xbox Playing the 10 year old Battlefield Bad Company on Xbox backward compatibility, I'm really impressed.

[Athan Immortal]

The other day I saw a post on reddit that was talking about Battlefield Bad Company being 10 years old, and I got a sudden rush of nostalgia to play it again. I looked on ebay and sure enough the game was there for a few pounds (less than ~$5 delivered), but then I remembered that I may still actually own it. I went through a cabinet where I keep a few of the old XB360 gems and behind a copy of Crackdown and Mass Effect, there was Bad Company! I dug out the Xbox One got about 2 years worth of updates then went for it.

 

The Game

Bad Company's single player was just amazingly funny. A bunch of the army's worst that go hunting for gold in enemy territory.

 

It was to the Battlefield franchise, what Portal is to the Half Life universe. An absurd and humorous take on what was quite a serious world.

 

It carried into the multiplayer as well with game modes like Gold Rush where the radio chatter was hilarious, for example winning the game and the commander shouts over the radio "Yes! YES, the gold is mine... er ours, the gold is ours... good job men."

 

It was also their first dabble with frostbite and the destructible environments which made it memorable from a gameplay perspective. Growing up with games like Half Life and Quake 3 where any object in the way of a bullet might as well have been adamantium, it was a game changer to have a tank or a grenade blow a wall away in a house.

 

I enjoyed Bad Company 2 mainly because it came to PC, and I played loads of it, but the story was much more serious, they'd moved away from the comedy center and I thought that was a big loss.

 

So with all that in mind I was ready to have my rose tinted glasses smacked off my face, I mean it's always better in memory, maybe the game would look old with my 2018 spoiled eyes, and maybe there would be some slow downs or compromises with the emulator... but I was pleasantly surprised.

 

Backwards compatibility.

I remember the excitement when Phil Spencer announced backward compatibility at E3 2015 

 

So when I saw the post on reddit, I looked up the list and saw Bad Company was on there. Although I still have an Xbox 360, I wanted to use the Xbox One to Win10 Streaming capability as well. This also let me record the gameplay and how well it runs 

 

I've also played some today for a total of maybe 2 hours and I can say that there's only been maybe 3 instances where there was a hint of broken audio, I've not seen any slow down in the actual game performance or the relatively complex physics at work. I shouldn't be so surprised, but the game just looks so good for 10 years old. DICE really knocked it out of the park, and the Xbox team did a great job with the emulator. I think I'm going to try Crackdown again at some point, but for the moment it's back to the fight!

 

What games have you used backward compatibility for, and was it as good as you remember?

I'd love to hear any other suggestions and maybe some gems I missed out on in the XB360 era.

 

[Majinhoju]

Now you've got me itching to play it again.  I haven't tried it on my Xbox One yet.

I loved the Bad Company series.  The campaigns were fun and I loved BC2 online on the PC.

[Stefan Payne]

and now compare it to the PC version with all the bells and whistles you can use there...

[Majinhoju]

1 hour ago, Stefan Payne said:

and now compare it to the PC version with all the bells and whistles you can use there...

There's no PC version for Bad Company 1.

[Athan Immortal]

4 hours ago, Majinhoju said:

Now you've got me itching to play it again.  I haven't tried it on my Xbox One yet.

I loved the Bad Company series.  The campaigns were fun and I loved BC2 online on the PC.

I can tell you the moment I'm waiting for in the campaign is where they

Spoiler

track the trucks to the border and Haggard runs away after them shouting that he's going to get that gold