REDMOND, Wash. — Due to a miscalculation in the otherwise seamless rollout of Microsoft’s industry-leading backwards compatibility and cross-platform game support for their vast catalogue of titles, gamers have discovered that several old Xbox magazines were rendered totally unusable by a bloated 796MB software update released by Microsoft yesterday.
“They’ve completely bricked my favorite mags,” Retro enthusiast Drew Robins lamented, flipping through pages and pages of glossy magazine layouts now littered with error messages. “I keep getting this one bug saying that WiFi connection is required to install a required typo patch. I can’t fix it. I Googled what I thought was an error code, but in retrospect, that could have just been the page number. I tried my best at a hard reset by closing and reopening the magazine but everything’s still blank. Fuck this.”
Robins made the shocking discovery yesterday in his garage after stumbling upon his once completely readable copy of Xbox Cheat Codes Monthly from May 2003 with holographic special edition Enter The Matrix cover. The magazine-bricking update has since generated widespread public outcry with its size proving far too large for most classic gaming magazines, which all notably released with a total storage capacity of 0MB.
“You used to be able to buy a magazine and know exactly what would be in it as long as you had it,” chain-smoking newsagent Walter Caroll explained. “Nowadays, they’re updating content for re-release all the time. Some of them change style by the day. Some of them are only half-written by the release date and the publishers promise to patch in the rest of the words six months later. Customers were returning some mags last week saying they added a bunch of ‘nerfed paragraphs. I’m losing my goddamn mind here.”
After attempting and failing to open the magazine successfully for about 25 minutes, Robins concluded that his endeavor was simply “far too much effort” for what likely would have only amounted to a halfhearted nostalgic skim through a 7/10 review for Brute Force.
“Microsoft regrets that the latest update to our Xbox gaming services designed to fix an issue that the last update unknowingly caused, has caused this issue,” a Microsoft press release detailed today. “Cross-platform coding is a complicated process. Updating a paper magazine’s original format from a gaudy, overwhelming column layout to a gaudy, overwhelming panel layout will take time. We are happy to confirm that this shall be amended in a further, larger update.”
Though Microsoft has expressed interest in taking long-term steps toward “classic magazine preservation”, the company has revealed in the meantime a new $14.99 monthly subscription that will deliver 300 magazines a month directly to your house.
