The backwards compatibility for European 360

I think it's very important for everyone that reads any article about backward compatibility not to ignore the last sentance in this article," The list, as with all regions, will be constantly updated as they get more original Xbox titles to work on your 360."

You'd think MS would make the Japanese BC list larger than the US's, since they need to do everything they can to succeed in that market. Limiting it to 12 games is only going to hurt their already poor reputation in that region.

Each game is not exactly the same for all regions. Especially in europe where the game has to be changed to the PAL system. Therefore the emulation is seperate for each version of the game as they don't share the exact same code. A us version may run but a europe version will not necessarily

Besides the games we're missing aren't particularly important to the majority.

Does it really matter that the 360s backward compatibility list for Japan is going to be so small at launch? I mean hell, their Xbox1 sale numbers a freaking paltry.

I've heard many different things about the backwards compatibility of the 360, some of which are scary and shouldn't actually be referred to as "backwards compatibility". The more I hear about it, the more confused I get, so I'll just that it seems like aLOT of people in Europe and the few in Japan that have Xbox, and will get a 360 will probably put up with the monstrously sized original for a while. Like maybe a year. Or two. Or forever if the compatible list isn't updated because of lack of sales as a result of not being backwards compatible with more Xbox games... Oh please microsoft, I pray you make this work for everyone. (I'm a satanist!)(Also, I DO hope the 360 succeeds)

If I was to make an educated (?) guess, I'd say this is most certainly because of localization issues. At least for europe, as we have lots of crazy people here who refuse to learn english and thus console manufacturers need separate versions for the french, german, perhaps spanish or whathaveyou markets.

As it's unlikely the xbox executable binaries have all the text strings neatly sorted into a separate file just in case microsoft would need to recompile the original source for a completely different CPU architecture, they'd have to recompile and verify versions for each separate language.

As for the japanese market... Did there ever come out more than 12 games there? ;) My guess is MS simply isn't bothering a whole great deal with that small piece of the pie.

TO FAAR who wrote this "At least for europe, as we have lots of crazy people here who refuse to learn english and thus console manufacturers need separate versions for the french, german, perhaps spanish or whathaveyou markets."

obviously you are not educated.

i speak spanish , when you become educated, maybe you will learn that spanish is by far the language in more countries in the world, maybe you will learn that english is not the language that most people speak, maybe you will learn that in miami its almost the official language.

"Yo puedo entender cada palabra de lo que escribes y dices, tu puedes, si no, ya sabemos quien es el analfabeta"

Just so you know, 200 games arent compatible 'out of the box' only halo and halo two are, a patch has to be downloaded and i dont think that download is availible untill tuesday, oh and you cant play halo2 online with out the patch either.

of course you need to download a patch to play the games in the xbox 360, if one thing we know for sure is MICROSOFT always need to fix they crappy first realeses, when you buy some microsoft product is already know that the first thing to do is download something to fix something, they many times have i patch ready before the actually product release, and you know that the patch wont be final, you must be download some new patch periodically, forever

I agree with "Faar". This is probably because of the discs are region coded. Over here, the NTSC-J games are lacking in the GTA (and other similar games) department. If that's enough to justify the sheer lack of compatible games - I don't know.

However many games on the north american list aren't sold in Asia.