I think sometimes about how some games, until perhaps they are rescued by emulation or fan efforts to port them, wind up stranded on a platform. Perhaps in such a way that you have to hang on to a device you might not otherwise.
For me one of these games is Slydris, a great mobile time-waster. It’s still available on iOS but the dev has abandoned support and forward porting for Android. I suppose I don’t blame him. At this point the only device I can use to play it is a Kindle Fire, a tablet which has become wholly redundant for me otherwise.
Are Xbox Live Indie Games backward compatible on Xbox One and Xbox Series? If not, I just remembered about Avatar Fighter Online, a $1 XBLIG title that let you use your avatar in a Street Fighter meets Mortal Kombat basic fighting game. Me and my friends at the time loved it.
This was the first game that came to mind, I wish I could play this again!
For a few years Michael Brough’s excellent iOS arcade game Helix was like this too, but luckily he updated it and it works on current devices again. Huge kudos to him, cuz it ain’t easy for developers to keep up with iOS’s flagrant disregard for backward compatibility.
I have an old phone that I guess is for ridiculous fishing if I ever wanted to replay it, on any newer iphones it is glitchy and unplayable. Even if you try to emulate the android version, you can’t really experience the game’s control scheme without real hardware.
It’s not really stranded since it would be fine to emulate, but my copy of bean dreams which is delisted even if you previously purchased it, somehow transferred locally to my current iphone and it runs fine, which makes it feel extremely stranded.
I’m really ready to get rid of my xbox 360 that I keep for the few games that don’t run on xbox one (including some original xbox games), I’m just waiting a couple more years on those two emulators to get even better. But I’m not gonna pull it out just to remind myself what those games are for this post though lol.
I think I can redownload purchased XBLIGs, but in trying to find the answer I found out that the lunatic obscurity-recommended Chieri no Doki Doki Yukemuri Burari Tabi for XBLIG does have a PC version that I guess was near impossible to find until this video was uploaded last year
my old XBLA hard drive has a bunch of games stranded on there, not least of which are Radiant Silvergunoh wow they just released it on steamguardian heroes and bangai-o hd missile fury
need to buy a copy of demons souls for my ps3 (acquired for the low low price of … free)
when god will they port espn nfl 2k5 the answer is of course never but it’s embarrassing that this is still the greatest nfl game of all time
similarly college hoops 2k8 is probably not the best ncaab game of all time but it is the only one where georgetown is good (sob)
my understanding is [prototype] (2009) is pretty busted on modern hardware which is a real shame cuz it’s a gripping story, fun gameplay and one of the few games i remember playing where your character was basically a supervillain origin story
I reckon i’d be one of only a couple hundred people on earth who have a copy of deeply mediocre dsiware pokemon clone “crystal monsters”. I find it a lil special because of that.
Let me tell you how bad Dad Brain is: I was thinking about how Slydris is marooned on my Kindle Fire. I said, “hey didn’t someone start a thread on SB about games stranded on devices, I should post about Slydris on there.”
Dear reader…
I haven’t gotten a lot of good sleep in the past two years
