So I have been learning the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night speedrun on Christine's XBox Series X and I was gonna stream it this weekend. On Playstation streaming direct from the console was incredibly easy so I expected it would be simple on XBox also.
It is not. So: I tell it to start streaming. It does everything on screen to show it has started streaming. When I bring up the stream on Twitch, it's… a silent loop of… a "corporate Memphis" animation of an astronaut and an angel and a cat clock.¹ It is supposed to be Castlevania Symphony of the Night. Certain system menus, if I bring them up while this is happening, force the stream to automatically "pause" and once it pauses it does not (can not) unpause, the streaming UI is just locked up. I can click "Unpause stream" and it bleeps and animates like I selected the menu item but the menu option continues to show "Unpause stream" afterward and the stream remains "paused". Of course, I'm not sure what difference this makes since it streams the same cat clock animation regardless of whether it's "paused" or "unpaused". In any of these situations, my headphone sound is not included.
This is really hard to chase down because how do you even search for that? "Stream is a cat clock." What I eventually find is a five year old Reddit thread where it turns out you simply can't stream Symphony of the Night. More specifically the XBox does not let you stream ANYTHING unless the developer has set a special "ok to stream" flag, and none of the XBox 360 backward compatibility titles have the flag set at all. So that's really disappointing, but beyond that, why not show some kind of error message in that case? Why… just stream something totally other?
Not sure if I'm going to be able to make my stream tomorrow work or not. :/
¹ A friend tells me he recognizes this as one of the animations from Microsoft's "Mixer" service?!
EDIT: Story continues
