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A day that will live in infamy. Today I saw a story linked on Evil Avatar where Peter Moore told Xbox fans to kiss Microsoft’s feet for being so gracious as to support a few hundred games, after promising to support them all. GamesIndustry.biz reports:

“Nobody is concerned anymore about backwards compatibility. We under promised and over delivered on that. It’s a very complicated thing… very complex work. I’m just stunned that we have hundreds of games that are backwards compatible,” he said.

That doesn’t mean we won’t get more backwards-compatible games – indeed, “more are coming” – but “at some point, you just go, there’s enough, let’s move on, or people aren’t as worried about a game being backwards compatible – and I like to think we’ve upheld our end of the bargain in making at least two or maybe three hundred games backwards compat.”

And…

“Our goal is to have every Xbox game work on Xbox 360,” Xbox PR manager Michael Wolf told GamesIndustry.biz at the time – a goal from which Microsoft now appears to have retreated significantly.

So, why will today live in infamy? Because I expect Moore to apologize before the end of the week. Apologize and assure us, again, that more games will be added to the list. And today will garner so much ill will that this begins the era when disc-based gaming machines will always support predecessors libraries. Period.

I don’t even have an Xbox360. Why not? Partially because I’m poor. When my Xbox broke a few months ago I couldn’t really be mad. It was a Thomson drive; I had gotten my money’s worth out of it. But I had to make a choice then. Would I get my Xbox fixed, or save a bit and buy a Xbox 360? Well, if I had gotten a X360, what would I have gotten? Geometry Wars and a few XBL Arcade titles that would be fun to play with friends. Maybe GRAW. But I know that I enjoyed swinging around the city in Spider-Man 2 when bored. I also like firing up Full Spectrum Warrior every now and then and, after cussing out the tutorial, playing a few levels. And god damn it Peter Moore, I like Psychonauts. You hear that Peter Moore? Psychonauts! These are the types of games you want your console associated with! Quality ones! (I still contend that if Gabe wrote up a demand and posted it on Penny Arcade that Psychonauts would be working on the X360 within a month.)

Hell, popularity isn’t even an issue. (These numbers are Xbox-only from March 2006, as found on WikiPedia.org.) On the highest-selling-Xbox-games list, numbers 13, 14, and 15; are Madden 2005, Madden 2006, and ESPN NFL 2k5. None of those games are backwards compatible. Spider-Man: The Movie and Spider-Man 2 both topped a million, but neither is supported. I’m surprised to find that Morrowind didn’t top one million for Xbox, but it’s not supported either, despite being hailed as completely kickass. (Which it was, despite the bugs.) Only the newest games in each Tony Hawk line (THPS4, THUG2, and THAW) are backwards compatible, even though the only Tony Hawk game to top 1 million is the first THUG. Hitman 2: Silent Assassin was the only Hitman game to beat a million, but Hitman: Contracts is the only one supported.

No, it’s not a matter of good games being backwards compatible, nor is it an issue of best-selling games. No, it seems that the issue is an interesting mix of convenient games, which explains lots of Tom Clancy games at once, or Barbie; and recent games. Ones that don’t have immediate sequels for the X360, but are recent enough that people may rent them and try them in their Xbox 360s. But hey, that’s just a glance, I may be wrong about that…

But I think I’m still right about one thing. Today, things changed just a little bit.

Don’t suppose Will Wright, Tim Schafer, Warren Spector, Reggie Fils-Aime, or Gabe & Tycho read this blog? I’ve made the promise to get these people and more for interviews on Evil Avatar Radio. And for bonus points, I’m going to get Tim Schafer and Reggie Fils-Aime at the same time, so we can coerce them to get a Tim Schafer game on the Wii. I have no doubt his wonderful characters, worlds, and overall design would make for an excellent coupling with the Wii’s “interesting” tech.

Ah well. I guess I’m off to email them all. I wonder if one mass emailing is overly unprofessional? And if that fails, I could always stand outside of their houses holding a 80s style boombox over my head, a la Lloyd Dobler. After all, to know Jeffool is to love him, right?

Note to self: This is the perfect chance to snag Brett Douville a Wii devkit! Anyone else want one?

I would like to thank you for your press conference Monday night. You took a chatroom full of people who previously took every chance to make fun of the name ‘Wii’, and united them against a common cause, you. Not only was your performance forced and rather boring, but let’s do the checklist!

First a lecture telling us that you’ve sold over 100million PS2s and other numbers. (As if about half of those weren’t people rebuying the system after their died.)

-Gran Turismo 4, slightly retooled for the PS3. Gran Turismo HD? The same game running in HD and you gave it ten minutes? Seriously Sony, what the fuck?

-+EyeToy. A new EyeToy game isn’t a game so much as a nice side item to the game, like R.O.B. the Robot. While you’re playing a CCG, EyeToy sees the cards you play, airing that on TV, with monsters appearing over them and fighting. Interesting, but not really ‘fun’.

-PS3 will have a MySpace-esque service. Yay?

-The online system is referenced as a good place for ‘shopping’. A decided boo goes here.

+A brief glimpse of games not expected at launch like Lair and Afrika. Also games from London Studios and Naughty Dog look fun enough.

And then there was your wannabe Wii controller. You claimed your new “innovative” controller will have ‘six degrees of freedom’, but by the horrible display given on-stage, it seems that it really just recognizes pitch, yaw, roll, and vertical change. So, if you moved the controller to the left without tilting it, the game would never know. It then doesn’t even have knowledge of where it is in relation to anything. So, it can’t do any of the things that the Wii can so far as gameplay. But the question isn’t ever “is the product better than the original,” only “is it good enough?” And to that I still laugh. In fact, the entire chatroom laughed the whole time until the very end when the controller was revealed, and then everyone laughed again.

Yes, when Kutaragi revealed your controller, which looks like a Dual Shock 2 with an Xbox ‘Guide’ button, the audience actually snickered at the man. Then they grew silent, and then made polite applause. And when he said “that’s not all,” I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I knew what he was going to do; we all did. But I felt like I was in the theater at a horror movie when the young blonde, before the opening credits, gets the phone call from inside the house. You shout “No! Don’t do it! You’ll die, and you’re not really that bad! Don’t get yourself killed!” But Kutaragi couldn’t help himself. It was bloody. And thank you from that Sony. Thank you.

-Jeffool.

Don’t believe me? Grab it from torrent, (here.) I’m grabbing a copy to watch again to see if I missed anything when I was nodding off from boredom.