Trolls. You may know one or be one yourself. Their sole pleasure is to provoke—not thought, but emotion. At PAX, Microsoft's Major "Larry" Nelson himself bemoaned the quality of posts on his site, and him getting trolled is nothing new. He recently posted the growing list of backwards compatible games, receiving a whopping 400-plus comments. We don't like to post comments from other sites, because our own trolls will bitch about it "not being news," Kotakuite german S> dropped us a line about a comment he found on the Major's blog:

I was browsing the Major Nelson blog, reading the barf of reader comments (mostly requests for unsupported games) on the entry regarding the recently announced new batch of supported games for the backwards compatible list, when I noticed this surprisingly eloquent string of responses from poster Zaiten. He openly accused Microsoft of endorsed business agendas with an aparent arbitrarily picking of games that are to be supported and left out of the Backwards Compatibility list.

Is this a cry in the wilderness or text book trolling? Hit the jump, read Zaiten's comments and decide for yourself.

It doesn't take much effort to notice that the Microsoft XBOX division does not want to disclose the real reasons behind their arbitrary approach to Backwards Compatibility on the XBOX 360. For one, they don't seem to give a flip about the Japanese segment of the XBOX library. There is sure to be some corporate reasoning behind it, heck, maybe these guys are right to blame debugging for the mediocre results; but I have different theories myself: 1- Japanese-developed games released on the XBOX were woefully poor in the US, thus efforts to emulating such games are pointless. 2- Microsoft has refrained from supporting certain games whose sequels are on the XBOX 360. 3- The utter failure of the XBOX in Japan is the #1 reason for neglecting the Asian-specific releases.

Let's look at the numbers first. NINJA GAIDEN, considered a milestone of the last generation, sold 550.000 copies. DEAD OR ALIVE 3, also critically acclaimed, sold 950.000 copies; both are backwards compatible. On the other hand, SEGA games PANZER DRAGOON ORTA, SHENMUE II, GUN VALKYRIE, OTOGI, JET SET RADIO, and CRAZY TAXI barely reached half a million units, and that's added together. You bet they're not supported on the XBOX 360. Konami's SILENT HILL 2&3, MGS2: Substance, and BLOODY ROAR; Capcom's DINO CRISIS 3, STEEL BATALLION, and CAPCOM CLASSICS COLLECTION are neither compatible. All of the aforementioned titles are ironically considered high quality games, top of the cream. Well, that didn't save them from being axed off the supported games list.

It seems that Project Gotham Racing (which sold 1,200.000 units) and PGR2 (platinum also) are not supported due to particular business convenience. PGR3 is a mere visual upgrade over its predecessor so there is no excuse whatsoever for either PGR1&2 to be technologically incompatible with the XBOX 360. What's even more, you guys said "the top-selling games" would be first in the BC list, so where are platinum-selling PGR1&2? So much for boosting sales of a gimmicky 360 title, don't you think? Furthermore, there's DEAD OR ALIVE ULTIMATE, one of the top XBOX LIVE games. It was critically acclaimed yet it's not supported. I believe that, perhaps it was so popular it might have hurt the sales of its next-gen sibling DEAD OR ALIVE 4. Same with STREET FIGHTER ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION and its Live Arcade twin. In fact the same phenomenon can be tracked for various 360 sports titles whose XBOX predecessors are deliberately not backwards compatible, as is the case with TOP SPIN and FIFA SOCCER.

I still find it puzzling that the XBOX division would choose to blatantly ignore emulation support for such myriad of Japanese games. It is so bad in fact that I feel urged to suggest that Microsoft is doing it on purpose to somewhat retaliate against the Japanese market for shunning the XBOX into oblivion for the past 5 years. Ok, so that may be a bit of an overstatement. After all, western-developed masterpieces have been equally dismissed, as is the case with DEUS EX, CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, MECHASSAULT, TOP SPIN, FULL SPECTRUM WARRIOR and PSYCHONUTS. The truth of the matter is, mostly everyone is simply disappointed, we feel that we've been deceived and cheated on by the mockery that is the Backwards Compatibility of the XBOX 360.

Some of you guys shamelessly condescend to Microsoft for failing over and over again to deliver on their promise. When more than 60% of the XBOX exclusives (90 totals) are not playable on the XBOX 360, calling that "Backwards Compatibility" should be criminal. My point is that we could care less about your ineffective efforts to improve this broken and impractical feature. You're a year too late and the damage is already done. Believe it or not, many an XBOX fan did not actually believe XBOX equaled HALO. We stuck to the exclusive titles that developed the XBOX identity through the years and won our genuine support.

Last year many sold their XBOX in anticipation of the upcoming XBOX 360, only to find in dismay —right after release— that almost none of the top rated games were supported by said next-gen system. Here's hoping Microsoft revamps the original XBOX console (darn if it could use some hardware shrinking and slicking) because that is the only Microsoft-manufactured console I would deign to acquire. If only you had been honest with us, Microsoft, we could still believe you did actually care about the games, your customers, and the creative heritage of this industry.

And what was the response to this diatribe? The next three comments were: "Excellent list!", "Still no Fifa 2006 then :-(" and "No Metal gear??" Brian Ashcraft

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