This weekend marks Xbox's 25th birthday, and while any celebration of the milestone is going to be muted in view of the layoff bloodbath Microsoft is currently engaging in, the gaming division is taking steps to keep us thinking about the brand in a positive light. That includes a fresh expansion to the list of original Xbox games that are now backwards compatible on PC.
After the four original Xbox games that Microsoft brought to PC earlier this year, another 21 have joined the list – a total of 25 games for the console's 25th birthday. The new list of games is an utterly bizarre one, largely dominated by LucasArts titles. That includes plenty of beloved Star Wars titles, alongside largely forgotten obscurities like Secret Weapons Over Normandy and Thrillville.
Some of the titles you might recognize, like Star Wars classics Battlefront 2, Jedi Outcast, and Knights of the Old Republic, are odd choices in themselves, since those games are already available on PC. Assuming Xbox is using the same emulation-based solution to port these games, they're all going to be substantially worse experiences than simply picking up the native PC versions for the same price on Steam.
That goes double for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, which is also on the list of newly added games. The Xbox version of Morrowind was a stunning technical achievement back in 2002, but it was notoriously janky even at the time, filled with bugs and technical limitations that have been robustly addressed on PC. I struggle to come up with a compelling reason anyone would want to play this version over the PC original today, especially with all the mods available for the RPG.
There are two games I absolutely will not complain about, however: TimeSplitters 2 and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect. Developed by the Rare veterans at Free Radical Design, the TimeSplitters series was a spiritual successor to classic N64 games GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, refreshing the FPS gameplay for a new generation with fun weapon gimmicks and charmingly goofy characters.
TimeSplitters never moved beyond cult classic status, and attempts to revive the series ended in failure. None of these games ever got PC ports, which makes their inclusion arguably the most notable part of this Xbox backwards compatibility update.
