It's unreasonable to expect perfection in games, but some are running quite well. When I look to test an emulator and report bugs, I like to start with games I have a lot of experience with as early candidates. It helps me stay grounded and have a direct reference point as to what correct output is without having to know much about the emulator. I also wanted to choose a game that was likely to run well.
That led me to try out Castle Crashers and discover a rather fascinating rabbit-hole surrounding Xbox Live Arcade games. Upon loading up Castle Crashers in Xenia, the game played pretty much how I remembered it.
Xenia itself showed some nifty details in its presentation. I particularly liked how the Windows task bar would show an icon for the game that's currently running instead of the Xenia logo. Xenia only supports XInput controllers, but they work well and don't require any configuration whatsoever. On my PS4 controller, everything worked without any trouble. It was actually a bit surprising for rumble to be working without me having to go through any kind of configuration menu.
For those without a controller, there are keyboard controls as well, though it is not quite as natural as using a real controller. The one major problem I ran into is a rather common one in emulators: the text was garbled. According to footage of older builds, this wasn't always the case. As someone experienced with other emulators, I know how tricky it can be to get text rendering properly.
This wasn't any real cause for concern and I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't weeded out with other rendering issues across other games in the future. Considering that this was the only major issue I had run into, I was incredibly impressed To make things a bit clearer, here's a screenshot grabbed from someone playing the demo on console.
Considering that the game was playing perfectly fine outside of minor graphical issues, this was rather frustrating. After looking at various documentation and asking around, I found out that an Xbox Live Arcade game and its demo are the same file. The only difference is that you need a bit set to make the game run outside of demo mode.
I figured that Xenia not setting this mask was some kind of anti-piracy measure in order to prevent users from downloading the demos off of their Xbox and then running the full version on Xenia.
That wasn't actually the case; while most titles are still available on the Xbox Live Arcade, Xenia devs claim that this is not a piracy issue. I couldn't believe that was the real public response, but it truly appeared to be the case. People within Xenia's discord echoed that and that's how I received that screenshot. I was rather upset that the emulator was being limited for what seemed like such as nonsensical reason. However, Rick showed up and answered my questions directly, giving some incredible insight into the reasoning behind the decision and how things developed the way they did.
Finally, everything made sense. While I don't entirely agree with all of the reasoning and methodology, I can at least understand the purpose and ideas behind what they were trying to accomplish. As Rick explained, simply hacking it the other way isn't a real solution, so Xenia itself did need to catch up a bit before it could really be fixed. I disagree primarily with the fact that creating hurdles for general users is a good thing.
As annoying as some users can be, they're an important part of testing and maintenance. More users means there are more headaches, but it also leads to regressions being caught quicker, more obscure games being tested, and people like me with little coding expertise being able to more easily contribute.
In this case, it just depends on the developer if the extra noise is worth it, and they determined at that time that it wasn't. With games like Halo 3 and Red Dead Redemption running in modern builds, having this limitation didn't make sense from the standpoint of limiting the community.
And in the above quote, Rick agreed, saying that he was open to changing it if it was implemented in a reasonable manner. And things quickly seem to be heading that way as developers seem poised to allow the license mask to be customized on a per game basis thanks to Xenia's improved configuration infrastructure that didn't exist back when these decisions were made.
I came into this article because I was frustrated, in the end I learned a lot more about Xenia than I expected. Titles range from classic console and arcade video games, to new games designed from scratch.
The Xbox Live Arcade service was officially announced on May 11, at Microsoft's E3 press conference [1] and launched on November 3, for the original Xbox game console.
Pac-Man video game. The service launched with six titles and expanded its library to twelve titles by the end of the year. The service was integrated into the main Dashboard user interface, and the Xbox hard drives were bundled with a free copy of Hexic HD.
They also have a trial version available for free download. These demos are playable and most of them offer only a fraction of the levels, modes, and content of the full game. A full version of the game must be purchased to allow the user to upload scores to the leaderboards, unlock achievements, play multiplayer, and download bonus content. Several new features and enhancements have been added through software updates including a friends leaderboard, additional sorting options, faster enumeration of games, an auto-download feature for newly released trial games, and "Tell a Friend" messages.
On July 12, , Microsoft launched the "Xbox Live Arcade Wednesdays" program, which promised a new Arcade game to be launched every Wednesday for the rest of that Summer.
In order to promote the service in retail, Microsoft released Xbox Live Arcade Unplugged Volume 1 as a compilation disc of six games. On May 22, Microsoft's general manager of Xbox Live , Marc Whitten, detailed changes for the service that included increasing the size limit of the games to MB and improving the way digital rights management is handled.
In an effort to "focus on quality over quantity", Microsoft will begin to delist older underperforming Arcade titles. Microsoft will give a three month notice prior to delisting these titles. Curiously, delisted titles won't be removed from Xbox live completely, they will just be inaccessible through Xbox live marketplace via normal methods.
If you have already downloaded a delisted game, you can recommend it to another user, and they will receive a link do download the game. By March 10, , three million downloads had been made. Nearly 70 percent of Xbox owners connected to Xbox Live have downloaded an Arcade title [21] [22] with the attach rate being titles per user. Xbox Live Arcade games are purchased using Microsoft Points.
Titles range in price from msp to msp, with the vast majority selling for msp and under. The games are generally aimed toward more casual gamers, striving for "pick up and play" appeal.
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