Xbox Game Pass for Console, PC, and Android

Aristophan wrote:
WizKid wrote:
Dyni wrote:

How does Psychonauts hold up? I love the look of the new one, so I'm trying to decide if I should give the first one a look before it releases.

I’m playing through it now, I think it holds up fine, the cutscenes are a bit low-rez. It’s still one of my favorite games.

I really enjoyed the game, but the last level is a huge pain. If you find yourself getting frustrated with the platforming, just YouTube the ending.

Yeah, the last level isn't just a test of all the platforming skills from the rest of the game, it also involves a fairly unforgiving time constraint. I YouTube'd the ending and felt no lack of satisfaction with the game.

Started Haven last night. I am ADORING it. IMAGE(https://emojipedia-us.s3.dualstack.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/thumbs/240/google/274/sparkling-heart_1f496.png)

I would have never tried it without Game Pass. Now? I am just gonna curl up with it tonight and enjoy it some more. I want to continue this journey with Kay and Yu IMAGE(https://emojipedia-us.s3.dualstack.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/thumbs/240/google/274/revolving-hearts_1f49e.png)

IMAGE( https://i.imgur.com/ykrAUxm.jpg)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/zorJ5K6.jpg)

I’ve been smitten by Snowrunner. It’s got some serious problems though. It’s biggest problem is that it gives you all of the missions at once, even though you don’t have access to the equipment required to complete the mission. Maybe just grey out the missions that you couldn’t possibly complete? Maybe give a wide variety of potentially helpful tips rather than repeatedly telling my to take the truck out of low gear? (I wasn’t in low gear.) Maybe hold my hand through the process of tuning a truck to my needs once?

Something I think all driving games need is a cockpit view in which you can change the opacity of the vehicle.

I've completed the first Act of Backbone which is only on PC Game Pass, a 2D sidescrolling pixel art adventure game, aiming for a hardboiled detective vibe in a world with of animal people (like Blacksad or Zootopia). It's odd. Basically you're a PI given a pretty typical assignment (find evidence of a cheating spouse) that ends up getting you entangled into a conspiracy in the criminal underworld.

A lot of the interaction so far has been through dialogue, but the mechanics of the dialogue trees aren't always clear to me, especially given how at times the options you're presented are different branching paths, each of which you can return to, while other times they are one-and-done choices--I always prefer to have those differences made clear. And there are inconsistencies in where the game seems to be giving you choices about how to define your characters vs. when it has narrowed those choices because of who the game thinks your character is. I can appreciate either storytelling method, but when the game sometimes lets me have my detective make responsible or diplomatic choices but at other points only gives me options that are like "drink until you puke, or, pick a fight with a bunch of goons"--I didn't want my character to do either of those things!

There have been interesting sequences in dialogue though. There have been times when it feels like sussing out the optimal way to talk to someone has yielded benefits, and other times where it seems like I put my foot in my mouth and created an obstacle for myself that didn't need to be there. There have been multiple paths to achieving a few objectives, so I suspect that the game accommodates you succeeding or failing in those dialogue options, although at other times I think my failure was inevitable. It's doing a good job of at least creating the illusion that many of my choices matter and I should pay attention to the people I'm speaking with and try to read their vibe, which is cool.

There's also been some sneaking mechanics and puzzle solving. The sneaking wasn't exactly fun but wasn't too hard either. The puzzles have been fine, but a)for whatever reason I couldn't interact with one using the gamepad, but using the mouse let me do what I needed to do, so watch out for that, and b)the puzzles do not make any sense in-universe--this goes beyond the "I left a post-it note to remind myself that the door code is 1-2-3-4" to "to remember this door code, I will take six postcards, punch holes out of them, mark different shapes around the holes, and then write somewhere else a series of shapes that corresponds to the numbers near those shapes in the holes on the postcards." Forgivable, but a bit silly.

I'm really interested to see where this goes. I could see this ending up an adventure gaming classic, but I could also see the story falling on its face or the mechanics being too frustrating.

RawkGWJ wrote:

I’ve been smitten by Snowrunner. It’s got some serious problems though. It’s biggest problem is that it gives you all of the missions at once, even though you don’t have access to the equipment required to complete the mission. Maybe just grey out the missions that you couldn’t possibly complete? Maybe give a wide variety of potentially helpful tips rather than repeatedly telling my to take the truck out of low gear? (I wasn’t in low gear.) Maybe hold my hand through the process of tuning a truck to my needs once?

Something I think all driving games need is a cockpit view in which you can change the opacity of the vehicle.

Yup, I'm greatly enjoying it too, but find the camera to be mildly frustrating at times.

And broken tips too, for sure.

garion333 wrote:
RawkGWJ wrote:

I’ve been smitten by Snowrunner. It’s got some serious problems though. It’s biggest problem is that it gives you all of the missions at once, even though you don’t have access to the equipment required to complete the mission. Maybe just grey out the missions that you couldn’t possibly complete? Maybe give a wide variety of potentially helpful tips rather than repeatedly telling my to take the truck out of low gear? (I wasn’t in low gear.) Maybe hold my hand through the process of tuning a truck to my needs once?

Something I think all driving games need is a cockpit view in which you can change the opacity of the vehicle.

Yup, I'm greatly enjoying it too, but find the camera to be mildly frustrating at times.

And broken tips too, for sure.

After my last session I’m pretty sure I’m done with this. I won’t bore you with the details, but it feels like this game is designed to frustrate the player with every decision they make. I was having more fun when I didn’t understand the systems because I couldn’t see how heavily they were stacked against the player.

Sometimes it wants to be a game and sometimes it wants to be a hardcore sim. All I want is a sandbox to drive trucks and trailers in. Oh well.

Had a similar experience with Snowrunner. I did the tutorials, then got to where they dump you off with a MASSIVE list of missions. I don't know if I was just picking the wrong ones, or if there were some upgrades I was supposed to get, but it seemed like I kept getting sent places where the roads were passable, but barely. I wasn't getting stuck, but I wasn't going faster than a painfully slow crawl, and I couldn't figure out how to do better. I'm sure I was missing something, but I haven't felt like going back in and trying to figure out what yet.

I think the last straw for me was trying to deliver something to a nearby farm, only to pull in and find out that the entire farm is covered in deep mud, and just getting the trailer to the right spot took twenty minutes.

Here’s what made me throw in the towel:

Couldn’t complete missions because my big haulers were highway vehicles. There are no highways which haven’t been smothered in mud, and so I couldn’t drive on them. Couldn’t deliver goods. Couldn’t make money.

Got my scout truck to the point where it could go anywhere without getting stuck, but it couldn’t pull a trailer without getting stuck. Got it to where it could haul goods almost anywhere. This made it so inefficient on fuel usage that I couldn’t do a single leg on one tank of gas. Dropped my load. Refueled. Went back to my load to finish the job and I was already running on fumes. Pulled it a few feet and ran out of gas.

If I was a controller thrower I’d be down one controller.

Now I’m actually considering going back in. I was thinking that if I sold the four highway tractors I found I might be able to buy an off-road hauler. But I’m not sure if I’ve even unlocked the ability to buy an off-road hauler.

I finished Backbone over the last few days. It's not great.

The art is beautiful. The mechanics set up in the first act are pretty good, and the story in the first two acts is solid, with lots of good writing. But the game just clearly got away from this team. I don't know if they needed more time or money or just better editing.

I mentioned the way the mechanics were set up in the first act deliberately. The first act has puzzles, it has some light stealth encounters, it has some problems that you appear to be able to solve in multiple different ways. The rest of the game has...almost none of that. It's interesting to see that on Steam, they released the first act as a free "Prologue" and it has very good reviews, but the full release is rated as "mixed" -- seems they set up some expectations that the full game didn't live up to, mechanically.

I could forgive the game pretty quickly turning into much more of a visual novel over time if it told its story better. Without getting into spoilers, the end of the third act takes a huge turn that drastically changes what this game is about in a way that really does not work. The game it calls most strongly to mind for me is Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy, which I recall having a similar arc where you're solving a reasonably straightforward mystery until suddenly the story turns into otherworldly gobbledygook. The first two acts set up a perfectly sufficient small mystery that reveals a larger conspiracy that did not need to take a turn into loony tunes land to be interesting. And the pace of the story goes so wildly off the rails, one seemingly important character that was interesting to me almost entirely disappears, while one of the few other semi-developed characters exits the story in an incredibly abrupt way that I thought it was obvious it was going to turn out to have been a dream until it wasn't. I don't know if different writers worked on Acts 1-2 vs. Acts 3-5, or if they had an outline that they thought made sense that they didn't know how to edit when they got going or what, but whatever happened, it didn't work. And my understanding is, although the game gives you all these choices about how to approach things, they all lead to the same ending. I'm not necessarily opposed to that--I was frustrated to learn that that's true, but I felt like they maintained the illusion that my choices mattered fairly well for most of the game--but that makes me question their achievement choices, as I got an achievement for having trusted a character when I met them, and I see there's also an achievement for not trusting them, which suggested to me this is the sort of game you'd play through with different approaches, but if they all lead to the same end point, why bother?

One other thing that is just off about this game is the sound. There are scenes where there is some nice music, I think even written just for this game. But overall, the game is bizarrely quiet. When the game is not playing one of these very deliberate short songs, there's barely any sound at all, and though occasionally there is some detailed sounds of a character walking across the room, most interactions are strangely silent. It's yet another part of this game that feels like they didn't have the time or resources to do this properly.

Last complaint--the text flows strangely. Most of the game (especially after the first 2 acts) is just dialogue choices. But the second you pick your dialogue, the other person's lines appear instantly above your next set of dialogue choices which are there immediately, in a way that makes it difficult to force yourself to actually parse their interaction. I often find myself annoyed with games that parse out dialogue too slowly, especially the style that I often associate with Japanese games where the letters slowly tic by in rhythm with the speech. But this is the opposite problem--there is no space for the text to breathe and at times I found myself just inferring what the response to my last line was based on the next set of dialogue choices. Some of that is on me, of course, but the presentation really steered me into it.

It was a pretty short game, about 4-5 hours. It looks great and has some interesting aspects to it, and I will be very curious to see what this developer does next. If you're into adventure games, it's worth checking out. But if you stop at the end of the 2nd act, you'll not be missing much.

mrlogical wrote:

I finished Backbone over the last few days. It's not great.

I posted about this game in the thread about games you finished lately and had a lot of similar thoughts. It's hard to tell if the issue was just a lack of resources or poor direction/management of the game but the difference in overall quality and cohesiveness of the game between the prologue and the full version is really striking. Such a shame because it was a really promising game.

Dark Alliance is now available for pre-install in the PC Xbox app, and will unlock in about 15 hours.

Pink Stripes, yeah, sounds like we had a very similar experience! Frustrating that the game had these little bits of high quality that were just overwhelmed by bad decisions and/or lack of investment. Oh well!

Over the weekend I finally finished Full Throttle Remastered. I bought this game when it first came out (meaning 1995, not the remaster) but never finished it. Playing now with a readily accessible walkthrough for those portions of the game where I got stuck was a good experience. I don't love the remastered look of the game--it looks fine, but less stylish than the original (which you can press a button and swap back to), just a little more bland overall. It's always funny to play one of these classic adventure games with access to a walkthrough. Instead of getting stuck for days, trying every item on every other item and clicking every last pixel on every last screen, being able to just look up what the next step is (and learning that, for example, if you walk to the right side of this screen the screen will suddenly scroll to reveal another area, despite never having done that in any previous location) turns a 40+ hour experience into more like a 4 hour experience. It's better this way for sure. Overall I'd say it was good, but I wasn't exactly kicking myself for failing to finish it back in the 90s.

Speaking of Tim Schafer games, though, I am pumped to play Psychonauts 2, so I downloaded the original to play with it a bit. A search of my gmail inbox shows I purchased that game back in 2007, I assume played via backwards compatibility on 360. I remember liking it a lot, but playing the first 20 minutes or so yesterday, that game feels a lot older now (I guess some things have happened in the last 14 years). I was tempted to show Psychonauts to my 9 year old, but I think I'll show her the sequel instead.

IMAGE(https://news.xbox.com/en-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/TW_Available-Today_Coming-Soon_templates_6.23.2021_3.jpg?w=1920)

Coming Soon to Xbox Game Pass: Gang Beasts, Limbo, Prodeus, and More

Ooo bug fables!

Very keen for Iron Harvest. I adored Company of Heroes back in the day, and the mecha flavour suites me just fine.

I've heard very mixed reviews and the high price has kept me away. Perfect "dip in" Game Pass game. Bring it!

charlemagne wrote:

Ooo bug fables!

Yup, I almost bought it for $17 on the Switch sale last week. Glad I waited!

I played some Dark Alliance last night. Not a great first impression? The basic mechanics seem okay in terms of mindless fun. It feels like a game that would be at its best in coop, so after completing the tutorial, I chose "quick play" which the game told me would match me with another appropriate group. As a level 1 player I ended up getting paired with a level 8 player on a mission that was out of the first act of missions, but I figured the game must account for that. It seemed like I could play with this rando for a little bit, but I soon discovered that, even if I could still kill many of the enemies, every 3 minutes or so I'd just get one-shot by a grunt. After my fourth or fifth revive I bailed and started the first main mission, after setting my world to 'public' so that maybe someone could join me. The game was more playable after that--I didn't die once on the first main mission--but it was also kind of a slog getting through what felt like a very long level with lots of enemies. There's still a part of me that's tempted by the loot aspect--I got some decent looking gear by the end of that level--and the ways you can level up your character, but, I don't know. I'll probably give it another try or two, maybe give multiplayer another chance, but this does feel destined to be one of those games that stays on my harddrive for way too long because I think maybe I'll play it again but I never will.

Also I hadn't mentioned I've played a lot of The Wild at Heart. It's a really good Pikmin x Metroidvania thing. The only reason I haven't played dozens of hours of this is that my 9 year old really got into it with me, so for now I'm only playing it with her around to watch. It's really good though, it is really satisfying in its deep gameyness. My only complaint is I occasionally have too much trouble figuring out where to go next--there are different skills you can acquire to get past different obstacles in the map, but it took me such a long time to find the first ability that let me get past an obstacle that it was a bit frustrating. Also there's a day-night mechanic where, once the sun goes down, a creepy bad guy comes to attack you and your only way to avoid getting killed by him is to stand near a light source. You can sleep to change it back to day, and you can craft some flares to make additional protected spaces, but also there's no benefit that I can see to doing stuff at night as opposed to during the day, so it just feels like a needless hassle that interrupts my progress, at least for now.

Dyni wrote:
charlemagne wrote:

Ooo bug fables!

Yup, I almost bought it for $17 on the Switch sale last week. Glad I waited!

Me too!

Also works in Windows browsers - never install anything again!

Huge day for Microsoft. Just for grins I decided to head over to Xbox.com on my MacBook Air. Chose Carrion, don't have a controller connected or anything, but elected to continue anyway. It fired right up.

Ok, what about a beefier game? Halo Master Chief Collection loaded in 15 seconds, and the title screen looks amazing on my MacBook.

Ok, Destiny 2 takes forever to load on my One X, lemme try it. Title screen, in a Safari browser, in 12 seconds.

OMG. Will try actually playing (again, no controller and at the periphery of my wifi in the office), but what a validation that this gen on is all about Game Pass as a service and not the hardware. This is the final nail in the coffin of me ever purchasing another Xbox, but it's also the start of me paying $15 a month to Microsoft in perpetuity. Amazing.

EDIT: The happy place will be when they release a Xbox stick or smart app I can pair a controller to for the TV, but this is still really cool.

Do the newest Xbox controllers work on a Mac?

LeapingGnome wrote:

Do the newest Xbox controllers work on a Mac?

Yep! PS4, PS5, and Xbox controllers all work.

I will try it out on my iPad when I get home from work. (3am’ish)

Sigh.... still not available in all regions....
Hope this service comes soon to Mexico.... only a few games work through the android game pass app, on windows PC I get this screen:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/4RkhhsF.png)

Sonrics wrote:

Sigh.... still not available in all regions.... :(

Same in Australia.

Just add it already please. I've got some slime that needs ranching while I'm not at home.

WizardM0de wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:

Do the newest Xbox controllers work on a Mac?

Yep! PS4, PS5, and Xbox controllers all work.

!!!

Trying this out tonight!

How do I start streaming on my MacBook or iPhone?

Balthezor wrote:

How do I start streaming on my MacBook or iPhone?

Xbox.com/play

firesloth wrote:
Balthezor wrote:

How do I start streaming on my MacBook or iPhone?

Xbox.com/play

Pairing an Xbox controller is required.