The Richter Scale^®

At E3 in May, the big hullabaloo about the Xbox 360 was whether it was going to be backward compatible with the Xbox. There was cheering at the E3 Xbox 360 pre-launch when Peter Moore of Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360 would in fact be able to play “leading” Xbox titles.

Now that the Xbox 360 is here, and the list of Xbox games it will play grows (and occasionally shrinks), does it really matter?

The reason I ask is that there’s no easy way to transfer saved game data between the Xbox and Xbox 360. So all the time and effort that I’ve invested in working my way through countless Xbox games is wasted on the Xbox 360, unless I want to redo all my hard labor on that platform. Heck, it’s just easier to keep my Xbox around and play that when I want, knowing that it is in fact 100% Xbox game compatible, than it is to bother playing Xbox games in my Xbox 360. This is one area where Sony got things right on the PS2 - it’s possible to use PSOne/PSX memory cards on the PS2. With the Xbox this is not viable, because the memory cards hold only 8MB, but one might have all sorts of downloaded (and paid for) level maps on the Xbox hard disk which consume a lot more than 8MB, so there’s no way to be portable without hacking the systems. And even then, it’s not clear that would work.

I would guess that where Xbox backward compatibility is important is to those who don’t own an Xbox in the first place, which I suspect rules out pretty much all current Xbox 360 owners, since fanatics and game jockeys are the most likely to have had the forethought or perseverance to have obtained an Xbox 360 at launch on November 22nd.

Time will tell if Microsoft’s backward compatibility effort bought them anything.