thoughts

carlos82

"He actually pointed to the idea of a $1,000 console as being something that Xbox needs to avoid if the company wants to reach new players"

A dig at the Pro or not, the PS5 Pro does point towards an uncomfortable reality where the next generation of consoles are likely to launch at least as expensive and possibly more so. We've never had a generation where 4 years in, the hardware costs more than at launch.

Looking at the likelihood Xbox and PS sticking with AMD, their CPU's have made massive gains due to the addition of 3D V-cache, so how they go about trying to incorporate that into an SOC and keeping cooling and costs under control will be a huge challenge

Re: SEGA Delisting Multiple Xbox Games This December

carlos82

Xbox is hit the worst here as things like that Streets of Rage collection is fantastic and Crazy Taxi is always good fun, even if not as good as the Dreamcast original

I'd highly recommend picking these up whilst you still can and can only hope this is leading to some new collections from Sega

Re: Multiple Xbox Cloud Gaming Improvements Reportedly On The Way

carlos82

@Astig I've tried pretty much everything, by default I split my 5ghz and 2.4ghz signals and Xcloud has been poor whether I'm trying it on console, PC, wired/wireless or on mobile and as I said, Stadia worked great on the exact same setup.

So in my case I'm fairly certain that my location is the biggest issue

To add to this, I'd suggest that if such a service requires this level of troubleshooting, then its not fit for purpose. As your average person is simply not going to do this, they'll just try it once and see it doesn't work and move on

Re: Multiple Xbox Cloud Gaming Improvements Reportedly On The Way

carlos82

I'll preface this by saying that it could simply be because of my location but Xcloud has basically been useless for me whenever I've tried it. Either by having very poor image quality or when trying to play Halo, I had unplayable levels of input lag.

I did try the now dead Google Stadia and that was a significantly better experience in both regards.

I'm not really the target audience for such a service as I'm unwilling to sacrifice the benefits of having the game installed on the device I'm using but it really has to be a much better experience and actually work, no matter where you are

Re: Xbox Series X Teardown Shows New 2024 Models Are More Efficient

carlos82

@OldGamer999 I agree, the price of this is comical, being only marginally cheaper than the disc based version. I get some people don't care for physical media but you'd have to be a bit mad to buy this. On Amazon you can even get refurbished X's for ÂŁ400 and unlike Playstation, there isn't even an option to get a disc drive later if you change your mind

Re: Rumour: Microsoft Employees 'Completely Confused' About New Xbox Strategy, Says Insider

carlos82

Xbox has a strategy? They seem to be making it up as they go along recently and the sad reality is that I don't ever see their console numbers improving when even some of their upcoming games are going to be multiplatform.

Also what is the selling point of that middle tier of Gamepass which has had a lot of games removed from it? That won't increase subscription numbers.

There are a quite a few Xbox games I want to play hut I'll never own another Xbox console as I don't need to

Re: Xbox Series X Vs. PS5 Pro: What Are We Missing Out On?

carlos82

Not much by the look of it, just seems to be quality mode settings at 60fps with the help of upscaling that's better than FSR. It still seems to have mediocre RT performance but this time at 60fps instead of 30.

Even without the ludicrous price it seems like a lacklustre upgrade but because of that price it's laughable

Re: Report: Suicide Squad Dev Rocksteady Suffers Layoffs At Warner Bros. HQ

carlos82

@themightyant the issue is that it's much harder for these kinds of games to gain any traction, due to their nature of requiring significantly more of your time than single player games. So whilst there is a very large market for them, most of those customers already have the ones they want to play and are unlikely to change.

Sure some new successes can happen, such as Palworld and there's probably mobile stuff I'm not aware of but the problem here is the AAA market to treat them like a major release. Making them with these huge budgets, which is just mind blowingly stupid at this point as the likes of Anthem, Avengers, Suicide Squad and now Concord are all basically dead or about to be, whilst losing a ton of money in the process.

Re: Poll: What Do You Think Of Crash Bandicoot On Xbox Game Pass?

carlos82

It's a great remaster in the sense of them replicating the original games but as someone who played Mario 64 before these back then, I was never a huge fan but still enjoyed them.

Back to the remasters themselves and I was always disappointed that this, Spyro and CTR were only 30fps games. It'd crazy that Nintendo make Mario Kart and Odyssey at 60fps on Switch and then these are lower fps on the more powerful consoles

Re: Talking Point: Is Local Co-Op On Xbox Still Important To You In 2024?

carlos82

Local multiplayer is far more important to me than online play, it's really stupid that just to play a game with my son, I often need 2 pieces of hardware and two screens and then an online subscription to play multiplayer a few feet apart.

This is why the Switch is very important for our gaming but even that is sometimes a step back from 3DS with its download play multiplayer.

We need more split screen/local multiplayer games

Re: Xbox Game Pass Changes Partly Because Microsoft 'Isn't Seeing Strong Growth', Claims Analyst

carlos82

"PC & Mobile gamers haven’t purchased Game Pass at the rate Microsoft expected"

The mobile part of this is what gets me. I'm sick of hearing people talking about these billions of mobile gamers in the context of console style gaming. The overwhelming majority of those gamers are just playing free to play games that don't even resemble console games and were NEVER going to subscribe to a service en mass to play the likes of Halo

Re: US Sales Figures Reveal Interesting Stats About Xbox Series X|S & Hellblade 2

carlos82

For Xbox, the console is increasingly becoming less and less important to them and is now effectively just an option to play their games.

As for Hellblade, well it was never a "big" game and I've got to be honest, it's also the worst game I've played this year

Going forward though, there are some very promising games on the horizon with Indiana Jones in particular later this year

Re: Xbox Suffers 'Major Outage' As Servers Go Down For Most Players

carlos82

@OldGamer999 yeah it certainly needs a better solution, for Switch it's something like an automatic 7 day check in for NSO, I'm not sure what it is for Gamepass, I've seen 30 days for PC but nothing about console, though I'm curious why I and another here can play Gamepass games but you can't

Re: Xbox Suffers 'Major Outage' As Servers Go Down For Most Players

carlos82

@101Force Is that because the other user hasn't been set up to have that Xbox as it's home console? Looking at mine I can freely sign in and out of accounts but I never set the other one as a home console.

Overall the system definitely needs looking at and made more user friendly for such situations