Black in back (compatibility update)

The list of backwards compatible games has been updated today (that last one was a false alarm). The back-compat list had last been updated way back in December, after which we heard rumblings that another update wouldn't be released until March.

Microsoft's Cesar Menendez (who I just met at the blogger's breakfast; hey Cesar!) wrote in January, "The Backwards Compatibility team is still working on adding your title to the list. Just because David Reid said (back in December?!) that they were going on vacation, doesn’t mean that all BC efforts have been halted." I guess they might not have been halted but here we are at the tail end of March getting our first backwards compatibility update in nearly four months.

The good news is: BLACK, Star Wars Battlefront II, and World Soccer Winning Eleven 9 have all been updated to work on the Xbox 360. I guess someone at Microsoft was listening when Alex Ward said he asked them "four or five times" himself to make BLACK back-compat.

I would really love to see new Xbox games being developed to be backwards compatible right out of the box. Couldn't developers test their games on the Xbox 360 emulator before shipping? Once Dreamfall comes out I'm gonna have to hook up the old Xbox again.

[Thanks, Matt and Brian]

UPDATE: These previously backwards compatible (and ostensibly buggy) titles have been updated in this release:

• Darkwatch

• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

• Half-Life 2

• Fable

• Fable: The Lost Chapters

• Forza Motorsport

• Ninja Gaiden

• Ninja Gaiden Black

• SSX 3

• Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Chaos Theory

• kill.switch

• World Series Baseball 2K3

Does this fix the Half-Life 2 physics bug?