Games Inbox: Is Phil Spencer going good news for Xbox?

The Monday letters page continues to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Legend Of Zelda, as one reader wonders if Far Cry has fans.

Games Inbox is a collection of our readers’ letters, comments, and opinions. To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk

Turn and face the strain
Just seen the news about Phil Spencer leaving Xbox and I don’t know what to say really. He should’ve left at least five years ago, as far as I’m concerned, but the person coming in sounds much worse. If it was some boring accountant type I wouldn’t worry so much, but someone whose last big thing was AI? And they’re at Microsoft? It’s going to be slop around the clock.

The best case scenario is that she admits she doesn’t know anything about games, just business, and gets in a bunch of new people to handle the details. But the fact that she promoted Matt Booty sounds like the worst possible first move, as I’d say he was even worse than Spencer.

We’ll see what happens – it’s not like any of us can influence any of this – but this is long overdue and I really don’t know if the Xbox brand can be saved now.
Gaston

Welcome competition
Somehow I doubt Sony is going to be quaking in its boots right now, at the news of Xbox’s new boss. Sounds like Microsoft decided that they’d gone with a gamer as the boss before so now let’s go with the exact opposite. I can kind of see the logic but at the same time… that’s not going to work out is it?

How’s someone that knows nothing about gaming going to make sensible decisions about Halo or funding some new game or whatever? I don’t know, maybe it is better they know nothing, since they could hardly have done worse than Spencer in recent years, but it doesn’t seem a good starting point.

I’ll admit I haven’t played an Xbox game since the Xbox 360 so I don’t really have any skin in this game but I don’t think anyone would argue that PlayStation 5 couldn’t do with some more serious competition, to wake them up too.
Focus

Touring circuit
So Phil Spencer has finally left Xbox and, of course, the news comes out in the most skeevy way possible, at the weekend when most people will miss it and the guy is leaving on Monday? That doesn’t sound like a respected veteran finally hanging up his spurs. That sounds like someone getting frogmarched out the building by security, the second the boss reads him his rights.

Normally I’d say we’ll never find out what actually happened but maybe we will with Microsoft, since most everything else usually leaks out from them. My guess is that the head of Microsoft had had enough and Spencer had too.

The guy must be a multi-millionaire by now. If I was him I’d leave it all behind me too and buy a brewery somewhere. Can’t wait for him to start doing the interview rounds in a few years, where everyone has to treat him like some business genius and not the guy that killed Xbox.
Wotan

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No rush
I played Red Dead Redemption 2 this weekend. It’s a game I go back to every so often but not because I love it more than the rest of my games. Not because I’ve beaten it and love the story and gameplay. It’s due to the fact I’ve been playing it since 2018 and still haven’t got round to finishing it. I did manage to complete a new mission and have reached 36% on the story.

I just think this game is like a mood. It’s so chilled out when not in gunfights. The hunting and fishing keeps me occupied. I don’t feel pushed to finish it. There is no urgency. Red Dead Redemption 2 might be the game I’ve owned the longest and not finished. I’ve beaten Minecraft and not Red Redemption 2?

Anyone else have a long-term project like this?
Bobwallett

GC: If it took you this long to get a third of a way through it then you should finish it sometime around 2042.

Far Cry fan club
Far Cry 6 feels like such a long time ago now, I was bit surprised to find out it wasn’t much more than four years. I think that was when Ubisoft lost their way, when that flopped they seemed to give up on everything except Assassin’s Creed… and live service games, of course.

I don’t know what they’re going to do for the next game, to try and make it special, but I don’t think being away for a while is going to be a big enough draw. Games like Far Cry are popular but they’re not the sort of thing people are fans of, I wouldn’t have thought. I mean, we’re not talking Zelda or Resident Evil here.

Or maybe I’m wrong and there’s a big following for Far Cry 6 and… whatever it was about and whoever the characters were. (It was set in Cuba, wasn’t it?)
Cuit

GC: It was a fictional country inspired by Cuba.

Seeing red
I bought the cardboard Virtual Boy ‘headset’ and I’ve been playing the games over the weekend and all I can say is… why is it all red?

That sounds a bad idea before you even try it and when you do it’s just as bad as you think. Like you said in your review, it’s like it’s been raining blood or everything is set on Mars or something.

Even so, I did enjoy trying out all these weird games I’d never heard of before and would certainly never have played any other way. I can’t say I particularly liked any of them, but Wario Land was okay, even though it was a bit slow. It was fun to see the ‘other platforms in the background’ gimmick though, which Nintendo has used in a bunch of games since.

I look forward to playing the other games, especially the cancelled F-Zero one, in the future and even if they’re terrible, I like that it feels that you’re getting this glimpse into a secret world.

Star Fox 2 was good like that too. You could absolutely see why they canned it, but it was interesting getting to play it all the same.
Austin

GC: Red LEDs are cheaper than other colours is the simplest answer.

Marketing decision
I’ve just seen the banned ad for Call Of Duty and I can’t believe anyone would of thought that was a good idea.

I’d like to know if Activision or Xbox gave the greenlight and said, ‘Yes, that’s a good ad, let’s show it.’ I never thought either of them would of made an ad like that and I’m not surprised it got banned.’
David

GC: It would’ve been someone at Activision.

Lucky accident
That was a great Reader’s Feature at the weekend about Zelda’s 40th anniversary, kudos to Rhion for writing it.

My journey with the Zelda franchise is a little odd. I was about 14 years old and ordered The Legend Of Zelda 2: The Adventure Of Link from my mum’s catalogue, on the promise I would pay her back £2 a week from my paper round money until it was paid off.

After all, number 2 is always going to be better than number 1 right? At least that’s what my 14-year-old brain was telling me.

The game arrived.

I got home from school only to find that the catalogue had sent me a substitute game. The original Legend Of Zelda.

I was a little bit gutted and went on my paper round mulling over whether to send it back and wait another two weeks or not at all?

I got home and, as kids do, I had no capacity to wait for another game so I fired it up in my trusty old NES and the rest was history.

On the future of the Zelda games… I’m not completely enamoured by the open world template of Breath Of The Wild and Tears Of A Kingdom, yeah I said it.

I prefer the much more linear titles but if they do go open world again and it’s probably a dead certainty due to the money it brings in.

I would like to see them leave from the skies and head for the sea.

Sailing vast open oceans while learning to plunge new depths and discover new islands. Yes, I know very The Wind Waker-ish but it’s not really been done in a 3D Zelda title since then and that’s been a good 25 years now.

If they used the original Zelda as inspiration for Breath Of The Wild then there is no reason not to use another title as a platform to push off.
freeway 77

Inbox also-rans
In response to Biter and Mario Kart Arcade, where is he playing it for only £1? The arcades near me in Merry Hill and Birmingham are charging 3 quid a turn!
LeeDappa

So are we really expecting the next mainline Pokémon games to be announced this week? I guess that gets that out of the way, but it seems an awful lot of Pokémon games are already on Switch 2 and we still don’t have a Mario or Zelda. Priorities!
Ned

GC: It does seem quite possible.

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