Well I'm going to chat with MS support tomorrow to ask if it's even possible since the promotional balance that I used would've run out by now.

With a bit of luck I'm getting "my" money back without a time constraint or they will refund it and I have to spend it again within 90 days.

The issue is that their engine is very CPU-heavy from what it seems. Doesn't run well on Jaguar. That's exactly why it doesn't run well on mid-gen consoles as well. Probably they will come out with some solution to make the game run on last gen at least decent, but I doubt it will ever be a solid experience which is a shame.

Halo 3 Anniversary with fully Ray Traced Global Illumination+shadowing+reflections to replace that old HDR, Parametrized > GI Solver lighting model.

banjo was trending today, interesting. 

Lol if MS at one point tried to reboot phantom Dust, anything is possible. Probably not next year unless it’s a banjo 1/2 remake but the IP is definitely not off the table.

MS were not able to keep Fable and Perfect Dark a secret, if Banjo was being made we would know some details by now. They should give to DoubleFine to tackle imo they should not risk that IP on a 3rd party studio.

Finished Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.

Graphics are quite good. Jungle environment looks awesome and everything else is quite good as well. Wouldn't necessarily call it next gen but seeing those graphics running at 60 FPS is pretty impressive.

Gameplay feels good as always. Not much has changed here except being able to reload weapons while zoomed in and some extensive melee takedown animations. I also played one mission using mouse and keyboard and that worked great too.

What makes this game a bit unique is that stealth missions work different than you're used to in CoD games. Quite nice but not really necessary either as you can Rambo your way through without a penalty in most cases. Sadly, one stealth part is also the worst scene of the whole game. A completely trial and error section in a very confined space that is highly scripted and once you're spotted, the mission is failed. Pretty much impossible on first try.

Other than that the game is really short, even for CoD standards. 8 proper main missions, two additional short missions (one for each of the endings) and two short side missions.

Checkpoints are too infrequent in some instances and not where you might expect them. Also the AI of teammates is insanely dumb. They will hit next to nothing, even on close range they manage to miss or they just ignore enemies entirely. Doesn't really matter on lower difficulty but you can't rely on them as much as in previous CoD games when playing on the harder settings.

Story-wise it did quite some things right but since the game is so short, you really can't make a connection to the supporting characters. You still want to know how it turns out but ultimately the threat is the same as in a couple of previous CoD games. However, I do like how you can determine the ending which alters everything.

I also had issues on my Series X, especially in the second level that plays in Vietnam. Lots of rather open space and a big firefight with dozens NPCs that reduced the framerate from 60 to around 30. The helicopter part afterwards didn't help either. Turning off ray tracing didn't help at all and since even Digital Foundry said how well the game runs, I guess there was something wrong on my end.

8.5/10

wow not complete crap.

Dead Rising and KoF XIII for me.

Gears Tactics really isn't that hard, especially compared to XCOM. Also I expected team members to be out of the game (or mission) when downed but not only can you revive them, they can even revive themselves (by doing that you get less AP for that turn). The only penalty is that one fourth of your health is permanently locked for that mission. So far a downed member only happened to me a couple of times throughout the campaign and I'm almost done with it.

Very interested in Breakdown. I have the rest of the games but they're all great.

Especially KOFXIII. One of the greatest fighting games of all time.

Really cool month.