Old 360 Titles Will Not Work With Project Natal

News

Old 360 Titles Will Not Work With Project Natal

The problem lies with heavily integrated control code

Disappointing news came today for 360 fans, when Destructoid asked Microsoft Games' Kudo Tsunoda whether or not it would be possible to patch existing 360 games to work with Microsoft's Project Natal.

Tsunoda answered, "It's not likely," and continued on to add that titles which had been altered to utilize Natal, such as the XBLA Space Invaders Extreme and Namco's Beautiful Katamari, had quite a significant amount of their code changed. For previous 360 titles, a re-release would most likely be the only way to add a Natal compatibility.

Comments

Our Take

Nick DiMola Director

09/25/2009 at 05:56 PM

This is unfortunate, but not surprising. Even if they could patch older games to just work with Natal, it's unlikely that they would invest the time and effort to do so for free.

Jason Ross Senior Editor

09/25/2009 at 07:51 PM

That's a surprise, in some ways. I was under the impression that at least with the Wii, all those GameCube games, like Metroid Prime 2, could be ported over easily enough.

What could be so complicated that the code couldn't be ported simply enough?

Maelstrom

09/25/2009 at 10:18 PM

I would think it is more a matter of not being able to figure out how to replicate controller inputs of available games to Natal in a good way as opposed to a big hardship with making the existing code work. Games will have to be built with Natal in mind to get anything approaching a decent control scheme and all Xbox 360 games are currently made with only the controller in mind (with few exceptions like Lips, Rock Band, etc.)

Lukasz Balicki Staff Alumnus

09/27/2009 at 09:17 PM

Not very surprising at all considering Microsoft did the brilliant move of storing game patches on the harddrive cache and limit the size of the patch.

I think most existing PS3 games will allow patches for the Sony wands.

PixlBit