
Apparently, we are not the only ones who are frustrated. Tim Schafer, whose creative juices flow through Psychonauts, is more than a bit perturbed that he cannot play his masterpiece on the console. After calling people at Microsoft, offering to bring programmers up to Seattle to help get it working (probably within a few hours, he suspects), the only response he could get was assurance that top men were on the job. Who? "Top ... Men," they said.
Tim Schafer, a man who convinced his wife to name their first child "Geometry Wars," needs our help. Send off an e-mail something to the effect of "I am a 9-year-old boy in the hospital, dying of consumption, and my last wish is to play Psychonauts on my XBOX 360!" (Please, try to make up your own disease.)
[via 1up]



















(Page 1) Reader Comments
Microsoft, give us Phsychonauts and Counter-Strike please!!!
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Dear Nice Mr. Backcomp Programmers,
My name is Joey Waguespack and I am a 16 year old xbox fanboy. When the xbox 360 came out naturally I bought one, but you probably know it isn't cheap. Back in May 2005 when the Xbox 360 was first announced I knew I had to get one, so I got a summer job, the job payed six dollars an hour three days a week, it was not that bad but I still needed more money for my shiny new xbox 360. I decided to sell my original xbox, I sold it to a friend for 100 dollars with two controllers, but I kept all of my games since I only had about 10 and I thought all of them were going to be backwards compatible. After selling my xbox, I had enough money for a premium and five games at launch.
Now, lets jump to November 2005, I wait in line for eight hours to be the first to have and xbox 360. At about 2:30 AM on November 22 I had my 360 running, I liked it a lot and all of my 360 games were awesome, but after playing them for a while I decided to bust out Halo 2 to see how it looked on 360 then I started Half Life 2 with sucks on 360, so then really mad about Half Life 2, I put in old Psychonauts, well I'm sure you know what the screen said, blah blah, blah, blah, original xbox game, blah, blah, blah. At this point I just go to sleep not happy at all and think how much the xbox backwards compatibility on xbox 360 sucks.
Sincerely,
Joey Waguespack,
aka jOEfRO
P.S.
You guys really suck at your job, and this is from an Xbox Fanboy.
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Panzer Dragoon Orta
Shenmue 2
Soul Calibur 2
Mech Assault 1/2
Beyond Good & Evil
:(
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Using the list at www.gamedude.com as a reference and eliminating redundancies, the US Xbox library numbers approximately 820 games. That should reach at least 875 before Xbox releases end. (Gamedude's list lacks a few of the most recent items and ebgames.com shows about 35 title on its 'coming soon' list.) The BC list appears to be up to 217 titles by my quick count.
So nearly 25% of the entire US Xbox library is covered by an effort that has been underway on the final Xbox 360 hardware for less than a year. Just in terms of the required for testing that is a lot of ground to cover. Give it some patience and by this time next year they may have the whole library covered except for a few items like Steel Battalion and other games requiring custome control devices that don't have Xbox 360 equivalents. Even those might be covered by a simple adapter since the Xbox controller ports are USB based.
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But I have to say i lose all respect and think of someone being very lame when they name their kid that, and imagine how much of a dumb b***h his wife is to go along with it
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Hey, in this day and age, and speaking about game developers and gamers, nothing really surprises me.
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A game I don't understand why its not on the list is "Rallisport Challenge 2". The game was made by Microsoft Studios. The game scored a 9.3 from Gamespot which gave it an easy "Best Race title of the year" when it came out, and a nominee for game of the year. So how could this great Microsoft, highly acclaimed, multiplayer game still not be on the list?
Completely off of the subject...Starcraft DS...is anyone listening?
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Hi Micro-friends,
Thanks so much for your exceptional work on keeping the Xbox 360
backwards compatible. The list is filled with warm and fuzzy memories
of misplaced youth.
But the problem here is that I have SO MUCH MISPLACED YOUTH LEFT. And yet no Psychonauts is here to enjoy it with. Help a brother out?
I'd be happy to send your team upwards of $1* for this game to be
playable within the next 6 months. Give that some thought, as I'm sure
Gates and his hippie friends don't shove their ambidextrous wallets
around with such force.
*$1 playable upon completion of said game. Upwards may or may not
exceed .01 united states currency. Do not pass go or collect $100.
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The point is we have had 2 mass update of BS games to backwards compatibility list and most of the time it was thought to be the devs not wanting their games released so they people would get the newer 360 versions. Well now we know that is not the case and that it is M$ that is really fucking us over with these shit updates.
Come on now! Why push Street Fighter 2 for the Live Arcade when all they need to do is make Street Fighter anniversary ED backwards compatible (and yes SF@ with online play is already on that disk).
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Psychonauts only sold something like 50,000 units. That would be only 0.16% of all Xbox owners. I think MS is focusing on the BEST* selling games, not ones that practically caused a company to go under.
*Of all the games that have sold over a million units, only 2 aren't backward compatible or don't have a 360 equivalent (PGR3, Madden, NFS, etc).
http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/articles/On_Backwards_Compatibility.aspx
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I already have Stranger's Wrath but I'm waiting until they make Psychonauts BC on the 360.. and then I'll buy it! I really wish they could get on top of that as I would love to buy Psychonauts right now, but not just so it can lie around and wait.
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The fact I haven't played it is down to my eagerness to make a quick buck from my Xbox - then I bought a GameCube for £15 unaware that Psychonauts wasn't released for it.
D'oh.
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Psychonauts wasn't visually appealing?
Die in a fire, please.
It had the best, and certainly the most creative, art direction of any game in the past five years, period. This is not up for discussion.
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Chris,
We are working on Psychonauts, I promise. It is a wonderful game. Have faith, and patience.
Sincerely,
Alan Stuart
Emulation Ninja, Psychonauts Fan
Xbox 360 Team
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I'm really impressed with Microsoft here - great to see that they really are listening!
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Above the link goes to my MySpace Blog, where I've blogged the first instance of me getting a human response from Backcomp about Psychonauts being worked on. Enjoy the ninja banter, kids.
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XBox360 + little kids + sparkly fireworks + overused internet acronym = ordinary day of game play on the 360?
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Tim Schafer used a line from Raiders of the Lost Ark when talking about his correspondence from Microsoft.
I have no doubt the conversation took place, but I wonder how much of the actual words are embellishment or whether they did say "Top Men" and he ran with it.
I wonder why they actually refuse help to get it done.
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Chris- That is pretty cool- I just got an automated response...
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"Tim does rock, and we are working on Psychonauts. Thanks for your support."
All the best!
-vic
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So how would you know what the game is and "really" want to play it if you dont have the original xbox? If you have a PS2 it would still work there...
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How do I know about Psychonauts? Because I own a tv and a computer ... Besides I'm not going to pay full price for the PS2 version when the should-be-BC XBox version costs half as much.
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http://flickr.com/photos/thetian/167906206/
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