This past Thursday saw Microsoft officially roll out the New Xbox One Experience, and along with it came Xbox 360 Backwards Compatibility, a highly requested feature for the Xbox One by Xbox owners. Over 100 games came with this new update, including the complete Gears of War franchise, the Sega Genesis-era Sonic the Hedgehog main storyline games (1, CD, 2 and 3,) the Nintendo 64 classics Perfect Dark and Banjo-Kazooie, and more. Microsoft has even gone as far as to make available DLC free for certain games, such as the original Borderlands, and even for Fallout 3 (by popping in the 2nd disc of the GOTY edition.) Some of the games also look better and perform smoother than it’s original counterpart.
However, there seems to be a couple issues with some of the backwards compatible games, mostly related to input lag, and frame rate drops.
Neogaffers are reporting some issues with Gears of War 3, Dirt 3 and Gears of War Judgment, where in Gears Judgment, placing the game on an external HDD seems to improve performance, however, for Dirt 3 and Gears of War 3, there seems to be significant frame rate issues. There were also reported issues with the Genesis-era Sonic games and Call of Juarez: Gunslinger in terms of input lag, but that doesn’t seem to be substantiated.
A fix, at least temporary, is to install your Xbox 360 games on a USB 3.0 external hard disk to improve the performance of your games.
Here’s hoping there will be future fixes for these small issues, however, Microsoft has done a bang up job bringing a portion of the Xbox 360 library to the current generation of gaming, while keeping a promise to listen to their audience, ensuring the Phil Spencer reign over the Xbox Kingdom continues gaining momentum.
