DF Direct Weekly #274: OG Xbox/Xbox 360 PC 'Back Compat', Valve - Memory Crisis "Getting Worse"

**Rich** (0:02)
Hello there, and a warm welcome if you like that sort of thing to this, the 274th edition of DF Direct Weekly, our weekly show where we tend to discuss the latest gaming and technology news. Joining me for this particular episode, a warm welcome, a proper one, to Tom Morgan. Hello.

**Tom Morgan** (0:21)
Hello, meeting me again. How are you doing?

**Rich** (0:25)
Doing alright, thanks. And following up with the Me Against Stakes, it's John Lilliman.

**John Lilliman** (0:30)
Hey Rich, a word on the street is that Count Binface is asking for Shenmue 4 and a reopening of Sega World London, the Trocadero Station, you know, so it's like I'd be on to that because I missed it. I didn't get a chance to go to England before that point. So did you ever go to Sega World London?

**Rich** (0:51)
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was pretty awesome.

**John Lilliman** (0:54)
It looks amazing from the videos.

**Rich** (0:57)
Yeah, it had those mid 90s VR setups as well.

**John Lilliman** (1:02)
Oh, sweet.

**Rich** (1:04)
It was a very special place. So I'm fully on board with the Count Binface Manifesto there, John.

**John Lilliman** (1:11)
Yes, I agree.

**Rich** (1:12)
Sensible policies for a happier Britain. That's what I say.
Anyway, do I remember what's happened?

**Tom Morgan** (1:21)
Do you remember the VR that they had on show at the Sega World back in the day? How laggy it was.

**John Lilliman** (1:28)
It was bad.

**Rich** (1:29)
It was bad, but it was kind of cool, right? Those big pods.

**John Lilliman** (1:32)
I actually just used one of those again recently.

**Rich** (1:35)
Okay.

**John Lilliman** (1:35)
And I hope to do a whole retrospective on it down the line because I have access to the full selection of software for that virtuality station. So it could be something coming in the future eventually, but it's cool. It's really weird.

**Rich** (1:51)
The lag is pretty bad, though, isn't it?

**John Lilliman** (1:54)
I would say the thing that surprised me is the hand tracking is incredible. It's so good. Like, you're like, how is it this good considering the age? But the problem is that the frame rates on all the games, it's really, really low.
So it feels kind of like you're like looking around at like 12 FPS. It's not great.

**Tom Morgan** (2:12)
Wow. Oh, boy.

**Rich** (2:14)
I guess we should get into the show. But before we do, a quick shout out to digitalfoundry.net, our website president, Sir Will's given me some notes and some highlights for this week. Basically, he did an article where he used a whole bunch of razor peripherals, including sort of interactive rumble to play 7 First Light, which is utterly bizarre, but well worth checking out. Obviously, we're going to be talking about the Xbox back compat situation for PC in the next segment, actually. But we actually had a report on that, that went live simultaneous with Xbox's announcement. We'll talk about the reasons why there wasn't a video shortly. It turns out that having previously said that the RTX 50 Series Super line is coming back, apparently, it's been delayed again.
Read about that on the site. And yeah, ARC G3 handhelds using Intel Panthelec. The pricing has been announced, got to say, not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but who knows.
But that's what's happening on df.net. I guess we should kick off the direct proper. Okay, so our first news story of the week, and it's good news from Xbox for a change. We actually have the beginnings of Xbox backwards compatibility. I'm going to put inverted commas around that for PC. And basically we have the release of a quartet of OG Xbox games that you can now run under emulation effectively on the PC. The four games are Blinkz, The Time Sweeper, Conker Live and Reloaded, Crimson Skies, High Road to Revenge, and Bill Gates' favorite, Fusion Friendly. Friendly even.

**John Lilliman** (4:02)
Fusion Friendly, that sounds good.

**Rich** (4:03)
Fusion Friendly. It's a very friendly game, to be fair.
Where should we go with this? Tom. Well, all three of us actually experienced this, and we did have early access to this, which is how we were able to get our article up on df.net alongside Xbox's announcement. No video, though, and that's because we encountered a number of issues, which meant that we couldn't really show the games the way they should be shown. We'll talk about that shortly. I'm going to come to you first on that, Tom.
This is pretty good news, right? The ability to, I mean, this is clearly the first of the first games of a much wider initiative to bring all of those older or hopefully all of those older console games onto Xbox on a more wider, broader platform, which does encompass PC.