#CHAT I AM SO HYPED FOR THAT 2 HOUR STREAM

[rosetheocto]

Lee when Dan actually bothers to play Miitopia (he isn’t forgotten about anymore)

I just don’t question my failtopia memes anymore man

[xmaruu11]

Hello! Fellow comic writer here ^-^ Hope you and Doody are taking a little downtime after the recent update!

I discovered DH just after the Mother Spore arc, and I was curious how quickly the series grew to the audience it has now. Was it steady and gradual or did something give it a boost all at once?

I HAD THIS ASK SITTING IN MY ASKBOX FOR MONTHS CUZ I WANNA TALK SO BAD ABOUT IT !! BUT LIFE HAPPENED AND I COULDNT

Get ready for story time!

A lot of people think DDVAU started in 2024, after mother spore. But it didn't. Yes the boom of the story was January-February 2024, but the story has been going on since 2022, November 2022.

When we started DDVAU Doody and I were both University students, in our second year im pretty sure, so the updates didn't have a schedule and there wasn't an overarching plot. The idea for the mother spore arc happened in january / february 2023. But at that point we were working on chapter 10 and the valentines special. And then life happened, personal stuff happened and we took a hiatus until August 2023, and then December 2023. Again, it took,, time...

DDVAU had a small following at that time, and both of us were okay with that, we weren't expecting the amount of support it had during that time (2k notes per update), we felt overwhelmed with love at that point!

Then mother spore part 1 happened, december 2023. That was the first time I decided to go crazy on twitter and start posting with // DDVAU spoilers, and just be a fan of my best friend work. I didn't know that by doing that, it called a lot of people attention. This chapter ended up in a cliffhanger AND it showed a lot of other characters that we never shown before, so a lot of people were interested because their favorite guy appeared! Also we had multiple pretty cute moments between characters. Then people started livetweeting and sharing their opinion using DDVAU spoilers. It kinda snowballed after that. People asked what it was and people shared.

Doody and I thought it was gonna just be that, one simple update and then it stopped. BUT IT DIDNT! Then February 2024, Mother Spore 2 came out, and the whole process of last time repeated. And since this one had more action, everyone was more curious and more interested in what was going on. I keep tweeting and interacting with fans, cuz I am patient 0, DDVAU biggest fan.

THEN the DDVAU server happened, and a lot of people started joining, and I joined as well. People shared fanart, theories, we were able to chat and be nerds with each other. It build up hype for the next hiatus since again.. Doody and I were still university students.

Mother Spore and the end of volume 1 dropped in August 2024. The process repeated again, I also streamed again to keep the hype up. Doody and I yapped for hours and shared fun tweets and live reactions.

AND THEN, the first merch drop happened and once again people were surprised and sharing their thoughts and ideas and everything. Then our lovely friends and guys at the DDVAU server, planned an entire Zine for christmas to surprise doody and I, which again CRAZY!!

Then volume 2 happened, we started uploading it to webtoon and just kinda, kept doing what we like. The monthly schedule helps to build up hype, monthly streams and just,, having fun with my friend helps a lot.

But of course, nothing would have happened if we didnt have so many lovely and wonderful people that just support everything we do. All the lovely people who buy merch and support the kofi (since its the only way we actually get paid as an indie project), all the lovely people who are in the discord, share on twitter and tumblr and tiktok and literally anywhere.

Its always great and so lovely :D

DDVAU growth didnt happened overnight, we worked for a year before mother spore exploded, and then we just kept sharing our passion and love for this story, causing so many more people two get interested.

This is a dream came true, and I wanna thank everyone for letting us live in it

[tubbo-updates]

Tubbo tweeted on his private twitter

[the screenshots are written out under the cut]

Life Update:

Dude I am so excitited (excited) I just cannot put into words I feel like the kinda hype to play minecraft again which I haven't in so so long it's very refreshing!

The last 2 day I have taken off streaming was just for me prepare to really put my all into it and hit the [breaks to the next tweet] ground running I have written up lots of just chatting ideas I want to stream aswell as what I want to on the QSMP!

I'm flying home in Brighton tonight in like 3 hours will see you when im home!

On a real note really quick the amout (amount) of support I have seen over the last [breaks to the next tweet] few days ahs been so overwehlming and I can't thank you all enouth! (enough!)

Massive shout out to all of you guys that have watched my steams no matter what dumb idead I had had that day and I cannot wait for this next chapter to start!

Heres to so any more awesome memories!

- Toby

[genlossneg]

ok. i didnt mind genloss, it was ranboos first massive project, theyre only 19 and a streamer, ok. but oh my god would it kill to take an improv class. the first 2 episodes felt like an snl skit. especially when it was branded as original and then was just some sort of frankenstein of different horror tropes from ranboos favourite horror media, that just reminded me of snl stealing joel havers skit lmao.

there were so much issues with it and i feel like i wouldnt mind as much if it was branded as a horror comedy a few months before the show, not 3 days before the show. a few months before and the weeks leading up to may 24th, it was branded as "you arent ready for this. this is groundbreaking, nothing will ever be the same after this show. this is serious." etc and then i think it was like 3 days before may 24th there was that fucking showfall media psa that just felt like ranboo saying "oh btw its a comedy" without warning it caught me so off gaurd lmao.

then he streamed after that sfm psa released and, if i remember right, people were asking about it being a horror comedy in chat and ranboo was like "well yeah obviously did u think id make a project 100% serious? no lol" (dont quote me on that though its been a while) now theyre saying gen 0 and gen 2 are going to be completely horror now, but i dont think thats true bc they also said gen 1 was mostly horror and none of it is

speaking of, the advertising was just lies lol. the whole "little to no filler :D" thing. it wasnt like ranboo didnt expect the improv to last that long bc the expected runtimes (from their tumblr post on may 23rd i think) were sometimes longer than the actual ones. 1st ep was meant to be 1-2 hours, it was 1 and a half, so that much filler and standing around going "what the hell man" was PLANNED. they just lied about no filler to make people excited. just be funny and i wont mind the filler. i like sneegs humour in his streams but here he was just bickering with ranboo. same with ranboo to charlie, charlie was the only one making actual jokes so when ranboo and sneeg were alone it was just "wait so why didnt you just-" "well idk i thought u woul-" "well why would i-" and when i tell you it drained my soul.

ive been a massive ranboo fan for about a year (im recovering dw), and after the game theory episode i got really hyperfixated on genloss (up until the sfm keynote thing i think). i was hyped for it back when T_1 was the only thing released for genloss, and followed it all the way up to the streams. i watched them live and my face was just like 😐 I WAS SO DISSAPPOINTED LMAOOO

the box being 18k pissed me off so much bc an experienced filmmaker/writer/director could make something so much better than genloss with just that 18k. i aspire to make my own live action thing one day, and like, hearing them go "oh yeah the box was 18k and jermas face prosthetics were 10k teehee🤪🤪" was just. AAAAA. and the thing is, like the prosthetics were funny, but spending TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS as a BIT from jerma going "what if i took off the mask and it just doesnt look like me lol" then framing urself as jesus christ and a victim. i am so mad.

idk how to feel about ranboo anymore, i used to watch like every 2nd stream for a while but then the whole "GUYS BUY MY MERCH also racism bad MERCH!!!!! BUY!!!!" thing made me rethink lol. the racist and misogynistic undertones in genloss made me so uncomfy, and while im not poc so i cant speak on that, i have enough sense to know that having the only poc in the entire show play evil rats is so tone deaf.

and niki!! i was worried when the teasers were coming out bc every single person shown in it was a white guy (and a white enby), so i was kind of happier when niki showed up, but then she died within the hour to "commentate on misogyny in media". ranboo thought that he was commentating on misogyny by contributing to it. did they think this through at all. i would have LOVED if they did something special with niki and something powerful, but all that happened was she showed up, cried, then died and now ranboo fans are going "ranboo was so real for this!!!". ik niki had control over her characters writing but im sure ranboo was the one who decided when certain characters died and stuff.

also i hate to say this but the mask flashing to signify if he was in control or not was EXACTLY like a thing in the undertale fanfic (sfw im not weird) i wrote when i was 12 💀💀the characters eyes would flash when they were under control bc edgy. it was so weird watching genloss with that in the back of my mind 💀💀💀💀

in conlusion, genloss had so many flaws and so much easy fixes that it just feels so sososososososo rushed. another year in the oven wouldve been ok i think.

woah this is long im so sorry i do not think only type oops

- the i feel like i should label what kind of anon i am lmao anon

sorry before i get to anything else the undertale bit caught me so off guard omg.

anyways.

it wasnt like ranboo didnt expect the improv to last that long bc the expected runtimes (from their tumblr post on may 23rd i think) were sometimes longer than the actual ones. 1st ep was meant to be 1-2 hours, it was 1 and a half, so that much filler and standing around going "what the hell man" was PLANNED.

this!! the way the second stream just.. dragged was so rough.

the poc/women diversity discussion is something we had on the blog a bit ago as im sure you've seen so i don't have a ton to add but. yeah there were certainly choices that got made there.

very much enjoying all the essays getting dropped in here (even if i feel like my responses are weak sometimes lmao)

[princessazalea17]

We have come full circle: Death of the Stranger Things/Riverdale Era.

One of my friends shared the news in an Instagram group chat, and I was PISSED. So, your girl is back with another rant.

We have come full circle. I dont know if it's because me and my peers and I are grown adults now, and we are no longer in that Stranger Things/Riverdale era where everyone wouldn't shut up about their favorite Netflix shows. I remember those days when Netflix took over and everyone had it. I was late to the party because back then I didn't have the money to be able to afford streaming services, and I had to resort to websites like KissCartoon, KissAnime, and those YouTube videos with the high pitched voices and the TV show playing in the corner of the screen (or, if you were unlucky, a 2 hour background on a loop with a link to the video in the description).

Well, it appears that I might be going back to that route because, at this point, the cost of all these subscriptions is eating into my wallet. I can eat the cost of the $12/month for the plan listed in the screenshot because I was "grandfathered in." However, add the cost of Spotify premium (which went up now that I'm no longer a student), my gym membership, and other streaming services.

Others have even mentioned online that we have too many streaming services to begin with to the point where it is becoming like cable. Even mobile carriers and other sites (like Spotify) include access in their plans-- I used to get free Hulu with Spotify Premium student (but I never used it because I heard the ads are unbearable). Netflix had the most access with shows before companies bought the rights to many of them. A lot of shows that are on MAX, Hulu, and Prime Video used to be on Netflix, believe it or not. Not to mention all of these random smaller sites like Vix, Britbox, Crackle, Paramount Plus, and others I forgot to mention - it is becoming too much. Eventually, cable companies will start bundling these services into their plans.

The main reason why I am on Netflix so much is to keep up with shows and movies that have stemmed from the books I have read, and because I don't want to have to use Prime Video or buy them individually. Shadow and Bone is on there, Heartstopper, All the Light We Cannot See, and other series that were based on books. Netflix also has a good selection of anime and cartoons, like Bee and Puppycat or Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (mainly part 6, which is a Netflix exclusive!).

I even have nostalgia merch that I purchased secondhand and from Hot Topic of shows that were once big on Netflix and TV, mainly from being interested in these fandoms back in my younger days. Back in high school, if you wore Stranger Things merch, you would receive tons of compliments. Now, it's almost as if no one even knows the show, as if the hype died down. I don't see people talking about it as much online anymore since people were shitting on Eddie Munson and Max Mayfield stans and Kate Bush and Metallica blew up on the internet. You can literally find their merch at Ross now - not to hate on Ross, because I love shopping there, but a lot of pop culture merchandise that I find there is mainly from fandoms that are super generic or have otherwise died down. I remember wanting Rick and Morty merch so bad when it was popular! Now, you can literally find their merch everywhere - the men's section of Ross and Rue21 is flooded with their hoodies and shirts. This can also be tied with harmful trend cycles, but I will go deeper into this topic in another post.

Wrapping this post up because I'm getting mad. But I might post another rant soon. Not sure yet.

Here is a little song rec for today

[kumezyzo]

i was rewatching the dream team all stars MCC and was thinking about streamer!reader cause im actually sick in the head :) so now everyone else has to deal with it 😌 so, as much as i love bad, reader does happen to be an honourary Dream Team member according to bf!sapnap.....

i like to think during this time (Nov. 2021) reader and sapnap are well into their talking stage and like, reallyyyy close to dating (they prolly start dating two weeks after this stream of sum). so this is technically crush!sapnap [so cutee]

also just bsf!george and dream moments cause why not (and cause i need some more fluff to feel gud)

lots of swearing (particularly fbombs lol)

so enjoy.... or dont lol :) m.list

crush!sapnap who cant help but giggle when you text him about the 'serpnerp and gerge' bit he did before the event started. when you ask about the fake kisses they gave eachother, he would be tempted to text you back with "i could give you real ones if you want" but refrains from it.

crush!sapnap who secretly had your stream pulled up on the side just so he could see your face as you hyped yourself up for the event.

if youre faceless, he'd just want to listen to you and hear the way you pause to read a text he sends you. he'd feel so cocky if you happened to quietly giggle at something you he sent you.

crush!sapnap who forgets youre on the call for a moment when he makes comments about needing to take a shit...

"if i really wanted to, i could insta-shit"

"ew wtf 😭"

"i actually forgot you were here for a moment, my bad" (he would be blushing so hard)

crush!sapnap who hypes you up so much during parkour tag (and makes sure youre not getting tagged) when youre the last person to be tagged

bsf!george who also hypes tf out of you when youre tagging people. he gets so loud that you have to tell him to stfu at times

crush!sapnap who subconsciously tries to protect you during the first round of sky battle until you call him out for it

"sapnap, dont worry about me! just try to get the other fucking teams. holy fuck..."

"y/n is getting toxic~"

"george shut the fuck up."

(it was mostly cause dream was getting heated at you but dw sap gets it 😌)

bsf!dream who blames you for a block placement glitch during sky battle

"Y/N!"

"WHAT?! WHAT THE FUCK DID I DO?!"

it led to a strange disagreement about where you were standing before crush!sapnap interjected and told you guys to leave it be. (we stan)

crush!sapnap who feels his heart flutter when you giggle about heated dream was getting over you standing on a rail in grid runners.

bsf!george who gets very hyped when you dont mute yourself during ace race.

"y/n are you muting yourself?"

"nope, are you?"

"LETS GOOO! ITS JUST Y/N AND GOGY"

"Lets go!!!!...... but shut the fuck up a little"

crush!sapnap who tries to gather your materials whenever you need them during buildmart and ultimately pisses off dream when he doesnt bring back what people need.

"Sapnap, how the fuck are you leaving but not bringing back fucking anything we actually need!?!?"

"okay! okay, what do you need?!"

bsf!dream who gets wayyyy too heated at you during battle box.

"y/n just use the fucking bow!"

"i am you dumb fuck!"

"oh my-"

crush!sapnap who gets annoyed too, but tries to not direct it towards you.

"george if theyre building to middle, block them!"

"y/n is supposed to be covering me!"

"they are, so pull your weight!"

bsf!dream who gets yelled at by his chat for yelling at you.

'say sorry to y/n'

"what? you know what, fuck y/n! ive known them for over 5 years, im not saying sorry!"

"good! i dont want your apology anyway! we are no longer friends!"

"good!"

(literal toddlers lol)

crush!sapnap who says a small 'hi' when he passes by you in sands of time. even if youre in the same call. and have been for 2 1/2 hours.

dteam who just lets you do youre own thing in the last to games of the event (sands of time & tgttos).

"i actually havent hear y/n speak in like five minutes," george said with an impressed smile. "i thought they just left the call for a moment, ha."

"me too for a second-"

"both of you shut the fuck up, im tired and tryna get this over with."

"PFFFT-"

bsf!george who could help but cackle when you yell at him during dodgebolt.

"george if you dont stop talking about the arrow, i will fly to london and shove it so far up your ass-"

crush!sapnap who calls you after both of you end your streams to talk about how you feel after the event.

"how are you doing, you seemed..."

"angry? annoyed?"

"tired..."

crush!sapnap talks with you until either one of you has to hang up. you feel like youre back in highschool talking to your crush for hours on end.

ngl, i dunno how i feel about this one. it might be too much tbh but im tired asf writing this and dont wanna change much. and i got a little carried away having fun writing it....sorry... -Nony

[kangshxrtie]

ch. 2 ⤍ collab?

you started your stream, posted about it on socials, and waited for a decent number of people to be on it before putting your face cam on and speaking.

"alright so update. i know i said y'all would never see me again if y'all clipped it but people lie and i am a liar"

user1 we knew

user2 you could never ditch us, we pay your bills

user3 i clipped it and have no regrets

"i will be honest after stream i did follow kazuha, and she did follow me back. my biggest flex at the moment"

user4 that should've been me

"but other than that i will be ignoring the fact that yesterday even happened" you shook your head in approval at your thoughts, "so there should be no reason to mention it anymore"

"plus she only knows me because of that one clip. she'll never wanna really meet me"

user5 KAZUHA SAID SHE WANTED TO COLLAB WITH YOU

"she said what! y'all we need to make this happen!" you shouted excitedly once you read the comment forgetting about everything you said earlier.

naoi.rei actually down bad

"i mean... i guess we could collab. i'll probably dm her after stream or something" you said awkwardly.

_yujin_an Y/N CAN PULL?

"of course i can yujin" you rolled your eyes at her comment.

_yujin_an y/n gets no bitches

"what did i ever do to you?"

naoi.rei no rizz 😭

"why are y'all both attacking me right now" you exclaimed, "you know what i'm banning both of y'all from the stream"

you proceeded to ban both of them making a mental note to unban them later so it wasn't permanent. you should've known that it wouldn't help anything because yujin came into your room like she owned the place or something.

"hey chat. it's y/n's favorite roommate" yujin greeted the stream as she grabbed a random chair in your room to sit down on.

"least favorite" you corrected, "wonyoung's my favorite"

"i changed myself to number one on the list though"

"that doesn't matter. you haven't done anything to be my favorite"

"i bought you food!" she exclaimed.

"you did... but you're still annoying"

"you're annoying" she retorted.

user6 the yujin & y/n beef will never end

"but anyways i came in here to ask if y'all wanna see a y/n x kazuha collab?" yujin asked your chat.

you stayed silent, not wanting to show how happy you were at the possibility.

user6 Y/NXKAZUHA COLLAB NOW

user7 MAKE IT HAPPEN

user8 collab of the year????

"she's on the same team as sakura and chaewon. we can make this happen" yujin said.

"and you didn't tell me sooner" i gasped, "fake friend"

"do you not keep up with what they do" yujin gasped, "fake friend"

"this isn't about me this is about you not telling me sooner" you tried to deter the conversation.

"well i'm telling you now. so is the y/n x kazuha collab happening or not" yujin held her phone up as a fake mic to your mouth.

"i mean if kazuha's down i'm down" you shrugged not being able to decline it on stream.

"let's go! we did it chat" yujin cheered before taking her exit.

you continued to stream for a couple more hours, just playing some chill games and talking to chat.

once you ended stream you checked twitter to see if people were hyped about the possibility of the collab, only to see kazuha's direct response.

ALL CHAPTERS !!! | NEXT CH !!!

[skinnyducky]

good in bed // v.h.

Hey...how y’all doing? I have halfway recovered from my wisdom teeth surgery and I definitely was feeling a bit sad not posting and whatnot. But, here I am now, so I hope you enjoy this one. Pt. 3 to Party at Y/n’s is most likely coming Monday. And, Pt. 2 to Maneater is coming Wednesday (hopefully). Any who, hope you enjoy! Also, this is very much inspired by Dula Peep’s “Good in Bed.”

Word Count: 1336, edited 

WARNING: mentions of sex, arguing, angst, language, and i think that’s it.

---------

The start of yours and Vinnie’s relationship was like ice cream on hot summer day. It was sweet, it was refreshing, and it was much needed. After being cheated on by your ex, you needed to find something to bring the love back…and that’s exactly what Vinnie did. The two of you had met after accidentally buying the same car. You bickered and fought over the vintage vehicle before he ultimately decided to let you keep it…but only if you gave him your number. You happily did so and long story short, that led to a beautiful relationship…or at least what was a beautiful relationship.

As the relationship went on, you found that the so-called “honeymoon phase” was really just a phase. For you and Vinnie, it lasted for a least a good two weeks. What started as late night conversations before bed shifted into heated debates and hate-filled goodnights. The butterflies that fluttered around had died, and now your stomach was overflowed with enraged hornets. You didn’t know what was the cause of your downfall, and you weren’t even sure that there was anything that could fix it.

Well…you knew one thing that definitely fixed it: sex. The term “angry sex” seemed like a myth. You thought people were just overhyping it…until you were actually living it. You remember the first time it happened; you were pissed that he didn’t show up to dinner with your parents, while he was pissed because you hadn’t stopped yelling at him for a good hour. The two of you argued for hours, and as an attempt to get you to stop, Vinnie grabbed you by your waist and tossed you onto his bed. It was silent, the only sound being the heavy breathing from both of you. Next thing you know, the two of you are going at it.

Ever since then, that’s all you two did: fight and screw, then pretend like nothing ever happened. As nice as the sex was, it just was too toxic for you. You didn’t want to be stuck in an endless cycle and having to resort to sex to solve your problems. And also, you wanted Vinnie to know you for more than just your body. With that being said, you figured the solution to that was to communicate. Something you two did none of.

So, here you were in Vinnie’s room, sitting on his bed and waiting for him to finish streaming. While scrolling mindlessly through Instagram, you tried to figure out what the hell you were going to say. You didn’t know how to talk about your feelings, it was completely foreign to you. Ugh, this was going to be difficult.

“…I love you guys, bye chat.”

Vinnie stopped streaming and turned around in his seat to face you. You pursed his lips and started fiddling with his thumbs. “So, what did you wanna talk about?”

“I think you know.” You said, not meeting his eyes.

“Is this the talk? You’re breaking up with me aren’t you?”

You shook your head, laughing to yourself at the boy’s stupidity. “No, Vinnie…I’m not breaking up with you.”

“Then why does it feel like you are?”

“I promise, I’m not. I just wanna try to communicate, y’know. Like other couples do.”

He shrugged. “Don’t we already do that?”

“I wouldn’t necessarily call our exploration of each other’s bodies ‘communicating.’ Besides, you and I both know that our relationship isn’t the same as before. It’s like we’ve grown cold towards each other or something.”

“Is this because I forgot our anniversary?” He asked, leaning back in his chair.

You gave him a puzzled look for a minute, trying to figure out when your anniversary actually was. Had you forgot too? Damn, this relationship really was trash.

“Uhm, no…this isn’t about that. Although, we really need to mark our anniversary on our calendars.”

“Then what’s this about, Y/n?”

You sighed and stood up from your spot on his bed. You paced in front of him, trying to figure out the right words to say. “Vinnie…I’m tired. I’m tired of always arguing and then having angry sex…which is amazing, by the way.”

He squinted his eyes at you as he thought about what you said. “So…are you mad about the arguing or the sex?”

“Oh my god, why is this so hard?” you groaned. “I’m mad about all of it, Vin. I’m mad that we just can’t talk to each other. I’m mad that when we do have time together, we spend it arguing. I’m mad that the only way for us to enjoy each other’s company is to have sex. I’m just tired of it all.”

“Then, let’s just end the relationship.”

You stopped your pacing and stared at him with wide eyes. “I just told you I didn’t wanna break up.”

Vinnie chuckled, “I know that Y/n, but if you’re really feeling that way…then just leave.”

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing right now. You actually want to just break up? Aren’t you going to at least talk to me about what you’re feeling? Aren’t you gonna fight for us?”

“You wanna know what I’m feeling, Y/n?” Vinnie asked. You nodded, egging him to continue. “I’m feeling…very hungry right now. I want a fat burger and a fat fry with a fat shake to go along with it. That’s exactly what I’m feeling right now. And if the relationship is already going to hell…why fight for it? I say let it die.”

He then proceeded to hop out of his seat and dance around his room, chanting “let it die, let it die…let it shrivel up and die” while clapping.

You just stood there with nothing to say. You couldn’t believe that he was taking this all as a joke. You just poured your entire heart to him, trying to fix your relationship, and he’s sitting here quoting The Lorax and acting like a child. At this point, you were sure that there was no hope for the two of you and you were fine with that. You weren’t going to be driven mad by this anymore.

“You’re a fucking joke.” You growled, picking up your keys off his bed. “Y’know, I wish we hadn’t met each other because I’d be way better off if I didn’t even know you.”

“That’s not saying a lot, babe. You’d probably still be with the same dickhead who cheated on you.”

You scoffed, feeling the hornets in your stomach get their stingers ready. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m saying I made your life better. You wouldn’t be who you are today if it wasn’t for me.”

“You’re one to talk. You’d be stuck in here, playing video games and withering away if I hadn’t come along.”

Vinnie huffed, holding back a laugh. “At least I don’t have to deal with video games nagging at me all the time.”

“Jerk!” you yelled, rushing to his door. You stood in the doorway, turning around to look back at him. “I never want to see you again, you hear me? NEVER again, Vincent. You’re dead to me.”

Slamming the door behind you, you made your way down the hallway of the Hype House. But before you could go any further, something stopped you. A feeling of sadness washed over you and your anger subsided. The hornets that once threatened to pour out of you had now calmed down. At that moment, you felt your body tremble as sin known as lust flowed through your veins. You swallowed hard, trying to keep yourself from rushing back into Vinnie’s room and pouncing on him…but there was nothing you could do to stop yourself.

“Screw it,” you whispered.

You turned around and darted towards Vinnie’s room. Bursting through the door, you tackled him onto the bed and well…you know the rest. You knew going through this all over again was bad, that it was causing more damage to your relationship. It was definitely sad…but that’s what made you good in bed.

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

saturday again no problem (a tuesdaypost retrospective)

sort of mixed feelings about this one bc, as we have previously chatted about, the august 2021-august 2022 period was one of the worst twelve-month periods of my life.

however! this year brought like six new tuesdaypost initiatives from other people (please shout at me in the comments or by DM bc my brain is broken and i don't remember all of you) and i DO want to take a look back at some media i enjoyed.

the normal format + some misc. stats below

listening

here are all the tuesdaysongs plus Permanent Peace by Jack de Quidt, who is not on spo/tify. this year gave me albums by: joywave, alt-j, unloved, scene queen, new doja cat, a bunch of junie and the hutfriends singles, and the gleeful insanity of the mcr tour. VERY good musical year imo

-

reading

this historically has been one of the more fallow categories, bc there is a level of background pain where it is quite difficult for me to read and viddy gaem is a better distraction.

could have sworn i read three cowboy novelizations this year but i can only find evidence that i read the sabata and red river novelizations. i have mixed feelings about the execution of Tom Lin's The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Gods of Jade and Shadow but do not regret reading either.

no particular comics or manga stand out in my fallible, forgettable brain this year. i am excited for the ongoing light novel and manga adaptation of Otherside Picnic but that's just from watching the anime

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watching

happy that letterboxd is doing part of the thing i wanted (getting me to watch more movies) deeply annoyed i have fallen into the trap i was afraid of. this trap is: I Want To Make The Number Go Up and am now reluctant to watch tv bc i can't log it on letterboxd and it doesn't "count". fucking hate to gamify my own leisure like this!!!!

the very good thing about letterboxd is that my friends have excellent taste, and letterboxd reminds me which of the eight billion django knockoffs i have and have not seen.

GOD was january a good movie month. the below screenshot is movies i watched for the first time this year and really liked/have stuck in my head in some way, and 3/8ths were from january. thank u library streaming service kanopy

see letterboxd has taken such a big chunk of my Moving Images time that it was hard to remember that both peaky blinders and killing eve ended this year!!! and i rewatched several seasons of adventure time! and most of the first season of DS9! and i am now in the process of watching the vampire interview show with my sister!!!

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playing

got a handmedown switch!

this year was mostly big open worlds that didn't require a lot of complex thought from me, or if they did require some puzzle solving it was in really short bursts. lion's share of the hours this year went to fallout 4, breath of the wild, and pokemon scarlet. i really loved junk shop telescope, depanneur nocturne, and card cowboy.

honorary mentions to phone games that kept my anxiety to a low simmer while in a lot of doctor's offices.

game im most hype for is probably the spooky fishing game Dredge, but i don’t think we’ll get that until early 2024. if anyone says the words "fallout 5" next year i will lose my mind bc i would like another one of these stupid motherfuckers before i die.

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making

i think i'm going to mourn the old lair until i die.

i am deeply, deeply unhappy with how this year went both personally and professionally. made an apartment cozy. lost the cozy apartment. cleaned a whole bunch of metal. framed a lot of things. bought a whole bunch of furniture. still have moths.

hate to leave this post on this note however i really should have died twice this year and didn’t. so im trying to be nice to myself about the rest of it.

-

bonus stats

47/52 weeks posted

moves: 1 (assisted with two)

recipes failed: many

postcards sent: many

number of 1040s i will receive next month: 4

overnight trips: 2

day trips: 3

covid: +1

serious covid scares: 9

combined hospital and doctor's visits: don't worry about it

number of lamps: also don't worry about it what are you a cop

cats: +1

[azureflight]

My entire friend group have uninstalled WoW and started FF14

It still feels surreal we are doing this. Now, it is perfectly possible that we will be back to WoW within the month, talking about how disappointing the “weeb game” was, but, this stills feels like a seminal moment.

I have been a Warcraft fan since I was a literal kid trying (and failing :P) to play Tides of Darkness on my aunt’s desktop. I spent so many hours and so much of my allowance playing Reign of Chaos in internet cafes. 

When WOTLK trailer dropped, we had hijacked the computer lab and projected it to the auditorium for all to see. 

I have been part of real life, unironic Horde vs Alliance infighting in college gaming clubs. I remember us all wearing Horde/Alliance merch, enthusiastically and rather foolishly, but completely seriously, arguing about lore, about who did what wrong and who was “more at fault”.

I own, almost every single Warcraft book, comic, guide ever published. I own hard copies, I own digital copies. I have watched and read and listened to every single piece of lore ever produced about this setting.

I have kept my sub up and played through all of the content draught, the infamous SoO, the practically less than 2 patch worth expac that was WoD.

I have allowed my sub to lapse for the first time during BFA. 

I was so hyped for Shadowlands back when it was announced, and was annoyed when they changed the release date, causing me to waste my vacation time that I had taken for it. But a mere month of the expac in and I was already bored of it. And now, 9.1 is out and I am done. I barely played this patch and I have not only cancelled my sub, but went and removed the game from my PC.

Maybe this is a stupid overreaction and in the next patch, at the worst the next expac, I will be right back at the fur shop like the old fox I am. However, I know it feels different.

Throughout the years, I had many a thing that frustrated me about this game. Made me rage even. But I hadn’t quit then. No. The feeling that has been creeping up on me, isn’t rage. It is disinterest. I just, don’t care anymore. 

Most of my friends over the years have switched to the Horde and this has been a sore spot for me. I stuck with Alliance, having some alts to play with them, and they had some Alliance alts to play with me, but... It wasn’t the same, it wasn’t enough. Several online friends, I had already lost contact with.

And now we are all gathering in FF14! I had the discord chat of my life! So many people I hadn’t talked to in years, on top of my actual real life friends whom I hang out with, are all jumping into this new journey.

My best friend’s progression guild is looking to make a full guild transfer, currently all of them except one have characters and a guild in FF, trying to convince the last guy to make the switch.

And then there is the lore. That’s why I fell in love with this setting in the first place. I loved this story, the cheese, the heroism, the over the topness, all of it. It was never “high art”, but it was unique in its own way, it had heart and it had characters and stories that I got invested in. Deeply so. I hadn’t start playing WoW because I was a connoisseur of MMORPG genre and “calculated it to be the best among its contemporaries”. I dived head first in Vanilla because it was Warcraft.

And now, I honestly cannot bring myself to care about this story, or its characters, other than a passing resentment. This was not the case, less than a year ago. I had bought the bloody Shadows Rising novel, I had read it and I liked it.

Now I am just, over it. This sense was rising, this sense of feeling less and less care for it, as expac after expac went in wildly nonsensical directions. But I had things that I had liked well enough to keep at it and have hope, hope for a good enough story that would keep me engaged. But I lost it. Something broke in 9.1.

I guess I realized, or rather I perceive, that the actual writers of this story do not care about it and none of it matters. There is no story. There is no plot, no continuity. Just an endless stream of “cool” shots in cinematics that ultimately don’t matter because, it has no basis and it has no relevance. It exists because someone wanted to make this cool scene, without caring what came before it, or what will come after it. Each scene exist, not to progress a cohesive story, but simply because someone wanted it to exist. And the next “cool” piece will flagrantly retcon the last one, ignoring or outright invalidating the stakes and hooks that had been set up in the previous one. 

This is no longer a story of people, who were dramatic and weird and fantastical, but ultimately people. No. This is now a check list of what someone wanted to do in WoW setting and all the characters are empty puppets and all the plots matter only as much as they matter in any given single cinematic or questline. There is no pay off, and there is no logic. Characters aren’t allowed to live and react. Things only happen because the author said so, and the characters just bend and transform to do their bidding. And they feel no reason to explain nor establish as to why a character acts the way they do, let alone trying to make it believable or internally justified.

The gameplay aspect is the least important to me, the exact opposite of the majority. But I am sick and tired being punished with powerlessness for what I like story wise or aesthetically. I am sick and tired needing to read through guides upon guides, copying meta builds, just to have my class be remotely playable.

And most importantly, I am sick and tired of a game that will put me through genocide, deny me justice and vengeance under the guise of need for cooperation and then deny me playing with my friends across factions.

Now I get to play with all of my friends without jumping over the hoops or giving up on what I love. Because there are no stupid factions in FF14. And I can play multiple classes without hating myself.

I had several favorite characters in this game. They are still, mostly, alive. But do I care about them anymore? Jaina, Anduin, Sylvanas, Turalyon, Tyrande, Genn... No. I don’t care and it doesn’t even hurt anymore, it just feels like I had wasted my time and money. It feels exactly like how I felt during season 8 of GoT. An empty feeling of waste, so I leave.

Will I care about the characters or the story in FF14? I don’t know. I don’t think I will stick around if I don’t. But will I go back to WoW? A piece of me wants to hope for a superb turn around, but... Honestly? I don’t see it happening. And anything less than an epic turn around that fixes all of this, the lore, the classes, the playerbase division? I won’t bother anymore.

So off to the greener pastures! Maybe I will come crawling back within the blink of an eye, eating this post, repenting for ever having left. Maybe... I just don’t think so.

[sheadre]

When Stars Collide (Jackson Wang x Reader) Part 2/2

Part One

Warnings: none

Jackson’s PoV.

He stared at his phone as he sat in his living room. Jackson felt so restless a long time ago, his heart was always thumping hard against his chest whenever he saw a picture of her. She was beautiful and her laugh was music to his ears. It’s been a week since he took her home after wrapping up the song at the studio. Ever since she debuted in N3XUS she drew his attention to herself in every music video or variety show.

Fans pointed out how badly her bandmates treated her and how much she was ignored by both the other girls and the company. She posted a few acoustic versions of their songs on her Instagram which left many people dumbfounded why her company was treating her so poorly. She was more than just talented. Jackson knew that he might fall in love with her right after he walked into the studio. Her voice was mesmerizing and it expressed so many feelings. He couldn’t help but stare at her in awe through the glass window.

He kept thinking back to that kiss she pressed onto his cheek as she said goodbye. He never thought he would feel like this. Even when he was so in love with Alice, it couldn’t compare to that buzzing he felt around (Name). Jackson sighed leaning back into his couch pulling a pillow into his arms, hugging it tightly. Then his phone went off startling him.

“Ey, man, I’m coming over with some take-out” sounded Bam Bam’s voice from the other end. “Jinyoung’s with me too.”

“Will you ever stop acting like you can just walk in here like you own the place?” Jackson sighed but smiled. Even after years of GOT7 ending, they were still as close as ever. Soon his doorbell rang and when he opened it, Bam Bam walked inside like he owned the place. He hung his head as he chuckled but his worry and nervousness never eased. Why couldn’t he just text her? Why was he so nervous?

“Hey man, you look like someone kicked your puppy” Bam Bam turned back to him while Jinyoung took his shoes off. Jackson’s response was silence as he walked over to the counter and started unpacking the food. “Wait, did Alice contact you again? Did she call you again?”

“No… the last time she did, I blocked her” Jackson shook his head while turning to the cabinets so he could grab plates and silverware.

“Then what’s wrong?” Jinyoung asked and his expression showed his worry for his friend.

“Ah, it has to be a girl! Did you get a new girlfriend? One night stand? Anything? Have you gotten laid ever since…?” Bam Bam was immediately interested making Jackson roll his eyes again.

“I have no idea, okay?” Jackson groaned as he planted himself in his couch with a pout on his lips. “We were connecting, wrote a song but… I don’t know…”

“Why are you not calling her? Just find out if she’s into you, man” his friend plopped down next to him. “It’s been so long since you looked at a woman other than as a friend. You need to get laid.”

“That is the only thing you can think about?” Jackson hit Bam Bam with a pillow. “I have no idea what to say…”

“Just text her ‘hi’ and she will respond, the pick up lines are so lame anyway but you can try them if you want her to run to the other end of the planet” Jinyoung chimed in making Jackson look at him as evilly as possible. The conversation quickly turned towards what everyone was doing and other things. It was relaxing to just let go of all the busy work days for a while and think about anything and nothing at the same time.

Then later that night, Jackson grabbed his phone and typed in those two letters with a winky emoji. His heart jumped in his chest but he decided to just put his phone down and take a shower first. He was tired and would have a long day the other day. When he finished with the shower, a message was waiting for him.

Time skip ~

A months went by and to his delight, the company wanted him and (Name) to shoot an MV for the song they collaborated on. It was tiring but he was filled with energy as he danced with her. She was so mesmerizing in her costume, her dance moves so smooth like she was born to do this and he thought so in reality. Jackson ever since seeing her perform on stage during a concert or in a music video, he thought that she was a natural. Her moves and gestures looked so effortless compared to the other girls in her band.

However, he knew that if you were passionate about what you were doing, people could achieve more than they would ever dream of. He was certain that she would achieve all her goals and more leaving everyone mesmerized. Then they were asked to perform on the newest Idol Producer during the live concert. The hype around the two of them was already large, fans wanted them to be together so when they appeared and he kissed her on stage, the whole place seemed to explode. They both agreed to it especially after the company asked them to show more intimate for the fans. It was too easy and he felt like no one was around them, like there was only the two of them. It was so sweet and he wanted to hold her and never let go. Jackson could see the same thing in her eyes but the moment ended with the music and she broke out of her trance.

To his disappointment, she had to leave the scene right after their performance for an interview with Elle. After that, they both had little time to even just chat with him being in a different country. It was frustrating then Jackson was invited to an awards show where everything turned downhill. One of the actresses he never even met before tried to make small talk and get closer to him. The intentions were so obvious and the woman was looking so cheap, acting so cheap. Though, the gentleman in him kept being polite to her which she took as a green light to be more pushy. Yibo, noticed it but was too busy listening to a director talk to him to go over to them. Jackson wasn’t angry with Yibo for not helping him out, he was still young and that director was way more important than to leave him hanging. Then the actress was in his lap before he realized what was happening and of course many fans and paparazzi shot a ton of photos in different angles of them.

First time in his life, Jackson pushed a woman away and ran away in frustration. He knew that by the time he reached the hotel room, (Name) would’ve already seen the photos and the none existent stories with them. But he couldn’t give up, he couldn’t let her slip away. For weeks, he felt miserable because she didn’t answer any of his texts or calls. One night, when he just wanted to fall into bed and not wake up for the next 72 hours, he found a letter on his coffee table with a ticket to Seoul. He furrowed his eyebrows as he lifted the letter to read it properly.

Dear Mr. Wang,

It’s Sue, (Name)’s assistant. I’m writing to you because I am aware of the truth behind those pictures. I’ve seen your live stream two weeks ago in which you explained everything. (Name) refused to see it but I know that it is not late, she is very much in love with you. I’m not writing to you as her assistant but as her friend.

There is an airplane ticket for you for the flight that comes to Seoul from Shanghai at 11 pm. I will arrange everything so she will be home, here’s the code for her apartment complex’s gate. I hope you can come…

Jackson’s heart seemed to skip a beat as he processed the words. He grabbed his phone, some cash with his keys and called a cab. He had to reach the flight which would take off in two hours. Throughout the flight he was restless, thinking about a million ways what to say to her. He couldn’t lose her. No one made him feel this way before, get under his skin, fill him with energy and make him giddy. Getting to her apartment was easy but knocking on her door was harder. Jackson stood there with a dry mouth and blinked a few times before he groaned and just knocked on the wooden surface of it without a thought in his head. He heard soft footsteps padding up to the door but all the air left his lungs when he saw her.

Your PoV.

You knew that everyone noticed your pouty face and bad mood lately but only Sue said anything about it. After all, she was the only person you told about your true feelings for Jackson. To your surprise, she wasn’t even surprised about that fact, just smirked at you knowingly and insisted on showing you Jackson’s live stream.

You definitely missed him. Being around him made everything so easy and effortless, so carefree. Ever since you stopped texting him, your days turned dull and grey. Nothing really interested you anymore and found yourself staring at your TV with a blank expression. Suddenly, someone knocked on your door which surprised you because you didn’t order food nor did you called over anyone. Not that you had many people to call over.

You walked up to the door with your eyebrows furrowed and opened the door. You thought you were having a heart attack when you saw who it was. Jackson was standing on the other side, disheveled, glitter sticking to half of his face and neck, dark circles under his eyes and panting heavily as he stared at you with wide eyes.

“J-Jackson?” you asked unsure of what you were supposed to do. “Um… Come in.”

Walking past you, you could smell his smell. You always thought that it was nice for him to not put on liters of cologne. Other guys tended to do so suffocating anyone in a ten meter radius.

“(Name)… just please, listen to me, I know the photos and what the media made up is contradictory but there was nothing going on between me and that woman” Jackson sputtered quickly after you closed the door. He grabbed your hand and looked at you pleadingly. “Please, believe me…”

“Why… are you explaining anything to me?” you asked quietly trying to pull away. He didn’t owe you anything, he was a free man, there was nothing official going on between the two of you. “You… don’t owe me anything…”

“Then why are you not responding? Why are you ignoring me since then?” he asked and leaned down so he could look into your eyes. He reached up to cup your face and wiped a tear away. You reached up and touched the wet trail of the tear in surprise. “I know we never got to officially go out… I wanted to ask you out properly after that night when we performed in live TV but you had to go to an interview. (Name)… I’ve never felt anything like this with anyone before…”

Jackson was looking deep into your eyes, forehead almost touching yours. He was still so perfect and you knew you would be a fool to not say yes. Every inch of you wanted to say yes… ever since you met him in the studio.

“I wasn’t angry with you…” you sniffed as you held onto his hand that cupped your face. “I was afraid that I was seeing too much into everything… I was afraid to be heartbroken.”

“I know… and I want to make it up to you” he breathed before his lips crashed against yours in an urgent, impatient yet sweet kiss. You could feel his desperation as he held onto you like his life depended on it. You kissed him back with your eyes closed. Your heart was thumping so hard against your ribcage as he pulled you closer.

He was everything you ever wanted and you were grateful for the stars to lead you to him.

Ten years later ~

Hong Kong was beautiful in its own way. You learnt Chinese quickly especially with Jackson helping you when you got stuck. When he first brought you home, to introduce you to his family, he seemed to be so proud showing you off. His family was nice and accepted you completely after Jackson proposed to you.

You knew how hard it was for him to propose after how his first fiancée let him down, but you couldn’t be happier to tie the knot with him. It was natural and nothing changed after years of marriage either except that you got two kids. You were always laughing your head off when Jackson was once left with your daughter for days because you had some work over seas and showed you the drawing your daughter made. He was glowing with pride and happiness, already telling your daughter that she was a true artist.

It was filling you with happiness to see him happy. He was so good at taking care of your kids, even made a special performance with them for Mother’s Day for you. Though, you got a whole different performance later in the bedroom. You loved him more than anything and you knew he felt the same way about you. There was no need for any proof.

End ~

[fandom-sheep]

Eret Dream SMP

10 APR 21 Delayed Liveblogging Part 1/1

Alright I’m 2 hours late because I missed the notification

But it looks like we’re building an ice highway and talking anime so all’s good.

I love all the people shouting Yuri on Ice. Just everyone shouting for him to watch the gay show.

Their not up for “sexy lamp” females in shows. Understandable.

Cool being with her flower crown.

Yuck. Why is a 14 year old writing a love letter to a 24 year old? IM SORRY THEY FELL IN LOVE WHEN SHE WAS 10?!?

A lot of people shouting about assassination classroom as well. It was actually a pretty good show.

I won’t ask what banana fish is..

Eret’s moving out of the tower?

Not into his castle no no.

Nah into the neato fortress.

Poor being just wants to be near the others.

Time to watch the ye of the poll go ZOOOOM

Given? Haven’t heard of that one.

Yeah I was really late.

Ad and void time let’s go! We love the void.

Multiplayer ad! Let’s get the Eret some extra ad money!

The void art is so cute. I wonder who did it? I’ll have to search and find out.

Let’s vote Bois!

I’m saving up my bits for a water and I’m at 10.8k and I’m always so tempted to use them to unlock emotes but I know I need to wait to get to my goal.

I’m almost better at saving bits than money

Firefighters? Well duh there was a fire.

This poor king. So many concerning things.

Now everyone wants a sad-ist react.

I agree to wait for an animatic stream. It’s always awesome when Eret reacts to all those little animatics that didn’t have a lot of views.

Already back to talking about sexism in anime

Fortress expansion! Woo!

Pretty being deserves to be complicated with the work they put in their appearance.

Ah a sus on the horizon.

Ah. The sonic man is committing arson. That is acceptable to the leader of the lgbt twitch kids.

A combination pop and bonk sound when the bottle opens.

Oh wait my comment got read I forget that happens here. That’s happens to me multiple times at this point. Am I just lucky or do others have that happen?

Oh he said below the age of 13. I thought I said under the age of 30 for a second and I was so confused.

Chat kids. Hons. Dont say your exact age on the internet anywhere for any reason. The only options are adult. Older minor. Younger minor. Maybe only adult and minor in most scenarios.

Ah is sniff here? Sniff’s cool.

Stupidly long songs are almost always awesome songs.

About to switch from watching on my iPad and typing on my phone to doing both on my phone.

Hank Green follows Eret on TikTok?

Alright I’ve swapped to my phone to watch and type

Ah we beat the sub goal.

Defenestration such as “be quiet or I will defenestrate you”

I hear this being quoting a tiktok. I know because I also watched that tiktok.

Overmorrow is one of my favorite words. Everyone forgets it but it’s great.

No headaches. Those aren’t allowed.

Twitter. Be nice to the king.

If any CC should come to tumblr Eret should. He would fit in well.

“Twitter needs to cancel itself” I wholly agree. Twitter is only good for fanart. It’s no fun any other way.

Twitter is the on fire garbage can that tumblr was. Now tumblr is just a chill campfire.

People don’t accept that people learn. People like to pull out old things that don’t reflect their now views.

Eret’s chat is so chill. Even when unhappy about Twitter.

Switching from talking negative things. Nice.

Awww. Everyone chanting about tumblr. We are superior.

Does yahoo own tumblr? I wouldn’t know. Poor tumblr seems like its run by a whole 4 people.

Eret’s chat is also super nice to one another. Like they try to answer each other’s questions about what’s going on and the like.

I love how the chat goes nuts with the appropriate hearts when people come out.

Dress the way ya want. Life’s better that way.

Ooo. I’m going to add a sponge to the kit I keep in case a kid I work with or a friend starts having a panic attack.

Building content is always thrilling. I can’t do that stuff so it’s fun watching building.

The poor rock just saw the verified mark and didn’t stop to think.

And it was his own brand as well. And he didn’t even delete it and try to recover.

Chat just singing along to the song. I love this chat so much. They are so sweet.

I wonder what Eret’s chat “personifies” as in the smp if we do?

This man isn’t encouraging that tattoo but if it happens he demands to see it.

Chat just yelling Bye.

I probably won’t make a post for whoever we raid.

I just don’t think I feel wordy enough for that.

Off we go to the other lgbt mine being!

That last second hype train. LOL

Also poor Eret scared the audience won’t come back. She doesn’t realize that her audience is like a lot of puppies.

She could tell us to wait for next stream and we would wait there for however long it takes for her to get back. Be it a day or several months. We would wait and then be really hyper and happy when she returns.

Anyway. Farewell you all!

[siyeonjisoo]

AVATAR GOING HUNTING NYC 9/3

It has finally happened, y’all!  Concerts are back in my life and I am more than thrilled about it.  Last night was the first concert I’ve been to since February 13, 2020 so over a year and a half when I’m used to maybe 3 months at most between concerts.  Felt so SO good to be back at it and see concert fam folks again!

My comeback was with the incomparable metal band Avatar who I first saw in 2019 when they toured with Babymetal and I had no clue who they were.  How things have changed since then.  Now without any further ado, I give you how the day went.

I sadly had to go to work in the morning but I left at noon and made it to Irving Plaza around 1:40.  I was really worried that I was going to have a horrible spot in line and thus have to hide in the back or along the walls to avoid the mosh pits but I ended up being only the 7th person in line.  I had GA ticket and was the first person in line for that. Between already knowing some of the folks there and spending the next 6 hours making friends with them, I ended up being promised they would help me get as close to front row as they could get me which was AMAZING.

Doors opened actually on time and we were able to get into the venue pretty quickly!  I ended up SECOND ROW for this show DEAD CENTER.  An intense place to be but so very amazing.

Touring with Avatar are two other bands, Tallah and Magic Sword.  Tallah performed first with about 5 songs.  I’m always completely unfamiliar with the bands touring with folks so I didn’t know this group either.  And they aren’t bad but not a group I will go out of my way to listen to again.  Drummer kicked ass though, apparently he only joined the band as a replacement drummer 2 months ago and he killed it.  The singer has the ability to do splits but that’s the only thing about him I think I like.  The other members of the band were just as memorable as their songs, which is to say, not at all.

Next was Magic Sword.  That group is a trio, of drummer, guitarist, and keyboardist.  They were amazing, 10 out of 10.  If you can get the chance to see them in concert, I beg of you to do so.  That said, I can’t say I’ll be listening to their music again unless it’s live because they don’t have a vocalist and I like to be able to sing/rap along with music unless it is loud enough I can feel it in every single cell of my body, which is what Magic Sword delivered.  Only bad thing to happen here was the crowd was starting to be...less than sober...and the person behind me spilled a quarter of their beer down my ass, right into the pocket where my phone was.  I was less than thrilled with this person and was thankful they traded places with their friend for Avatar’s set because the second person was kinder and actually made conversation with us a little bit and apologized for how drunk they both were.

The stage was cleared after Magic Sword performed probably 6 or 7 songs? I can’t tell for sure since their songs do seem to run on the longer side so I may have split a song that is actually one into two.  And then it was time for the reason I was there, the main event: AVATAR.

The roadies came out and set up the stage for them with a very different setup than ANY of us expected. There was a projector screen blocking most of our view but we could see three mic stands set up in the front middle, the usual lights and drumset in the back, and then another drumset on stageright next to the microphones.  

After many attemted Avatar chants and false alarms from the crew, the band came out.  They all lined up, John at the front drumset, Henrik, Johannes, Jonas, and Tim in that order filled in the microphones set up.  They all stood looking dead ahead, barely blinking, for a few moments of us screaming before jumping into the first two songs of the night, Colossus and Let it Burn.  They performed Colossus without moving or smiling or anything, they looked like robots so so perfectly.  They held the positions for what felt like a full minute or two with Henrik trying so so hard to not smile, I could see the corner of his mouth twitching.  He looked so happy to be here the whole night!

The lights went down after those 2 songs and they took off the front drumset and changed the microphones back to the usual ones that they can kick up and spread them to give them all more space.  When they did, a drumstick dropped on the ground and got left behind so a friend of mine got the venue staff to pick it up and hand it to her! She got a drum stick from Tallah, too I believe.

Next came SIlence in the Age of Apes, Bloody Angel, (Johannes said he thinks of all of us as his) Child (ren), and The Eagle Has Landed.  This is where things started getting a LOT more intense in the crowd.  I could feel the crowd moving more behind me in Apes so I could tell that there was a mosh pit that was at least starting out by then and by Bloody Angel, people were crowd surfing.  At least one person per song would come crashing over us for the rest of the show and I didn’t really love it.  I was scared the whole time a foot was gonna come crashing into my head or a staff member was gonna punch me in the nose AGAIN to keep me from getting a foot in the head. which yes, the dude full-on punched me in the nose to catch a foot that swerved away from my head and into the person in front of me instead.  An adventure of a moment.

Everyone went off-stage for a few minutes except for Johannes who took a moment to greet us and thank us all for coming  He was in his full glory the whole night, that cocky grin glued to his face and a manic joy in his eyes that was genuine happiness to be back in front of a crowd after so long.  He gave us some kind of witty (but obvious if you know song names) intro into the next set of songs and the rest of the band came back out.

(Insert quirky pun her) Paint it Red, Secret Door, Swarm, Torn Apart.  This was the period of time when I could barely keep my eyes off of Tim because he looked so giddy half the time.  Either making faces to tease us or just looking around himself in amazement.  More moshing pushing us around and crowd surfers kicking us in the head but oh-so amazing.

Then came the grand piano being carried on stage.  No, it wasn’t actually a grand piano, it was a keyboard put into a wood frame to look like a shrunken down grand piano so it looked real but was able to be lifted by three or four people and carried on stage.  Johannes sat down and seranaded us with Gun and I have not hated being in an American crowd so much before in my life.  Every time I would start to get into the emotions of the song, someone would shout something hardly intelligible because they were so far away or it would be someone screaming “I LOVE AVATAR!” Made me so so so annoyed but Johannes was smiling so I tried to ignore it and let it go.

The piano was taken away and the rest of the band came back to perform Going Hunting.  And lemme just tell you that it was an honor to be in the third ever audience to hear that song performed live.  It hits all the right feels to kick ass live and at home so I hope people are loving it.

Johannes thanked us for tuning in and making their streamed Dream concerts happen in Avataruary.  He said it gave them all a chance to reflect and think about the songs they haven’t performed in years, leading them to their self-titled album, leading us Deeper Down.  This song was actually one I don’t know if I’ve listened to before, I’ve kind of stuck with the 4 albums I really like and haven’t branched out much.  But it slaps hard.

Next it was time for us to worship our king.  Everyone but Kungen left stage and he looked at us like we were ants beneath his feet, barely worthy of being acknowleged while the roadies came and changed his guitar and gave him his royal attire.  Kungen slowly started playing the intro and Tim joined him, standing back to back and both of them looking gorgeous while everyone else slowly joined them on stage to build up A Statue of the King.  They followed that with zero comments jumping immediately into The King Welcomes You to Avatar Country.  Both of those songs are so effing hype that when they all just walked off stage after, I was shook.

I think this was when Johannes started getting a little sappy with us in his comment.  He said they’d all agreed that they wouldn’t get emotional on us but he had to take a minute and thank us all for being back here with them.  And the way he knows that we’re really back together is because even though we all look so different we all *snifs armpits* smell the same.  We all Smell Like a Freakshow.  I don’t know if it’s just me but it felt like we were all saving up energy for this song and went absolutely feral.  I used up almost all the energy I had left so I just did the bare minumum for Wormhole right after.  Moved just enough to avoid getting hit in the head with someone else’s head.

Then for what I think was only the second time all night, everybody went off stage.  Every other time, Johannes has stuck around and chatted while the others were gone but he left too.  They did a quick little outfit change behind the scenes I think, Johannes came back on with his overalls undone so clearly he was hot.  And, you know, a warm temperature as well. Yup.

And just like that, as though 3 hours hadn’t passed since the first band started, it was time for the last song of the night.  It was time to Hail the Apocalypse.  This song is the only song I know for sure they performed the last time I saw them live and I feel like it only gets better the more I hear it.  They could make a 10 minute version of it and I would still be asking for more.

They went off-stage for a second and everyone put down their instruments and came back without anything and just let us cheer for them.  They gave us a little bow and then started saying thank you and waving good bye.  I saw Tim say “I love you” at the crowd and I think John and Jonas both blew kisses at us.  

And then it was over.  They left the stage, the lights came up in the house, we all made sure everyone was okay from all the flying feet that came at us, and the venue staff told us it was time to go home.  I had friends going the same way I was so I was able to keep the magic going for a little while longer before I started my journey home alone.

These guys are all so amazing and I am so lucky I got to fall in love with them the way I did.  And I am so happy to have the friends I’ve made at this show and every other show I’ve been to.  It was an amazing way to get back to concerts, starting it off with a bang.  I have blisters, bruises, and sore everything but I would do it all again tonight if only I could.  It is now time to start counting down the days till I follow Miyavi around for a week on tour in October!

THANK YOU FOR TAKING ME HUNTING, AVATAR! Glory to Our King!

The setlist was given to my my friend. All other photographs are taken by yours truly

[technobladetimestamps]

Nov 16 Stream Timestamps

Timestamps from Technoblade’s “THE REVOLUTION (dream SMP)”

Link to my youtube comment with all of the timestamps x

Timestamps with hyperlinks below

02:13  “This is a surprise tool which will help us later” / thumbnail isn’t foreshadowing / video thumbnails have to be big / stream thumbnails can be detailed 05:17  “The traitor is actually Jschlatt” / firework crafting 09:50  “The ratio is impeccable” 13:23  “Dream’s in the game! My audience retention rate” / vc with Tubbo & Quackity / traitor Jschlatt theory / “Are you high?” “A little” 14:47  “You’re a bit of a wildcard” “I am the most consistent character on the entire server” / “What’s this about getting into power” / “We’ll burn this bridge when we get to it” 15:54  “You really are such an English major” / “You’re an idiom” / malaphor / “I’m actually speaking twice as much English as you guys” 18:07  “I think Thunder is overcompensating in the chat” / “Where can you see me” “In my heart” (Karl & Quackity) / Karl not leaving vc 20:33  vc with Niki / “Did Tubbo just leave me? I spaced out for 2 seconds” / “You can’t call everyone the traitor” “I can & will” 22:45  “You know it’s an event when Skeppy’s here” / “You know it’s a big deal when Georgenotfound wakes up” / “Everyone leaves me” 23:31  explaining the traitor thing to Niki / “Maybe I’m a sleeper agent” / had to kill Tubbo 25:03  nothing happened with that creeper / Fundy interrogating Niki / “Why did I train her for MCC” 25:54  “Even YOU’RE leaving me” / sad music / “I’m sitting here with 203k viewers & it’s not enough for any of these streamers to bear talking to me for more than 60 seconds” / Skeppy joins vc to immediately leave 28:50  Karl has a gift for Techno / Karl is just here for the animatic 32:21  “At least the chat won’t leave me” / pays for his music 35:01  “I’m going to destroy the government so bad” / “I hate all of the farming updates on skyblock” 37:45  joining a vc / “I just got stood up in like 4...conversations in rapid succession” / “My new years resolution was to make friends & it’s november & I’ve made zero headway” / Eret switches sides 41:53  Ender chest setup / worried about hotbar management / potions > shields   43:13  vc with allies / “Karl you are literally the biggest third wheel I have ever seen” 45:03  angering the dogs / trident combo 47:13  “D!ck with one ball” (Tubbo) 50:25  “Let’s hope Wil overslept like [George]” 53:09  recruiting Eret / “If you fight on our side we’ll make you the King of Burger King” / “He’ll be an executive citizen” / “I’m surrounded by idiots” 54:58  putting Schlatt on the allies list / “Schlatt is an alcoholic high on protein power” (Fundy) 56:47  can’t trust Eret / “I hate it when you’re right” (Tubbo) / Wilbur joins vc 59:50  having a moment with Hubert / “Not even the mobs like me” / sad music / “I just gained 8k subscribers the sadness is gone” / cow pit exp farm 1:02:57  vc with Niki / “I’m going to join the other vc AHHHHH” 1:05:02  “Once everyone meets up...I have something prepared” / “Technoblade when are you not ready?” “When I joined the server” 1:09:38  “Who do you take me for? Of course I’ve read the Art of War. It’s written by Mozart” / battle planning 1:12:18  “This is the betrayal...happening very slowly” 1:13:35  Pan1 / “This revolution is so doomed” 1:15:29  Dream attack / Quackity dies 1:18:07  “Agree Retweet” / “Violence is the only universal language” / “i have a supply” / “Why do you talk in upwards inflections constantly?” 1:19:57  Techno not getting to talk / “He took it all by force didn’t he” / “Fear into Ear” 1:23:50  Techno telling everyone he has a stash twice / distributing blue / mushroom the fox 1:26:49  Tommy talking over Techno again / “Stop going off on your tangents” “We have food at home” 1:29:30  vault reveal / Tubbo stealing emeralds / secret chest 1:32:40  “Shut up bro you are green as shit” (Tommy) / “Everyone give me back my stuff you don’t deserve it” 1:34:41  no netherite swords / “Who’s the traitor” “Promise we won’t be mad” 1:36:31  battle / Technoblade trident maneuvering / giving rocket launchers to Tubbo & Tommy 1:40:27  killing Karl / Dream bringing out the end crystals / fighting invis Dream / purpled switches sides 1:43:57  Dream wants to talk / 309k / group photos 1:46:08  vc with Dream / “But only if my enemy insists” / in the van with Schlatt / “What are you doing in my drug van? It better not be drugs” / Tommy preparing to shoot Schlatt 1:54:42  “We won” / “We killed an old man with heart problems! It only took 20 of us!” / President Innit / subscribe to Technoblade sign 1:55:57  Dream & Techno talk in chat / Tommy speech / “It was meant to be” / “I don’t think anyone is bowing to Tommyinnit” / “Karl don’t be weird” / Skeppy has a disc 1:59:06  Techno being apprehensive on mute / Tommy makes Wilbur President / “I’ll be the president” “I’m gonna veto that” / “Techno...you’ve taught me that government is not the way to go” / Wilbur makes Tubbo president 2:03:20  “I’m not sure I like where this is going x2” / “I’m not sure this is a good ending” / “Team chaos” “Perhaps” 2:06:20  Techno shoots Tubbo / Philza joins / “You think Schlatt was the cause of your problems? No. It was government” / speech gets interrupted / “The government ends here, I’ll kill it myself!” 2:09:23  Phil kills Wilbur / techno yelling for silence / “Tommy you just did a coup...& instilled yourself as president” 2:12:11  “If you want to be a hero THAN DIE LIKE ONE” / wither spawning / killing his former allies 2:15:09  post fight talks / “There will be no new government today. It will be over my dead body” / “Techno was not the traitor” 2:18:50  “I need to increase the crater that is L’Manberg so that no country can rise in its place” / “Mom says it’s my turn on the flame bow” 2:23:51  “What I’m doing right now is small scale. This is the work of an individual. This is nothing compared to the cruelty governments all around the world [inflict]...systematically” / “Llamas are the primary victims of war” / “I just wanna be apart of the explosion” (George) 2:27:06  Techno joins vc / connor joins the server / “I hope you’re proud of yourself Techno” “I kinda am” / Jack Manifold (Thunder) being broke / netherite armor 2:32:30  “Beach episode” / Techno accidentally joins the L’Manberg vc 2:35:16  the base is compromised / “There’s no way Technoblade would put a clock there if it didn’t mean anything” / got robbed 2:37:37  “If you’re going to ask me how I got all these emerald & arrows that’s a story for another day” / explaining the bedrock / “I can give everyone stuff & it’ll be such a flex” 2:40:24  Greek mythology 2:41:45  The Golden Apple / “They didn’t use discord back then they used skype, so can’t invite Eris” / “Zeus the god of feminism” 2:46:02  Eret recruiting Techno to kill George / joining vc / “Let’s stop him before he gets land” / Awesamdude proposing a fight 2:49:08  “No one can kill me I’m invincible” (logs out) / Dream literally names the turtle potions Sam thinks he hasn’t heard of / “I’m at soup” / “It’s not smack talk he just has that many items” 2:53:06  “Stab him Dream, I’ll shout encouraging words” / Techno fighting Bad & Ant 2:56:23  Dream wins / “I think there was this Dream guy attacking you with some sort of weapon” 3:00:11  turtle potions / Dream hyping up Techno about fighting BBH / Badlands negotiating with George 3:04:34  vc with Philza 3:07:00  spider farm afk’ing / lagging Quackity’s computer 3:09:06  smp earth / Phil only logged on to back Techno up 3:10:32  killing George / “I’m gonna drop his armor off don’t jump me” / not fighting Dream 3:13:00  vc with Karl & Phil / Karl definitely not starting a government / “Chat that was the boring part, don’t leave” / 320k / “Why do we keep scheduling these on Monday?” 3:16:18  “I don’t even want to think about how famous Tommy will be in the future” / “I get a tad bitter” / covid is good for youtubers but obviously bad / “I’m so good at socially distancing” 3:19:51  “Aren’t you tired of being nice Philza? Don’t you just wanna go crazy” / “You should be wary of the old in a profession where people die young” / vc with Eret 3:21:47  “What if you built a slightly larger throne next to it?” /  “How are they paranoid of a mole but the guy with a track record of being a traitor gets no questions asked” 3:25:47  “I’m gonna place a block at the bottom & kill you instantly” / reverse mlg /  emerald rich even with Tubbo’s theft 3:27:57  “I’ll allow it” / upstairs chests robbed / Eret disconnects with the book 3:32:04  armor sabotage bc he thought it’d be 1v5 / crystals are mutually assured destruction / Wilbur afraid of tnt getting blown up early 3:34:11  the diary was actually Eret’s / “He’s gonna tell everyone who I have a crush on. Nooo” / reading the 100 page book / “Can I not win here?” “No” 3:40:14  “This stream has released more serotonin in my brain than the last 6 months combined” / revolution was overcrowded / could improve the crater 2:43:09  “Awkward ten minute period where I’m just sitting there watching them set up a new government but I can’t kill them yet” / Carl is missing 3:44:34  “The one time Technoblade is gonna roleplay & they talk over him” / “CARL” / “As long as Sapnap isn’t the one that took him there’ll still be hope” 3:46:10  “Once you start using end crystals it’s the only pvp that matters & end crystal pvp is so lame” / Webtoons 3:49:10  “What’s going to happen to you & WIlbur now?” “I don’t know, I think I’m chill with Wilbur” / “The only thing that changed is my voice. Zero personal growth” / lines from the first speech that got interrupted / “King George is trending booo” 3:52:00  1 million twitter followers / “O god it’s been four hours...I am not built for this” / did a 13 hour stream once / sub growth goals 3:56:30  “What the heck is Phil watching”

[precursor-ao3]

Hi everyone,

Today marks the 2nd anniversary of the completion of Deviant Behavior, where the three parts were released in a staggered fashion throughout the day. It was amazing, and I remember spending 16 hours in the Discord server talking with everyone, building hype in the voice chat, and even hearing direct reactions over the voice call and in the channel. Theories and reactions went WILD that day, and I'll never forget it...

While it's taken me much longer to finish these side projects due to taking a step back from writing (deviant behavior seized a good year of my life and I'm still catching up from things I missed), I'm am thankful for all the feedback and support that everyone has shown across AO3, FF, WattPad, Discord, and more.

I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to plan anything more extravagant. Thank you for being part of this community, and I'm excited to push out the next updates for Natural Selection and Machine Learning!

My goal is to have these 2 completed this year (hopefully sooner than later) so I can continue the long-awaited Connor POV sequel titled "Afterburn," and it's Reed900 counterpart fic.

Make it a great day, everyone! More info on the DBH celebration stream after I’m not sick anymore!

[daleisgreat]

15 Years of Xbox 360: Flashback Special!

I am usually timely with these, but the holidays has resulted in this 15th Anniversary of the North American launch of the Xbox 360 Flashback Special to be about a month late. The 360 was one of the first major consoles to have a near simultaneous global launch in the three major market territories. With the United States and Canada launching first on November 22, 2005, followed by Europe on December 2nd and finally Japan on December 10th with most other smaller markets over the following year. The 360 had an extraordinarily long life cycle, with it being eight years until Microsoft launched its successor, the Xbox One. I had major highs and lows with the 360 so get ready to take in my journey with the system. Like with past system specials here, I recorded podcasts based on RPG games and comic book games that released on the 360, PS3 and Wii and have embedded them at the bottom of this entry for supplementary material if you crave even more 360 games to learn about. Be forewarned, this is my lengthiest Flashback Special yet, so I have implemented bookmarks for ease of navigation you can click or press on below! With that out of the way, the last special I did here was on the PS2, and I want to begin the 360 Flashback Special the same way by expanding upon its unavoidable….. CHAPTERS Part 1 – The Hype Part 2 – The Launch Part 3 - Reinventing Dashboards with Blades & Achievements Part 4 - Revolutionizing Downloadable Games on Consoles Part 5 - An Awesome Debut Year of Games Part 6 - Upgrade to HD Part 7 - Three Red Lights Part 8 - Kinect + Avatars = Wii’s Userbase Part 9 - Backwards Compatibility & Indie Games…..not those Indie Games Part 10 - For the Love of Online Co-op Part 11 - Bringing on J-RPGs and Doubling Down on Western RPGs Part 12 - Becoming a Pinball Wizard Part 13 - Racing Away to One of the Best Eras for the Genre Part 14 - The Fad that was Plastic Instruments Part 15 - Non-Kinect Casual/Family Game Hits and the Failure that was NXE Part 16 - Wanna Wrassle? Part 17 - Sports-ball Forever! Part 18 - No Russian, No Cauldron Part 19 – Dubious Honors Part 20 - Lightning Round Quick Hits Part 21 - ”It’s an Ocean” (THE END!!!) Part 22 – You’re Still Here!? Well then…. (STINGER!!!) The Hype Microsoft garnered a lot of attention by pulling the plug on its original Xbox early because of the PS2 being an unstoppable global force, and was determined to launch its system a year before the PS3. The Dreamcast had huge success in North America for its first year by launching ahead of the PS2 a year early, so I could see where they were coming from. I covered E3 2005 for the long defunct gaming site, VGpub. I recall getting a closed door tour with a few other gaming press members for the Xbox 360 and was shuffled around to a few isolated booths that showed off the 360’s “blade” dashboard interface and went over some of the functions of the system. I recall being shown Kameo running side-by-side an unreleased build on the original Xbox to demonstrate the 360’s horsepower. 360 had a couple games playable on the show floor that year with Top Spin 2 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted. From my brief time with those two games what I took away the most was the much-improved controller being lighter, slightly more ergonomic, and the much appreciated inclusion of the shoulderbumper buttons to replace the peculiar white and black buttons from its predecessor. Of the several games I was shown and/or played from E3 2005, the one that impressed me the most was Saints Row. I walked out of that demonstration thinking it looked like the first viable open world contender to Grand Theft Auto after countless watered down GTA-clones were flooding the market. Sure enough, Saints Row did not disappoint the following year and would have three more successful sequels over the years.

Back when cable TV mattered before the dawn of streaming, this MTV reveal event delivered on building anticipation for the 360.

Microsoft’s E3 press conference, which happened in tandem with a much publicized MTV reveal event of the 360 filled with all kinds of celebrities made it impossible to avoid the 360 launch hype building up to its November launch. Then there was Microsoft’s truly extraordinary “Zero Hour” launch event in the Mojave desert to give people the opportunity to travel all the way there just to buy an Xbox. Then there was the Mountain Dew contest where they were giving away 360s every so minutes and you increased your chances to win by entering more codes on their website, and yes, I must have entered at least a 100 codes from weeks of gathering bottle caps from co-workers to no avail. All this blitz of marketing engagement made it impossible to not pay attention to the 360’s launch. I was a huge fan of the original Perfect Dark on N64, and thus was eagerly stoked for the prequel, Perfect Dark Zero which made it a day one buy for me. Amped 3 wound up as the second game I pre-ordered for launch day, and it was a solid snowboarding game, which got a significant boost from its irreverent narrative that pushed me through playing it. The Launch With my pair of launch games pre-ordered I went on to count down the days until the 360’s launch. I thought I had my launch system guaranteed on November 22nd, but last second shenanigans prevented me from buying it at the final hour, yet I was able to procure dibs on the first batch of second wave systems that hit retail three weeks later. Launch window systems came with a couple limited pack-ins in the form of a DVD remote control (yay?) and the downloadable XBLA puzzler game, Hexic HD. Hexic HD was a perfectly fine hexagonal based puzzler from Alexey Pajitnov, the same designer who invented Tetris, but I mostly played Perfect Dark Zero in those opening months of the 360. I only got about halfway through the campaign, but I played a ton of deathmatch with friends and/or solo against bots. Like the previous game, PDZ had a plethora of multiplayer options and maps and tided me by splendidly during the first months of the 360’s lifecycle.

Perfect Dark Zero and Amped 3 were my first two 360 games and both held me over nicely during those initial launch window months! Over the next few weeks I played a fair amount of launch games my friends brought over and picked up/rented a couple more. Top Spin 2 I played far more than I thought I would and wound up finishing its lengthy career mode. Call of Duty 2 was a local multiplayer hit that friends repeatedly brought over. A few years later I eventually picked up Need for Speed: Most Wanted and got immersed working my way through its “blacklist” of rival racers to vanquish. Launch title Condemned: Criminal Origins I did not start playing until recent years, and I am kicking myself for not starting it sooner as it is a trip of a suspense/thriller first person game consisting of intense hand-to-hand and melee weapon combat over traditional firearms FPS weaponry. The game is still fun to this day and I have made it a ritual to play it on Halloween for the past three or four years. Reinventing Dashboards with Blades & Achievements

Also worth highlighting here during the launch was familiarizing myself with the much-loved “blade” dashboard in the launch window. The four blades were filled with many options to separate game, videos, photos and music media. I made heavy use of custom soundtracks on the original Xbox, and loved how the 360 had support for it built into the user interface so they could be dropped into any game. Dashboard and online features on the original Xbox like friends list, voice chat, game invites and more carried over on the 360 and later evolved into so much more through system updates that introduced must-have features like Party Chat that made it so several users can voice chat together regardless of what game any of them are playing. It made catching up with family and friends on weekend game nights more manageable. The biggest hit of the UI during that launch window was Microsoft debuting achievements that were mandatory for all games. These became an instant sensation among any ardent game player when accomplishing the criteria for an achievement and hearing the endorphin-rush of a sound effect and accompanying on screen graphic that indicated you unlocked another achievement. Most of the launch window games had straightforward achievements like finishing campaign missions or getting X amount of wins in sports and racing games, but they eventually evolved and encouraged users to play games in new ways I never thought of (Crackdown was a great early example of this with its achievement design). Also the way the Blades made it easy and irresistible to compare what achievements you accomplished in a game against other people on your friends list that it only upped the friendly competition between friends to see who could unlock more achievements. It is gratifying to see Microsoft allowed each Gamertag’s linked Gamerscore to carryover from 360 to Xbox One and now Series S|X. While achievements are still around today, and I occasionally dive into going out of my way to unlock some if I am enjoying my time with a game, they do not compare to the early years of the 360 where achievement-mania was running wild. Revolutionizing Downloadable Games on Consoles

This was also the first time a major console had an online digital store implemented at launch. The original Xbox had a scaled-down store they experimented with late in its lifecycle with about a dozen smaller classic arcade hits and smaller sized web browser-esque “flash” games of its era that could be purchased, and the 360 expanded on this bigtime. Initially, the 360 digital game marketplace known as “Xbox Live Arcade” launched with games maxing out at 50meg download limits so the game could fit on a memory card, so all of the first year or so worth of XBLA games were mostly re-releases of smaller-sized arcade classics like Smash TV, Contra and Gauntlet along with similar simple browser-based flash game of its era like Bankshot Billiards 2. Over the 360’s lifecycle though they kept increasing the game size limits to the point where disc-based games were coming out digitally and were multiple gigs in size as memory card and hard drive storage options increased. During the first few months of the 360 after launch developers were not flocking to releasing XBLA games because they were unsure if they were going to take off like digital games were slowly starting to on PC at that point. The launch dozen or so XBLA games were met with success, but developers were not anticipating it so in those early months only one or two new XBLA games hit a month. The big breakout XBLA success was a straightforward adaptation of the card game, Uno that launched in May 2006. I can attest for many sessions of simple, pick up and play rounds of Uno while catching up with friends over voice chat online. Microsoft eventually patched in support for the 360’s first webcam, the “Vision” camera, which lead to some peculiar matchups with strangers online who wanted to make sure to demonstrate all their adult substances they were consuming that evening. Later throughout 2006 and 2007 XBLA grew to releasing a game every Tuesday, and Microsoft enforced every XBLA game have a demo/trial so it was an eager experience to see what game would be hitting that Tuesday, because most of the time Microsoft did not announce the game until maybe a day before at that time.

It took over 20 years, but it was worth it to relive the iconic X-Men arcade game with online co-op, and EA did a bang-up job bringing back NFL Blitz for two of my most played XBLA titles! There are so many success stories of XBLA games to go on about, but I want to highlight a few of my favorites. Seeing the re-release of many classic arcade, 8 and 16-bit titles with enhanced graphics and online support was a big win for XBLA in this department. I remember interviews with the XBLA executives from this time answering fans demands and going through the legal hoopla with Konami to bring back arcade favorite beat-em-ups like TMNT, X-Men and The Simpsons, and all with online play! This treatment went doubly so for fighting games. It started with Street Fighter II: Turbo receiving the XBLA treatment, and within years Capcom, SNK, Namco and other studios were porting over their greatest hits onto XBLA like the first two Marvel vs. Capcom and Soul Calibur titles, many King of Fighters re-releases. My personal favorite is the remake, Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix that saw all new gorgeous artwork and a new officially endorsed ReMix soundtrack from the fantastic ocremix.org community.

Non-fighting game wise I was surprised by EA Sports’ revival of NFL Blitz. It is one of the few games I somehow got addicted to online, and become somewhat legitimately good at too and was able to genuinely earn the 10 straight online wins achievement against random ranked opponents! Renegade Ops is an addicting twin-stick shooter in an mini-open world unleashing destruction as pint-sized vehicles with a gruff CO barking orders from the chaotic minds from the team that also made Just Cause. Valiant Hearts I originally played on 360, and loved the passion they showed on their unique adventure/action take on a World War I game. I 1000% related to Double Fine’s take on being a wide-eyed kid caught up in the whimsical spirit of Halloween in both of its RPG-lite Costume Quest titles. Fans of past Sega consoles like the Genesis, Saturn and Dreamcast were well treated, and new fans emerged after a plethora of XBLA re-releases of titles like Guardian Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, both Sonic Adventure games, Daytona USA, Ikaruga, Virtua Fighter 2, Nights, Jet Set Radio, Sega Bass Fishing, Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi, Rez and others saw new life in XBLA form. The Genesis saw packs of three games re-released in bundles themed around best-sellers in the Streets of Rage and Golden Axe 16-bit entries. Although I would recommend skipping the XBLA Genesis packs in favor of the 360 disc release of Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection that has 40 Genesis games and bonus unlockable Arcade and Master System titles. Sega obviously treated its back catalog well on the 360, and I put in many hours revisiting these past favorites. I bought into the hype for Shadow Complex, and it became the first “MetroidVania” I ever finished. Hydro Thunder Hurricane perfectly captured the nature of the 1999 arcade boat racer, while successfully evolving its gameplay into the HD era. Adorable puzzle-platformer Ra-Skulls brought back pleasant memories of Mr. Driller! Twisted Pixel’s Comic Jumper made smart use of implementing FMV-video into its charming superhero platform-action title. Despite its stomach-turning title, Deathspank is a lighthearted action-RPG I saw through to the end with a twist ending I did not see coming. That same developer, Hothead Games, released the first two turn-based RPG Penny Arcade games I ate up that perfectly encapsulated the popular web comic in videogame form.

Two of my best-of-class XBLA recommendations are Trials HD and its sequel, Trials Evolution. It is an exemplary example of the adage, “easy to learn, tough to master.” Its quirky, bouncy motorbike and instant reloading spawns made it easy to succumb to endlessly retrying its inventive stages after each wipeout. It also had innovative use of implementing Friends List leaderboards with their ghost times appearing as you play, just teasing you more and more upon each crash when coming close to usurping their times! The sequel added online multiplayer that clicked and made perfect use of Trials unique gameplay. Microsoft I recall got a lot of flak for their curating policies for XBLA at the time because they would only allow one game to release each Tuesday, and there were many indie developers lashing out for being on the short end of the stick for not getting their game slotted for release on XBLA. Eventually Microsoft upped it two XBLA games a week, with usually a more anticipated game hitting on Tuesday and a lesser known title from a smaller studio hitting on Friday. Looking back on this the obvious downside is the lack of quantity of XBLA titles with only one or two releasing a week, but the curation process lead to the hit-to-miss ratio of them being significantly in favor of the hit range. Sure there were some stinkers that creeped in their like the disappointing Turtles in Time Re-Shelled remake, but the good outweighs the bad greatly in the XBLA market, especially compared today to the ridiculous amounts of low-rent DIY shovelware hitting every week on all consoles with there being seemingly no restrictions for any developer to get their game on a current console, for better or worse.

The digital store also made game demos more easily accessible instead of the traditional demo disc, and downloading demos in the early years of the 360 was kind of a big deal, especially when they had major opening acts of action and intriguing narratives like the Prey and Just Cause demos that made a huge impression on me and triggered me to rush out and buy them. This also worked against games, with the most egregious case being EA Sport’s planned reboot of its basketball series with NBA Elite ‘11’s demo being so plagued with bugs and glitches, that EA infamously flatout cancelled the game days before its street date release and forced retailers to return their copies of the game. That last minute recall tempted overzealous retail employees to snatch up precious copies to make it one of the rarest physical releases on the 360, with copies going on eBay for many thousands of dollars. An Awesome Debut Year of Games

I have no idea if it was happenstance, or intentionally planned, but it worked out pleasantly in the 360’s favor in its first year of next-gen exclusivity they had one or two AAA exclusive games launching per month. Noticing multiple users on my friends list playing the latest AAA game, and with the dawn of podcasts in 2005 featuring their affable hosts discussing the latest games in exhausting detail on launch week is what I feel created the horribly named sensation, “Fear of Missing Out.” I ate up gaming podcasts upon discovering them in 2005 with 1up Yours, The Hotspot, Broadcast Gamer and Team Fremont Live being early favorites of mine and influencing my gaming purchases with their genuine positivity on the latest games that made it difficult to ignore their top picks. They, along with traditional print and online gaming press made it easier to keep up with the latest must-have game of the month for the 360’s first year. A month after launch Dead or Alive 4 snuck in at the end of 2005. It was the first fighting game on the system, and with it having a Spartan character from Halo’s universe as a guest fighter, and an innovative-for-the-time pre-fight lobby system lead to me spending many hours in it online and offline. I was terrible at it, but still had countless hours of fun, even while legitimately earning the dubious zero point achievement for 25 straight online losses.

Oblivion’s Adoring Fan I loved seeing respawn every couple of in-game days to tag along on my adventures before quickly getting slaughtered, and Test Drive Unlimited was an unprecedented always-online open world racing title that laid the foundation for Forza Horizon and The Crew! A couple months later, the first big RPG hit on 360 with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It was a huge improvement from Morrowind, and this Western open-world RPG was publisher Bethesda’s first mainstream console hit. It took me well over a hundred hours to finish that I spread out over the course of five years (just in time for Skyrim!). I had to resort to abusing the hell out of the dupe glitch for infinite invisibility potions to get past those dastardly Oblivion Gates, but it was an immensely gratifying experience to complete and fully 1000 gamerscore Oblivion! Pro tip, make sure to avoid a near freak-out experience like I had and have a bow in your inventory on the final Thieves Guild mission where you steal an actual Elder’s Scroll!

The string of big-release games kept rolling through 2006. Test Drive Unlimited broke new ground for the racing genre with its always connected open world! Before From Software had blockbuster success with their string of Souls games, they were known at this time for their niche mech games, and had their most success yet with the release of Chromehounds in 2006. The online-focused mech game was more accessible from their previous feature-extensive Armored Core titles. A pair of popular third-person Tom Clancy games hit in 2006 with the first Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and Rainbow Six: Vegas titles. I rented both of these and was terrible at them online, but I do recall having fun as the decoy in Vegas to draw out enemy fire so my friends could pick off my assailants! My anticipation for Saints Row paid off, and it wound up being an awesome GTA-clone done right that year! The first Gears of War was the big 2006 holiday release from Epic Games, riding the success of several hit Unreal FPS games, but long before their current Fortnite fame. It lived up to the hype and delivered with its unapologetic brand of in-your-face gore, and smooth drop-in/drop-out online campaign play. It became one of my favorite franchises on the 360, and I would up playing through the campaign of every single game released to this day! The final big 2006 release I want to highlight is Dead Rising’s brand of campy, zombie mayhem from Capcom that became a huge new IP for Capcom and also the catalyst for many 360 owners to… Upgrade to HD Up through most of 2006 was when I used a traditional CRT (AKA “Tube TV”) as my main gaming television. HDTVs were first noticeable on the market during the PS2/Xbox/GCN era, and a fair number of games supported HD resolutions (especially on Xbox), but HD graphics were never a marquee bullet point of that gen. That all changed with Dead Rising. For the first several months I remained content with the CRT visuals of launch window 360 games, then when playing the Dead Rising demo, I could not help but notice the game’s text was rather tiny and kind of difficult to read. Upon listening to podcasts I learned I was not alone on this and it turned out the game’s text was optimized and quite readable for HD resolutions. Many more games would soon follow this trend in the following months. I noticed this even more when a friend brought over a smaller HDTV and we put them side-by-side running Rainbow Six: Vegas and I saw for myself the difference in the legibility of the in-game text. So yeah, the core graphics for all games where shinier and crisper in HD, but my primary reason for upgrading at the end of 2006 was just to read the damn text. History is repeating itself in recent years with text starting to look smaller and requiring more eye-squinting again to read in games like Wreckfest and MLB: The Show for me, when I later learned that is so because the visuals are optimized for 4KTVs (which I finally upgraded to several weeks ago).

Did you experience the ‘Look and Sound of Perfect’ with 360’s HD-DVD player, along with its killer app of a film in Tokyo Drift? HD movies also arrived to the 360 in 2006 with the release of the ill-fated HD-DVD add-on. Sony getting the better end of the stick in exclusivity deals with studios lead to it losing the physical HD format war against BluRay, and movies stopped releasing on HD-DVD by the end of 2008. I almost impulse-bought the add-on upon seeing it on the clearance rack for $50, but thankfully I held off. By that time however HD streaming was starting to take off with TV shows and movies available to rent and purchase from 360’s online marketplace, and the 360 nabbing a year exclusive on being the first non-PC device to offer streaming Netflix. Streaming movies and TV shows exploded in popularity and before I knew it, almost anytime I logged on nearly half of my Friends list was making use of one of many streaming apps that would become available on the 360. A couple years before the 360 got to this level of success, it had a couple major hurdles to overcome, especially the right-of-passage a vast majority of early 360 owners fatefully dubbed…. Three Red Lights There have been a fair number of platforms that have been notorious over the years for noteworthy faulty hardware ratios like the first three original PlayStations and the problematic powering on trickery required to boot NES games, but those all pale in comparison to the atrocity of the launch year 360 units. Within a few months after launch more frequent whispers started to become prominent of knowing someone who had a 360 that failed on them with the telltale indicator being three flashing red lights on the system. Users would then have to call Microsoft to set them up with a shipping container to mail to Microsoft to repair and mail back. I was the first among my local friends and peers to get the three lights of doom, and I have painful memories of it because my system was lost in UPS transit for three months before I finally got it back after visiting the local UPS center’s lost and found.

360 #2 only lasted several months before red-lighting in 2007, and the third met its expiration date in 2011. I will refrain from going into the nuts and bolts of the architecture problems, but in layman’s terms Microsoft was in such a rush to get that year head start on Sony, that a high amount of faulty chips made their way to manufacturing and resulted in the system’s high failure rate. To Microsoft’s credit, they gave all launch year 360 owners an extended three year warranty to get their system replaced free of charge, which I took advantage of twice. The third one died after the extended warranty, but by that point Microsoft had a slim version of the console on the market releasing alongside Gears of War 3 that I snatched up, and **fingers crossed** have had no issues yet with. Being the first to be hit with the three red lights amidst my immediate local circle of friends and co-workers made it interesting. Over the next year every couple of months another friend would call or text me, and/or another co-worker would catch up with me at work and relay to me their troubles of their 360 bricking and I would be their unofficial tech support on how to get ahold of Microsoft to the point where I still remember the phone number to this day (1-800-4MY-XBOX) to get set up with the replacement system. I wound up buying a hard drive transfer cable to transfer data to new hard drives when switching systems and I recall at least a handful of people borrowing it from me when they switched systems due to switching systems and/or upgrading hard drives. In a bizarre twist, I will put a curse on Hollywood Video for my first two 360s red-ringing! The first time it happened I was playing a rented copy of Chromehounds. The Hollywood Video curse struck again in 2007 when renting Shadowrun caused my 360 to crash!!! As ubiquitous as the three red rings became, Microsoft wanted to ensure a 360 makeover image with a marketing assault for the 2010 launch of… Kinect + Avatars = Wii’s Userbase Nintendo’s Wii launched Holiday 2006, and the motion-based console was an initial sales juggernaut, and it took over two years before it was commonly available on store shelves. Both Sony and Microsoft initially had meek responses to it with Sony essentially patching in motion controls in time for the PS3’s launch with the Six Axis controller that was not that well received or regarded for its precision, and the 360 had the aforementioned Vision Camera, which was essentially Microsoft’s take on an Eye Toy that only saw a handful of games support it for motion controls. Holiday 2010 saw both companies with a meaningful response with PlayStation Move on PS3, and Kinect on 360.

Microsoft pulled the same marketing strategies as Nintendo did years earlier intentionally marketing the Kinect towards families and advertising it heavily on daytime television. Most of Microsoft’s Kinect games were more-or-less their takes on the hit Wii versions. This is when Microsoft implement cartoony characters that could be implemented across games called “Avatars.” They were especially prominent in Kinect games, and one cool side effect for them was the many digital clothing items for them that could be either bought off the Avatar Marketplace, or unlocked for free by playing through games. I am especially proud of my You Don’t Know Jack dummy, and goofy oversized head ornament I unlocked from finishing Comic Jumper. A fair amount of late gen 360 titles supported Avatars in-game, which made for some interesting sights like having your Avatar onstage in Guitar Hero 5 jamming out next to Kurt Cobain. Microsoft’s gamel paid off, and for two-to-three years, the Microsoft moved millions of units of that camera. It is safe to sumrise that the 1-2-3 punch of Kinect, Move and smartphones all combined to steal the “casual gamer” userbase that the Wii was known for and the Wii’s console sales in America plummeted from 2011 onwards. The Kinect boosted 360 console sales so much from the Holiday 2010 period until the Xbox One and PS4 launches in Holiday 2013 that in that three year timeframe Microsoft sold the most systems in America for all but a handful of months. By the Holiday 2013 launch of the Xbox One/PS4, the 360 overcame the Wii’s sizable lead to become the best-selling console of the Wii/360/PS3 generation in America.

Only Kinect game I ever played was the river-rafting follies seen in Kinect Adventures, but surprise hit games like the Gunstringer seen above tempted me to almost get a Kinect on multiple occasions. I never bought a Kinect, but did play Kinect Adventures at a friend’s….yes, it was that damn river raft mini-game. I paid attention to the games releasing for it and supporting the peripheral, and a few looked like genuinely entertaining games and went on to have critical acclaim. Many traditional games added optional “Better with Kinect” features like zoom-in art gallery halls, or audio play-calling in sports games. Even though the ardent game player in me despised the change in direction Microsoft took with the Kinect, I cannot deny there were still several games I wanted to try on it after seeing the positive reactions for Harmonix’s trilogy of Dance Central games, Twisted Pixel’s The Gunstringer and even the limited on-rail experience that is Fable: The Journey. Backwards Compatibility & Indie Games…..not those Indie Games Hitting around the same time as Kinect was Microsoft patching in a new division of purchasable digital games initially called Community Games, but later rebranded Indie Games. Microsoft made its XNA development tools easily available for almost any level of experienced developer. This lead to a deluge of DIY games that looked like they were made as a semester long development school project flooding the Indie Games channel. Some developers embraced the campy nature of the amateur works that dominated the 360 Indie Games scene, with Silver Dollar Games especially unleashing a plethora of their…brand…of games like Try Not to Fart and the ironically titled, Why Did I Buy This?

The 360 Indie Games scene left a lot to be desired as seen above with the quality of games from infamous companies like Silver Dollar Games There were a few gems in the rough to be discovered in the Indie Games channel, and like XBLA games, Microsoft enforced a free trial on all games so you knew what you were getting yourself in for before throwing down some hard earned Microsoft Points, which are like regular points, but fun! There are two DLC Quest games that are fun quirky $1 platformers riffing on how gratuitous in-game DLC would become. Tribute Games gained notoriety on here with their adorable Breakout homage, Wizorb. Finally, I was a huge fan of Zeboyd Games that earned their reputation for their 360 Indie Games and I played through and devoured all four of their humorous takes on throwback pixel RPGs (Breath of Death VII, Cthulu Saves the World, Penny Arcade’s Rain Slick 3 & 4) that released as Indie Games. Zeboyd earned their development stripes on the 360 Indie Games platform, and I am happy with their continued success today! For every one of these hits that broke through however, there were at least a few dozen forgettable releases overshadowing them. Indie Games was Microsoft’s answer for their curation policy to XBLA, but as you can see it only went so far.

Zeboyd’s four 360 Indie Games are excellent retro-style RPGs well worth your time and can be found on Steam today to experience these gems! Microsoft had similar lukewarm success with their backwards compatibility efforts on the 360. There was a huge demand leading to the 360’s launch to be fully compatible with all original Xbox games. Microsoft only originally promised that the first two Halo games would be back-compat on 360, but after enough user outcry, Microsoft released several updates over the 360’s lifespan patching in support for what ended up being a little under half of the original Xbox’s library being supported on the 360, but the software-based emulation had a list of issues and bugs that accompanied each compatibility update. Aside from a fair amount of both Halo games, I played through Fable and Spider-Man 2 via 360 back-compat, and ran into intermittent bouts of slowdown with the former, and random little portions of graphic flickering with the latter. Still enjoyed my time with both, but not without these added issues. Speaking of Halo…. For the Love of Online Co-op

The 360 featured countless games that supported online co-op which made playing the latest big AAA title all that more fun. This primarily effected first and third-person shooters with the big example for this being the Halo titles on the 360 (3, 4, Reach, ODST, Halo Anniversary Remake). I played through all five of those games in online co-op and enjoyed them all tremendously. I will give props to Halo 3 and 4 having my favorite narratives, and I loved the final level of Halo 3 being an homage to the last level of the first game where you drive a warthog through a lengthy labyrinth of enemies and terrain to navigate before a time limit expires and everything explodes, MacGrueber-style! Halo 3 brought in four player online co-op, which I experiment with friends online by trying out the “Skull” modifiers which only upped the difficulty and lead to us finishing a good chunk of the game on the highest difficulty. Halo 4 I continue to this day to reference an ill-fated moment I had when playing with my friend Derek, where I was controlling the Scorpion tank whilst marching it up a lengthy incline, and he was walking alongside me and I misinterpreted the level’s geometry where I did not see a turn and nonchalantly drove the Scorpion tank off the edge of a level and plummeted it down to its awaiting death to the erupting laughter from Derek on the headset.

While I had a lot of fun with the Halo titles online, there were plenty of other worthy options, with the first Crackdown standing out among them. Getting lost in that open world with a friend and wreaking havoc with powered-up heroes whose jumping abilities had seemingly no limits was a blast, so was coming up with random challenges for each other like making a competition to see who could race up to the top of the mammoth Agent’s tower first. Saints Row 2 is another open world game that had online co-op, and made discovering some of the game’s secrets I had no idea about like its hidden mall worth going out of the way to show to friends. Dead Island’s online co-op stood out to me with its in-depth crafting system and emphasis on melee combat ala Condemned. The four Gears of War titles on the 360 all feature first-class online co-op. Gears of War 3 I have classic memories of bringing over to a friend’s the night it launched and we set up our TVs next to each other and played through the entire journey over two days. The survival-based Horde modes from the Gears titles created a new sensation for online co-op, and I played many hours of it online in the first three Gears. I even became invested into the “deep” lore of the Gears franchise to the point that I read a couple of the novels. Gears of War: Judgment switched developer to People Can Fly who tried to freshen up the controls and gameplay a bit. They also focused the narrative on Baird and Cole’s origins which did not go over well with the fanbase, and while it was the least popular of the four on the 360 I will still give Microsoft props for trying something different with it.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance’s final boss battle with Galactus was made to experienced and conquered with someone in co-op, and while the Army of Two games weren’t perfect, I would be lying if I didn’t admit to having some fun times with all the games in online co-op If it was not for online co-op I would have not broken my curse to finally finish the first Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. I started and never finished that campaign on five, yes five, separate occasions with different sets of friends each time and stopped because we either lost interest and/or ran into logistic issues setting up times for everyone to meet together. A former co-worker Sean reached out to me to play with him online and I reluctantly agreed and started it the sixth time, but sure enough we stuck with it and completed it, and it was worth all the starts and stops because it remains years later one of my all-time favorite comic book games. That Galactus boss fight is a final boss fight that I will never forget and a truly epic final encounter to close the game! The second Ultimate Alliance game also featured online co-op and I finished that game on a much timelier basis because a lot of my co-workers also picked it up and we met up regularly for a couple weeks to finish it twice because it focused on the popular Civil War Marvel event that had two separate storylines. It had a more polished presentation, but the first Ultimate Alliance I easily rank as the superior game!

Some rapid-fire quick online co-op memories to wrap this segment up on: The first Kane & Lynch game was an interesting experience in co-op because I played it on this insanely huge HD projector. The first two Borderlands games were both huge hits with my friends and peers that won us all over with its loot-driven FPS gameplay. Credit to Derek for having patience with my crazy work hours and sticking with me for the better part of a year to pick away at and eventually finish Borderlands 2! To a lesser extent, another fun FPS co-op focused title were the Army of Two trilogy of titles. The games all had noticeable control issues, but the teamwork focused gameplay worked for us, and the franchise had a certain charisma to it with their many unlockable masks and charming fist bump animations to equip. Real time strategy games have historically been troublesome to pull off on consoles, but Ensemble Studios found the magic formula to make it work with Halo Wars, and somehow made online co-op viable with it too, and it was another game I found myself teaming up with Sean in a very enjoyable campaign that also featured some of the best CG cutscenes that remain stunning to this day. Finally, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand has likely the most ridiculous storyline of all these co-op titles where you play as 50 Cent himself to track down a prized skull across the middle east that made it a zany quest to just shake my head and go with to see where it took me next, and also for my friend Matt and I to jam out to its hip-hop flavored soundtrack to throughout. Bringing on J-RPGs and Doubling Down on Western RPGs In the console space, before this generation, role-playing games were dominant on the first two Nintendo and Sony platforms. That surprisingly changed this generation. Microsoft made pitches to Japanese developers in the early years of the 360 to release their games exclusively, or at least timed exclusively on the system. This lead to Square-Enix releasing exclusives like Infinite Undiscovery and Last Remnant on the 360, and porting its MMO, Final Fantasy XI onto the 360 in 2006 and making it cross-platform-online compatible with the PS2 and PC versions which meant it was the first game to share online user bases between consoles from different manufacturers. It took a little over a decade for this to happen again, so this was kind of a big deal. I still recall Square stunning gaming fans with their E3 announcement that Final Fantasy XIII would release day and date with the PS3 version (along with XIII’s two sequels later on), so it was surprising during this time to see Square open up its publishing portfolio on other platforms.

As twisted as its plot may be, I still got a lot out of Eternal Sonata with its highly entertaining battles. Blue Dragon was another early J-RPG that drew a lot of attention that Microsoft was serious about RPGs this gen. Other Japanese developers also released RPGs in the early 360 years with Blue Dragon, Enchanted Arms, Resonance of Fate, Eternal Sonata and Lost Odyssey all appearing. I purchased nearly all these games, but only one I played through of these was the bizarre Eternal Sonata, which is a traditional J-RPG set in the mind of dying legendary composer Federic Chopin. Its plot is as out there as its premise, and I will never forget its equally bizarre post-credits stinger, but I loved its engaging battle system that kept me glued in all the way through. I was also taking a music history class in college at the time, so the brief Chopin historical fact interludes between acts also did a lot for me. While Japanese RPGs took off on the 360, so did…. …. “Western RPGs” from companies on this side of the global hemisphere. Bethesda and BioWare are the two most prominent developers responsible for this slate of RPGs this generation after lighting the fire on the original Xbox. I already discussed my love for Oblivion, and Bethesda capitalized on that success with another blockbuster in the form of Fallout 3. Take the medieval fantasy world of Elder Scrolls and apply a retro-50s post-apocalypse skin to it and you have the formula for another Bethesda best-seller I once again put in over 100 hours in completing the main campaign and all of its DLC expansions. After that I needed a break from Bethesda’s games and have yet to play New Vegas. I did start up the Oblivion sequel, Skyrim and briefly made some headway into that, but got sidetracked by other holiday tent pole releases at that time and it regrettably succumbed to becoming lost in my backlog. I eventually picked up the remaster on Xbox One, and one day I will restart and finish that game!

Giant Bomb’s videos of their complete play-throughs of the Mass Effect trilogy is some of their best work that should not be missed! A series that did not get lost in my backlog was BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. The first game I initially got into as an awesome modern-day take on Star Trek, with an engrossing cast of crew mates on the Normandy. The first Mass Effect was a little rough around the edges, so I eventually fell off halfway through, but picked it up a couple years later and plowed right through it. The same thing happened with Mass Effect 2, but the advantage to finishing it in 2014 was that all the bonus story DLC add-ons were released and combined for a gratifying experience all together. ME2 delivered on hyping up being careful with pivotal story decisions that would have consequences in the infamous final “suicide mission” in the game. My initial run through of it saw three of my crew members not survive it through, and it gutted me so much I restarted that final mission and had to compromise with only two crew members passing away. Immediately after finishing ME2 I jumped right into ME3 and this time saw it all the way through within a couple months, luckily by this point the extended ending and all the story DLCs also just finished releasing and I was stunned with what Bioware held out of the core game and I can feel for players who initially played it and missed out on having a central character like Javic locked away behind DLC and missing out on essential storyline DLCs that dealt heavily with the origins of the Protheans and Reapers. The way I played it felt like a complete experience with all the DLC, but without it I sympathize for the critics who stated it felt unfinished upon first release.

There is also the fantastic “Citadel” DLC I want to give props to which is its own standalone swashbuckling adventure full of lighthearted campy jokes, and concludes with throwing a the party of all parties for all your friends! For people who have not played the initial Mass Effect trilogy, at least give a couple episodes of Giant Bomb’s Mass Alex play-through videos of all three games in their entirety a shot. I am almost wrapped up with them as of this writing, and it has been wonderful experiencing that trilogy all over again this way. Like Gears, I became so absorbed into the Mass Effect lore, that I have bought and read all of the novels, and almost all of them are good, even the Andromeda-based ones! I know the first Fable has been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism over the years for not delivering on all of its promises, but that does not take away from the final product on original Xbox still being a astounding action-RPG! I treasured my time with it, and the “Lost Chapters” expansion, and late in the 360’s life in 2014 it got the remastered treatment to bring the entire trilogy (and the spin-off Kinect game, The Journey) all on 360. Fable II from what I gathered has been the highpoint of the series from everyone I have talked to. I have only played through the prologue, and failed at getting back to it while covering other games in the gaming press at the time amidst another busy holiday release season. Fable III sounds like it did not win everyone over with its major storyline hook it marketed of overthrowing a corrupt sibling at the throne, and sadly the Kinect game, The Journey was the last major single player installment of the series as of this writing. Becoming a Pinball Wizard I have played various videogame pinball titles over the years, but for whatever reason the 360/PS3 gen is when it got ahold of me and never let go. It started with Crave’s Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection. Each real life table replica had their own set of goals to accomplish in order to unlock an achievement for each table, so I kept plugging away, and little-by-little I found hooked into addicting tables like Gorgar, Medieval Madness and No Good Gophers especially being my favorite. Later on Crave released an XBLA pay-per-table platform with tables from multiple companies called The Pinball Arcade. Every several months a new batch of tables were released and I found myself immediately downloading them and studying the in-game instructions for each table to thoroughly learn all of its intricacies and the addicting nature of filtered online Friends-list leaderboards had me plugged in to top the scoreboard for each table.

Well over 100 hours I invested into Pinball Arcade and Pinball FX on the 360. Two of my favorite tables are pictured above with No Good Gophers on the left, and Mars on the right. The same exact thing happened with Zen Studio’s XBLA title, Pinball FX. Their tables were not based on real tables, and as they gradually released more tables for download, they embraced their interactive nature and featured more computer animated toys that flew off of and around the table, and more dynamic special effects on the playfield that simply are not possible on real life tables. Despite them being not lifelike, and featuring more exaggerated pinball physics, I still embraced them when I was in the mood to switch up from the real tables in Pinball Arcade. Zen released a sequel a few years later in Pinball FX2 that had more dynamic community and hub-based features and integrated online friends leaderboards into actual gameplay with in-game pop-ups when your score was approaching a friend’s high-score which only intensified every attempt and kept me coming back more frequently. Some of my favorite tables from the first two PBFX games are the spooky mystery pin Paranormal, the Monty Python-influenced Epic Quest (with RPG stats and leveling that carries over in each attempt!) and the outer space themed Mars. Pinball FX3 on Xbox One/PS4 added even more community based features that keep me playing it weekly to this day, but that is a story for another time! Racing Away to One of the Best Eras for the Genre I believe Microsoft somehow found a way to publish one marquee AAA racing game each year for almost the entire 360 lifespan. They originally rotated between Bizarre Creation’s Project Gotham games, and Turn 10’s Forza Motorsport series each year. I never got into either of those series that much. Forza is the more serious sim, and I have tried out a couple installments over the years, but the intense sim mechanics are just not for me. If I would have put more time into PGR I feel I would have really got into that series, and I have some fleeting memories of getting into the second game for a brief moment on the original Xbox.

While I did not get reeled into Forza Motorsport, I fell hook, line and sinker into PGR’s replacement, Forza Horizon from the developer, Playground. It lightened up the sim-based controls and offered up enough assist options to procure that comfortable blend of sim and arcade racing. I also wound up in favor of its open world hub nature to either drive around to new races and take in the country side, or hang around the game’s central music festival. The first Horizon had such a fitting licensed soundtrack of rock and electronica-based songs that I sought out the entire soundtrack and it is its own separate running playlist for me. Since I did not upgrade into the Xbox One/PS4 gen until 2016, that meant I picked up Forza Horizon 2 on the 360 instead, and thankfully it was not all that downgraded from its Xbox One version. Both games I wound up completing all the races, challenges and finding all the hidden barnyard cars. Yes, I even played through all of the Fast and Furious licensed expansion for Forza Horizon 2 where Ludacris himself as Tej provided voiceovers to set up each race. Before Forza Horizon, another game attempted the same thing a couple years earlier with Test Drive Unlimited. It featured a sorta-GPS replication of the entirety of Oahu as its open world hub and I absolutely ate it up and was white-knuckling the final race which was a one-on-one endurance race against the top ranked AI around the entire outer highway of the island. The sequel was fun too and added another island, but I think one Alex Navarro’s reaction to the opening cutscene in his Quick Look video will be my main takeaway of it. I have mentioned in previous console flashbacks how I love demo-derby racing games, and on 360 Flatout: Ultimate Carnage was king! It is a fantastic follow-up to the PS2/Xbox games, and my brother and I played it online regularly for years, I can go on about it forever, but instead I will embed below a special three-part video where my brother and I raved about why it was one of our favorites….

Many years ago my brother and I made this three-part YouTube series on our fandom for Flatout: Ultimate Carnage The summer of 2010 saw two new arcade racing games debut that both should have been successful new IPs with sequels to this day, but since the two released within a month of each other they presumably took up each other’s player base and both Activision and THQ did not pick them up for sequels. Activision invested in Bizarre for an all new racing IP in Blur, which is essentially conflating the power-ups of Mario Kart with underground street racing, and it was indeed as awesome as that pitch sounds. I played hours of it in the main career mode and online as well. On the other end THQ invested in Black Rock Studios with their innovative racer, Split/Second, a reality show-based driving game where studio directors would triggers obstacles and destructible environments to activate and provided an all-new gripping racing experience. It too was also a riot to endure and 100% finish, but it sadly never received a sequel either.

I loved the Burnout series the previous gen, and EA delivered with an upgraded port of Burnout Revenge that remains my favorite entry in the series to this day. I got into its open world follow-up, Burnout Paradise and developer Criterion were aces with their long-term support of free updates that kept me coming back to it. EA’s other flagship racing series, Need for Speed had a few entries I put serious time into. The 360 launch title, Most Wanted had an intriguing concept of working your way up the “Blacklist” of the most wanted street racers to compete against. When Criterion did an all new reboot of Most Wanted several years later, it combined that concept with the blazing fast gameplay from the Burnout series to my approval. Finally, I will give head-nods of recommendation to both of Sega’s Sonic kart-racers on the 360. They are the top Mario Kart-clones out there, and ooze with Sega fan service. The second game, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed successfully innovated with evolving stages that switched up from racing in karts, then into mini-bi-planes and then onto water-based hovercraft. I completed the careers for both games and put in a fair amount of online play with both entries too. The Fad that was the Plastic Instruments My gut told me the original PS2 Guitar Hero was going to be big within minutes of trying out the original demo in the fabled Kentia Hall at E3 2005. Adored the first game, but the second game was when it went mainstream, and was thrilled with the second game’s HD 360 release in 2007. 2005-2009 was the apex of the genre for my friends and me. There were countless nights of my friends and family passing the guitar around trying to best each other’s scores, and when 360 introduced online leaderboards for each song it upped the competition level even higher. Local city clubs and bars did Guitar Hero tournament nights and my favorite memory from these was on a Guitar Hero III tourney night when it was my turn to go up on stage to pick a random song out of a hat I was the lucky soul to draw one of the hardest songs in the game in the form of Slayer’s “Raining Blood.” I suffered on stage, and barely managed to finish, yet it remains a memory I shall cherish! In fall of 2007, Harmonix splintered away from Red Octane and teamed up with MTV Games to unleash the revolutionary Rock Band that brought in drums and karaoke to the fold for four player co-op play!

I will forever love the countless Rock Band nights I had in the first two Rock Band games that hit in 2007 & 2008, especially the nights I played with my old podcast co-hosts Chris and Scott. I downloaded well over a hundred extra DLC songs over a few years for it, and we would routinely meet up one or two nights a month for Rock Band nights for two years. Almost always, our last song to finish off a session was the final song in the first Rock Band’s career mode that was filled with many wrist-suffering solos, yes I am talking about Outlaws’ “Green Grass and High Tides”. Our Rock Band addiction culminated with the “Bladder of Steel” achievement which we procured when playing every song straight without a fail over the course of several hours! I was almost always the drummer on Rock Band nights. At first no one else wanted to do them, but eventually I got into them and kind of became somewhat decent at it on medium difficulty. One night at an Alice Cooper concert I became entranced at watching the drummer wail away all night that I convinced myself after the show to lay down a $200 pre-order for the premium ION Drum Set for Rock Band….though after a few months something about that bulky set did not gel with me and I did not prefer the way the drumsticks clanked off the pads and I never developed a rhythm for them and eventually gave them away to free up space.

The forgotten gem Rock Band title no one talks about, LEGO Rock Band! Behold one of its awesome boss stages with the Ghostbusters theme song! The plastic instrument genre quickly became oversaturated with numerous entries a year from Activision and EA. At first it was kind of interesting to dive into some of the band focused entries of the series like how Harmonix did a wonderful tribute to The Beatles with reliving their career and its groovy “Dreamscape” stages in The Beatles: Rock Band. The Metallica nut in me feasted on forcing carpal tunnel upon myself with the painfully intricate, yet entrancing solos from almost every track in Guitar Hero: Metallica. By the time Green Day: Rock Band and Guitar Hero: Van Halen rolled around though and other offshoots that I completely skipped like Band Hero and Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits, it was clear the writing was on the wall for the genre. I did manage to sneak in some last doses of fun with a couple other off-the-beaten-path entries though before this genre faded away from its zenith.

The head-bopping mash-ups of DJ Hero with its uniquely intuitive turntable controller and feeding my karaoke addiction with Lips were breaths of fresh air for the genre late in the 360’s life.

Microsoft’s karaoke series on 360, Lips, supplied a fair amount of fun with its unique glow-in-the-dark microphones and four volumes of songs released before Microsoft eventually morphed it into a karaoke pay-per-song app late in the 360’s lifecycle. My buddy Matt introduced me to LEGO Rock Band, which Matt got for free with any Black Friday purchase one year at Kohl’s and we were both nearly burnt out on the genre by this point, but thought we would at least give this graphically unique version a shot. The adorably twee nature of the LEGO visuals with its complementing soundtrack were irresistible, and it instantly won us over. We stuck with it all the way through, and were fans of its music video-esque “boss” levels, with the Ghostbusters theme song stage being one we replayed far too frequently. Another refreshing take on the genre was through DJ Hero and its sequel, DJ Hero II. I loved that turntable controller, and it flawlessly placed me into the DJ world with its mash-up stylings soundtrack and fitting club visuals. Both games were unsung heroes of the genre when they released because they both came out a year or two removed from the apex of the genre’s success, but the DJ & LEGO games brought in some much needed fresh air in that scene. Non-Kinect Casual/Family Game Hits and the Failure that was NXE Now while I almost entirely avoided the Kinect, there still remained deluge of non-Kinect casual party games that were a hit with the family on holidays and friends on game nights. The two Microsoft published Scene It games that came bundled with their user-friendly big button wireless controllers were family favorites for a few years and successful adaptations of the hit movie trivia DVD-board game. A guilty pleasure of mine is legacy licensed trivia/board games/game shows on consoles, and the 360 had plenty of them with solid editions of Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, Apples to Apples, Risk and Family Feud 2012. Doritos Crash Course seemed initially like a forgettable promotional game that was free on XBLA that only offered avatars racing each other on a variety of obstacle courses, but somehow its simple gameplay was addicting and far more entertaining than it had any right to be at family and friend gatherings.

You Don’t Know Jack was a fun revival of the hit PC irreverent trivia series that was dormant for nearly a decade before THQ brought it back on consoles in 2011. Friends and I played through every episode on the disc and its DLC packs, and I revisited it for several years because of one dumb habit where the adorably jerk-of-a-host, Cookie Masterson, would have a unique greeting to open the game if you played on a holiday. The success from this You Don’t Know Jack revival got the developers at then-Jellyvision to revitalize the brand and include a bunch of other party games in the popular yearly Jackbox games that are still going strong as of this writing. I also wanted to squeeze into this chapter of the flashback Microsoft’s polarizing decision to appeal the UI of the 360 to a more family/casual audience and changed the fan favorite “blades” UI into the detested “New Xbox Experience” (NXE) in 2008. Microsoft was trying to synergize with the equally detested UI of its latest PC operating system, Vista. Tablets were starting to become trendy at this point, and Microsoft was resilient on forcing a tablet-esque UI across all its devices and the results were a total system failure. I was among the many who made their outcry heard over how ugly the many rows of diagonally aligned boxes filled with ads were a visual nightmare on the eyes. I was use to some minor ad implementation in the Blades UI before promoting other 360 games available, but the NXE mixed in all sorts of commercials, movie trailers and other assorted promotions that hit the same wrong nerves as those eye-blasting web browser ads.

Microsoft eventually updated and tweaked the NXE into a much more aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly UI that remains on the 360 boot-up today. With the 360 user base understandably a modicum from what it was in its prime today, it is refreshing to see Microsoft lay off as of this writing with a complete absence of ads on the UI. I will also use this space to shout out the premium theme backgrounds that I have used for many years being the pumpkin patch and winter wonder land themes that are always a delight to see when I boot up the 360. Yes, the Xbox Live 360 servers are surprisingly still online in 2020, 15 years after the 360 launch. Most 360 online multiplayer supported games support peer-to-peer multiplayer so as long as Microsoft keeps the lights on, you will still be able to play 360 games online. Microsoft only kept the original Xbox Live servers up for seven and a half years, so to see them more than double that for 360’s servers as of today is…astonishing. Worth noting is some games like Chromehounds, Final Fantasy XI and all EA-published games utilized their own private servers which the publishers have shutdown long ago, so those games are unplayable online, but a vast majority still support the option. Wanna Wrassle? For several years on the 360, one of my yearly holiday season traditions was to buy the latest WWE Smackdown vs. RAW game and complete the career/season story mode and unlock all of the hidden wrestlers and features over the course of a few months. I did this from WWE Smackdown vs. RAW 2007 through 2011. For one of the yearly installments I was so close to unlocking all the achievements to get 1000 gamerscore, but the last one I needed required a grind to complete the main single player career mode five times. I decided at the time this was a perfect opportunity to catch up on past seasons of 24 and brought a second, smaller TV next to my living room TV and absentmindedly button mashed my way through those extra career mode playthroughs, and it took almost the entirety of the second season of 24 to accomplish that feat and earn that final achievement. No regrets!

WWE's yearly Smackdown vs. RAW games featured zombies in their storylines, while All-Stars shifted the gameplay to more arcadey fun for all! The story modes in those yearly WWE games were worth playing through because the writers in some cases got creative and did things that were not possible on TV like having the Undertaker cast mind control spells for example. They added and experimented with a plethora of new modes and options, with the WWE Universe mode being a prime example of going all out creating dream cards and custom storylines. The creation options became incredibly in-depth each year too, in the later installments the developers added a Create-a-Storyline feature that had a surprising level of customization full of custom text entries for dialogue and branching cutscenes. One infamous online community, Video Game Championship Wrestling, became famous for its machinima they created with this system that contained intricate storylines with created wrestlers in its league consisting of video game character icons, developers, comic book & anime characters, fabled movie legends and yes even sprinkling in a few wrestlers. I dabbled in creating a couple simple storylines, but it was too much for me to invest into, but thankfully users could upload and download storylines from the community which added seemingly infinite replay value.

You have not lived until you witnessed an episode of the acclaimed wrestling videogame machinima that is Video Game Championship Wrestling. Will it be Gabe Newell or Dr. Wily who will emerge here as VGCW champion? WWE released a couple spinoff games that were not as feature-dense, and contained more accessible, arcade-like controls. They were on the right path with Legends of Wrestlemania, which highlighted the 80s success of the then-WWF, but absolutely nailed it with WWE All-Stars which featured a hybrid of past legends and current stars, and all of them were intentionally designed to look like roided-out action figures capable of larger-than-life moves like hurling opponents 30 feet into the air in addition to juggling, fighting game-like air combos. This all combined for fun multiplayer sessions with friends and family members who usually are not fans of wrestling games, but genuinely got into the gameplay to my surprise. I rampaged through everything All-Stars had to offer within a couple months after the latest Smackdown vs. RAW game, and was kind of burnt out on wrestling games after this for a while and skipped all future WWE games for several years starting when they changed the branding with WWE ‘12.

TNA iMpact! was from the same people who made All-Stars and had super-fun Ultimate X match as seen above! FirePro Wrestling on the other hand features only controllable Avatars and none of the trademark legacy 2D gameplay the brand is usually known for. There were a few other non-WWE games I tried out before I took a 360 wrestling game sabbatical. Rumble Roses XX was the first 360 wrestling game and the second all-women wrestler game in America after its PS2 predecessor. Never put as much time into it as I meant to, so I cannot leave any lasting impressions on it other than it gave Dead or Alive a lot of competition with its variety of costumes. I did put a lot of time into TNA iMpact! however, which was the game the All-Stars developers worked on before. At the time it hit, I was into the TNA promotion, and the game was a pretty good representation of that product with a fun Ultimate X mode, and a story mode circled around a fictional costumed wrestler named Suicide who went on to become an actual wrestler in the promotion in 2008, and the character has remained there off-and-on to this day. Lucha Libre AAA Heroes del Ring introduced the high-flying luchadores from Mexico with their own exclusive game and featured some familiar past WCW/WWE/TNA stars, but had problematic controls to prevent it from having any lasting appeal. I never played the Kinect motion-based wrestling game, Hulk Hogan’s Main Event, but I have seen clips online to witness it in its near-broken state that lives up to one of my favorite reviews on Game Informer where it became one of their worst rated games ever. There are a couple of low budget Avatar Wrestling games on the Indie Games channel on 360 that are basic affairs, but there is one Avatar-based grappler that somehow got a full fledge XBLA release with the much-respected, best-in-class FirePro Wrestling branding. Those games have been a decades-long line of some of the best 2D wrestling games of all time, and somehow Microsoft was able to secure that branding for an admittedly decent and accessible Avatar wrestling game, but a game that should in no way be worthy of that elite branding. That would be like Phillips securing the Zelda and Mario licenses for their own low-rent made games on their CDi system….oh wait. Sports-ball Forever! Time to highlight some of my favorite go-to sports games on the system. Starting off with football, there I got use to buying Madden every two or three years. I only rented the 360 launch title, Madden NFL 06, which wounded up being one of the worst debut Madden titles on a console ever. This is because of EA’s overblown “Target Gameplay” video they debuted at a previous E3 where the final game, while still graphically a leap above Xbox/PS2, was far from what they teased. To make it worse, that was the same year they debuted the doomed “vision cone” gameplay feature in the earlier PS2/Xbox versions that went over so poorly that they had to disable it as a default option for the 360 version and hide it in the options. This was also the first lead Madden game to remove John Madden himself (and co-commentator Al Michaels) from commentary in favor of a nameless afterthought of a radio-style announcer. Madden NFL ‘06 is easily the all-time worst lead-platform version of Madden!

This video encapsulates why Madden 06 was an atrocity of a debut on the platform…at least it had easy achievements.

EA stepped it up with later entries, with Madden ‘10 remaining a favorite of mine for the brand this gen. I still recall that edition was when EA initially introduced their cash cow microtransaction-focused “Ultimate Team” feature as a free DLC a few months after its release. How foolish I seem now for at first dismissing it as an interesting curiosity I could not bother to invest a dime into ever, but only to see it blow up in DLC sales for EA and become integrated across all of EA’s sports titles and other publisher’s sports games within a few years. I only picked up one college EA effort this gen via NCAA Football ‘12 which was technically free with a six-month subscription to Sports Illustrated, but I got the most out of that game, and was huge into its “Road to Glory” mode. Road to Glory had my created player play out his final year of high school, and then go through a full college season. EA were absolute pros at this point with their college game, perfectly capturing the college game pageantry by jam-packing the it full of college anthems, cheerleaders, mascots and first-class commentary from the old College Gameday crew of Kirk Herbstreit and Brad Nessler. EA was also surprisingly generous with a community create-a-school option where users could create and upload teams and stadiums, and sure enough someone created my middle-of-nowhere Midwest FCS school and high school teams. It remains a heartbreaker (for good reason though) that EA pulled out of college sports games after the NCAA student athlete class action lawsuit, with NCAA Football ‘14 being their final installment. I do not feel that much love for EA though because of how they squashed 2K’s attempt at returning to football videogames with All-Pro Football 2K8. 2K signed on a couple hundred retired legends for their game, and players could pick a handful of legends to be the standout stars on their otherwise auto-generated teams. It was a fun, different approach, which EA quickly put the kibosh on by signing many of those legends away to appear in throwaway historical features in future Madden games. As I mentioned earlier though, EA did win back some favor with me by resurrecting the Blitz franchise with their excellent XBLA version of NFL Blitz.

There were a few other non-NFL games on the 360 I gave an honest try to, with Midway releasing an unlicensed, M-rated version of Blitz before they went bankrupt with Blitz: The League II. It showcases M-rated behind-the-scenes drama storylines, and more brutal and violent hits that bestow it the M-rating, and if you can handle that, then it is worth checking out. Finally, Backbreaker was an ahead-of-its-time pigskin game that debuted an all new physics engine that EA would eventually incorporate into Madden games. While the tech was not quite all the way there, the thing I associate most with that game is it playing P.O.D.’s “Here Comes the Boom” on every…single…kickoff. It was a huge detraction in my review, and I was surprised to see a few weeks later an email from my editor at the time passing along a note from the developers to revisit the game after an update addressing reviewer feedback, which did address a multitude of things, but at the top of the list was reducing the amount of times P.O.D.’s jam played to only twice a game, thank god! On the basketball side of things, I remained a huge fan of the NBA 2K series. The 360 carried over the awesome 24/7 mode I adored from PS2/Xbox era, which was an in-depth career mode for a single created baller, doing a global tour of the street hoops circuit. The 2K games struck gold in NBA 2K11 when Michael Jordan graced the cover and the game added a new historical Jordan mode where he relived his most monumental games with historically accurate rosters, and vintage 90s telecast presentation and commentary. The Jordan mode was a success, and integration of NBA legends became a big selling point on the 2K games going forward with future installments having a theme around the Jordan/Magic/Bird NBA breakout success of the 80s and the iconic ’92 Olympic Dream Team.

EA had a downward spiral with their sim hoops games, and I only tried out a couple demos of the earlier NBA Live titles this gen that did not win me over, including the attempted re-branding of the series with NBA Elite ‘11. That doomed demo was so glitch-laden that it got EA to cancel and recall the game from retailers mere days before its street date, and took them three years to launch another proper console NBA sim. I did love EA’s re-launch of NBA Jam however, along with the XBLA sequel, On Fire Edition. They hit all the right notes on re-introducing the classic arcade gameplay to a new generation. No idea why they have not done another NBA Jam since however, but at least On Fire Edition is back-compat on Xbox One and Series S|X. The PS3 consumed the bulk of my baseball playing time with their awesome MLB: The Show games of that era. However, I do have one chuckle-worthy memory of staying up late playing a lot of 2K’s arcade take on baseball, The Bigs, at a friend’s place one night. We played several games and I recall being impressed at how fast each game breezed by. I skipped all hockey sims this generation too, with the only time I digitally hit the ice this gen being EA’s killer NHL game on XBLA, 3-on-3 NHL Arcade, which delivered the hat trick of arcade fun gameplay, creative power-ups and intuitive controls.

For alternative and single player sports games, I already raved about Top Spin 2 during the 360 launch window. I could never get into EA’s thumb-stick controls for its Fight Night games, but I did enjoy 2K’s Don King’s Prize Fighter, which came from the same team that made the Rocky games on the previous gen I preferred more. Of all the MMA games, I briefly got into THQ’s UFC 2010, but the game always became a chore when gameplay transitioned into ground submissions. I enjoyed Tony Hawk’s Project 8 when it launched, but that series also had a fall from grace with several failed experimental games once EA stepped up the competition with Skate. One of the greatest mysteries in gaming history to me will always be Skate 3’s staying power in sales seeing it on sale for so many years that eventually EA repackaged the game in an Xbox One case with a sticker on it saying it is playable on both the 360 and through back-compat on Xbox One because there were no longer any other 360 retail games on store shelves. I tried a few times to get into Skate, but like the Fight Night games, the thumb-stick focused controls never gelled with me and I could never adapt. No Russian, No Cauldron

For several years straight, from the 360 launch in 2005 through 2012 I played every yearly installment from Activision’s flagship brand, Call of Duty. The first couple of years it was not that much though. Call of Duty 2 I only played several times in local couch multiplayer battles when friends brought over a copy. I always regretted never renting or buying it cheap to play through the single player campaign which I heard is excellent. Ditto that for the original CoD which eventually got a re-release on XBLA as Call of Duty Classic. However, I played through the entire campaigns for the next six games. CoD3 I rented from GameFly and breezed through in a weekend in split-screen co-op with my brother and did not think much of it at the time, but came to learn later that when playing in co-op it removes a few levels that proved to be too daunting to be handled in split screen. Then in 2007 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare released and first person shooters as we knew it changed. 13 years later it still has two of the most powerful moments in a FPS campaign in the form of the nuclear blast and its immediate fallout in the failed helicopter escape, and THE sniping level of all sniping levels in the flashback mission which immerses the player so well into the sniper role at its apex moment, that few other games since have managed to achieve. It overall was an incredibly gratifying campaign, which was equaled with a revolutionary online multiplayer experience that popularized persistent online multiplayer unlocks with a seemingly endless barrage of weapon and character customization unlocks to keep players reeled in. I was never “hooked” into the multiplayer on a regular basis, but starting with CoD4 and for the next few games I would occasionally pop on and play with colleagues who did play all the time, and had a blast catching up while apologizing for not carrying my own with my less-than-ideal kill/death/ratio.

World at War was an interesting revisit back to World War II and I enjoyed Keifer Sutherland’s voiceover talents as a superior barking orders at me throughout. It also debuted its survival variant in Zombies mode that was a hit that year and frequently played with co-workers on game nights. While that mode would become a bigger focus and more expanded with each successive CoD game, for whatever reason it never became as popular or played as much then as in World at War. 2009’s Modern Warfare 2 somehow met the high bar for the quality of campaign that the first game set, and its “No Russian” level I will never forget and I was bug-eyed throughout it as I never experienced anything like it before or since while my character attempted to keep his cover. As good as Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare titles were, Treyarch stepped it up with 2010’s Black Ops and its Vietnam War setting. It remains my favorite single player campaign from this stretch of CoD games. The meaning of the “numbers” touched on throughout the campaign had a meaningful payoff, and I loved how Treyarch sprinkled in their own unique gameplay intricacies like “diving to prone” and my love for the RC Car killstreak bonus in multiplayer. No matter how much of a weak link I was for my coworkers in online multiplayer, as long as I got just one set of three kills straight to get that fun RC Car perk, then I considered that a successful multiplayer session! Infinity Ward had a satisfying conclusion to the Modern Warfare trilogy with MW3 in 2011, but 2012’s Black Ops II was surprisingly underwhelming to me. It felt like they tried to do too much with the campaign, and sprinkled in optional bonus missions I felt obligated to do, but broke up the narrative for me. Of course, it could have been CoD burnout by this point, and I have never played another CoD game since. If I were to play the campaign of just one CoD game after this from 2013 on, what would you recommend?

For five years I anticipated the low budget FPS efforts from Cauldron that had me reliving past historical battles and as a DC Secret Service agent seen above. Interestingly, while Treyarch and Infinity Ward took turns each year this gen delivering Activision’s big holiday FPS hit, quietly another studio, Cauldron, yearly released five budget-tiered FPS titles under the Activision Value banner. These little publicized releases always caught my eye, and I had no idea if it was the case, but Cauldron’s games felt like where Activision would send freshly recruited developers to get their feet wet before getting promoted to the CoD teams. Three of Cauldron’s five games were History Channel licensed games themed around recreating and reliving both sides of war in two installments based around the Civil War, and another in the Japanese theater of World War II. The history nut in me appreciated the History Channel-produced intro video for each level, and it was a budget-friendly alternative come down FPS game to breeze through in a weekend after the latest blockbuster CoD game. Cauldron also did a DC-terrorist themed FPS in Secret Service, and Jurassic Park-inspired FPS titled, Jurassic: The Hunted. I imagine all of these play horribly outdated now, but I still will appreciate them for what they brought to the plate. Dubious Honors

Hulk Hogan’s Main Event and NBA Elite 11 top the dubious honors list for reasons I already ranted on above, but wanted to make sure to at least notate here. Moving on to other bad games, here are a handful that I was not a fan of: Rogue Warrior was a super-short and barebones functioning FPS published from Bethesda, but bizarrely got AAA buzz and marketing. It did have a catchy closing credits song though. Turning Point was an FPS from Codemasters with an interesting concept of a post-WWII shooter if the Nazis won the war, but poorly executed and reason why Codemasters has primarily stuck with racing games since (although they did attempt one more FPS with Bodycount which I did not play, but understand is just as atrocious). One game that went on to have a misrepresented history I reviewed at the time was Bullet Witch. It was a middle-tier single player action game published by Atari, and while it had some problems I made sure to point out in my six out of ten review, I received serious flak from a few friends for overrating the game. While I addressed the game’s issues and marked it down appropriately so, I did have a fair amount of fun with the boss battles and messing around with some of the more powerful spells. Over the years I have seen many bill this game with the label that it is among the worst on the 360 with the same kind of tone and vitriol as ET received on the 2600. Even Mr. Microsoft Larry Hyrb poked fun at the game in an online video long ago. Again it is not a great game by any means, but it is far better than what a lot of people make it out to be.

An XBLA game that got one of their marketed themed event releases (‘Summer of Arcade’, ‘Fall Feast,’ etc.) was TMNT: Out of the Shadows. It looked to be a cannot-miss 3D brawler TMNT game, and with that level of hype how could it go wrong? Very much so in fact, and with some of the worst camera controls in gaming I could not put it down fast enough. Another painfully disappointing TMNT game was the aforementioned XBLA remake of Turtles in Time. It played well enough like the original, but the redone visuals did not capture the spirit of the affable 80s/90s cartoon like the original did, and it stripped out the SNES bonus levels and had poorly substituted voiceovers. Stay away! There were a couple of semi-decent 360/PS3 era Turtles games. Nickelodeon TMNT was a perfectly serviceable brawler that did a better job of bringing back the good memories of the arcade classics than Re-Shelled did. Ubisoft released a single player platformer/action game to coincide with the 2007 CG film, TMNT. It too was pretty straightforward, and not earth-shattering, but at least hit some TMNT fan service marks good enough to be a worthwhile entry. Danger of the Ooze is one that slipped through the cracks that I rarely hear talked about likely because it released late in the 360/PS3 lifecycle in 2014. This should be played by any Turtles fan because this is the standout Turtles game this gen from the platforming masters at Wayforward with their take on a pretty fun MetroidVania-style game the TMNT license seemed destined for all this time. Lightning Round Quick Hits

Microsoft did not release 360’s successor, the Xbox One until 2013, so with eight years between the 360 and Xbox One, a boatload of games hit that system and I played far too many of them which is why this is going on far longer than it should have. There remains a hearty amount of AAA, mid-tier, XBLA and other noteworthy games that I want to give their due, so bear with me as I attempt to rapid fire through these… -I got wrapped in too many open world games this gen, and I want to first give props to RockStar Games for managing to finish two of their behemoths in the form of Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. GTAIV is the only GTA I finished the storyline for, and Niko Belic will be one of my favorite protagonists. The cell phone activities were initially a chore to retain friendship ratings, but eventually I came around to bowling, cab rides, comedy clubs and rounds of pool. RDR was the ultimate Wild West open world game. Neversoft’s 360 launch title, Gun, was in my backlog still and I blitzed through that in the weeks leading up to RDR’s launch because I just knew it would blow it away. Gun was a decent effort from Neverseft, but quickly became obsolete when starting up RDR, which did not disappoint, and delivered a remarkably atmospheric experience for its time in 2010. I loved getting lost on adventures out in the wild, and that original score is masterful and could not be have been better crafted. That final several hours of gameplay based around the family ranch is an incredibly bold choice of gameplay that will always have a special place with me. Kudos to RockStar with their spooky-themed story expansion, Undead Nightmare, which is a hell of a side story to RDR that is well worth your time all these years later!

GTA IV put a lot of attention on its mini-games that were entertaining shoulder content, and Red Dead Redemption introduced a drop-dead gorgeous wild-west open world I would crave getting lost in and exploring for adventures. -Another one of my top 10 favorites on the 360 released on the same day as RDR, and I am talking about sci-fi third person thriller that is Alan Wake. I got completely absorbed into Alan’s quest to find his wife, and Remedy had a five star presentation to keep me on my seat. Some people criticized its style of combat, but it worked for me, and I believe it will go down as the only game where its deadliest weapon in its arsenal is a flare gun! Easily the spookiest T-rated game I have played. Do not skip out on the DLC episodes that put a nice bow on the story, and the XBLA sort-of time loop sequel, American Nightmare

-Two open world games that I shamefully have resting in my backlog to this day are GTAV and Bully. I picked up both on 360, and eventually picked up the Xbox One version of GTAV. You know what open world games I did play through though? The first two Just Cause titles. This satirical take on the James Bond-super agent was right up my alley, and Rico’s unique gadgetry like hookshots, parachutes, and wide variety of instant vehicle drops innovated in new ways to traverse its gigantic open world. The chaos and destruction those games both were capable of raised the bar with how creative one could be to lay waste to their surroundings. -I already commented above how the first Saints Row lived up to its potential from its E3 demonstration I saw a year before its release. The sequels surprisingly kept getting better and better. The first two games were essentially damn good GTA-clones, but with both games having more zany activities and side missions than in GTA. Saints Row the Third upped the outrageous quotient for its plot and side missions, and was groundbreaking for how far it pushed the boundaries with its whacked out style of storytelling.

-It did not feel right to include it with the racing games above, but another recommended open world title from this era is Driver: San Francisco. Ubisoft and Reflections nailed making an open world driving game without races being the focal point. The spirit-car-swapping feature against all odds is cleverly explained, and actually works! -Despite its popularity I could never get into the Assassin’s Creed games which debuted in this generation. A friend borrowed me the first game and at first I was into its setting and gameplay, but that first game was notoriously rough around the edges and I believe I got hung up on a glitch that prevented me from making progress roughly halfway through, and I have inadvertently been done with the series since. I picked up a few other entries over the years and have been wanting to at least try them, especially hearing how the latest ones keep getting better and better. One day! -I finished my first Resident Evil game on the 360 with Resident Evil 5. That game also featured online co-op, but I ventured fourth and played it solo and still had an impeccable time with it. It put more of an emphasis on action to the dismay of critics, but having not played too much of prior entries that did not bother me, and there were still plenty of intense thrills had throughout.

This is easily my favorite arcade stick ever, and the exquisite 2011 Mortal Kombat reboot made its tall asking price worth it! -This generation saw collector’s editions become out of control, with games packed with all kinds of statures, Master Chief helmets, night-vision cameras and other gadgets for well over $100. The only one of these I invested in was 2011’s Mortal Kombat. I originally was not too hyped for that game because I had my fill of the series at that point after the three good entries on PS2/Xbox, and felt the series had nothing else to offer. My brother however is a big MK-fan and told me how he ordered the $200 edition that came with premium arcade-replica fighter stick. I went to his place to drop something off one day when he wasn’t home, and he told me had the game and stick hooked up and to give it a try while I was there. Within minutes of starting the story mode and realizing how they were reimagining the original trilogy and how they switched up the gameplay for that generation, I became immediately entranced with it and could not think of any other way to play it without that stick and could not rush home fast enough to pluck down a $200 order. I made sure to get a lot of use out of that stick, and is was absolutely worth it!

-Sniper: Ghost Warrior is an unorthodox FPS focused entirely on sniping, and for being a low-budget game at the time I had way more fun than I should have with it. Also loved how it did a 180 from games like CoD, where instead of one sniping mission to mix up the campaign gameplay, here there is one run ‘n gun mission for a break from all that sniping throughout the campaign! I am glad this game had a ton of success and City Interactive has released a few sequels that I hope to emerge from my backlog of doom. -I already elucidated on my Borderland 2 experience earlier. The first Borderlands was a surprise out of nowhere hit that I loved my first few days with it and could not get enough plowing through the campaign online with friends. Unfortunately I went on vacation a few days after it released for a week, and when I got back, sure enough, most of my friends were many levels higher than me and already vanquished the game, so I soldiered on the final third of the game on my own. It was a challenge and a half to beat the final gi-normous tentacle-laden boss, but I managed to squeak by it after gradually picking away from it behind a boulder for nearly an hour!

-I had a unique experience with the Portal games. The first one I initially played for about 15 minutes, quickly became frustrated with the teleporting mechanics and had to step away from it. A couple years later, an old co-worker Rick was one of many by that point stating why those games were some of the best games out there. I told him my case, and he offered to come over and bestow his Portal wisdom upon me. Many thanks to Rick, who did not straight-up spoil and told me what to do to get past Portal’s many puzzle rooms, but instead kind of nudged me into gradually easing into a feel for the core mechanics of the game and it helped greatly! I would not have been able to get into it without him. He had a surprise for me when he left, and left me his copy of Portal 2 to borrow and told me not to give it back to him until I finished it. I knew he was moving in a couple months at that point, and that compelled me to put all my attention into the Portal games. I am glad I did because both games are spectacular, especially the sequel which had a noticeably bigger budget to go all out with a AAA experience and narrative that came together to be one of my favorite games of that generation. -Bulletstorm was another innovative FPS with its implementation of a whip, and combining it with melee strikes and gunplay for a refreshing take on FPSs. It kind of came and went though, and I rarely hear people talk about it anymore, except for briefly last year when it got a re-release on Xbox One/PS4, with an extra DLC to have Duke Nukem replace the original protagonist’s voiceovers for the game. I will also associate the original Bulletstorm release for having one of the worst box arts of all time. It is just a no-frills footprint. If you played Bulletstorm before, sure, it will kind of make sense since kicking is a core melee attack, but if you were a potential consumer browsing games and had no clue about Bulletstorm then I would not blame you for not giving that cover more than half a second’s worth of thought.

-The trilogy of BioShock titles were all high ranking in my top 10 game of the year lists for their appropriate years. The first game immersed me into its aquatic utopia gone haywire, and it stood out from standard FPSs of the time with its heavy emphasis on its narrative and hunting down those audio tapes to get every nook and cranny of the story. Its “twist” was something else for its time, and remains one of my favorites to this day. The sequel had a lot of polarization because it was from a different studio, but I felt they mixed it up by playing as a Big Daddy for the whole game and I could not get enough of freezing Splicers and then doing a drill rush attack that shattered them into pieces. BioShock Infinite was an astounding way to wrap the trilogy with its mesmerizing city-in-the-sky setting, and one of my favorite storylines from this gen. Its two storyline DLC episodes that released around a year later are worth checking out if you missed out, especially the second episode that changed the gameplay into more stealth-based by playing as Elizabeth. It felt like a whole new game, and developer Irrational absolutely perfected the change-up! -Spec Ops: The Line will not light the world on fire for its stick-to-fundamentals third person action gameplay, but what appears to start off as just another rah-rah military shooter, eventually morphs into a far deeper and complex plot than what I thought it was going to be. A book eventually came out thoroughly breaking down its exposition because it stormed up that much of a discussion around it.

-Shmup fans had several worthy entries to play on the 360. Raiden IV and Deathsmiles were landmark new entries for the genre in their time. On XBLA, there were re-releases of a pair of renowned shmups from Treasure: Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun. A pair of original shooters also stood out among the XBLA crop with the free of charge student developed game, Aegis Wing and also the beloved Sine Mora that captured the pilot play-by-play stylings of Star Fox and successfully merging it into a shmup. There were also a fair amount of Japan-exclusive shmups for the 360, most notably from respected shooter developer, Cave. Many of them are region-free and can be played on American 360s, so please keep that in mind! -I already told some tales above about my favorite comic book games, and embedded below is a video where I and my friend Matt painstakingly dissect a ton of comic book games that hit the 360. Highlights include the shockingly good movie licensed games, X-Men Origins: Wolverine & Captain America. Not-so-good highlights include the movie licensed Watchmen, Fantastic Four and Hellraiser games. Matt also had a lot more hands on time with the acclaimed Batman: Arkham and Spider-Man games on 360, and I have always respected his expertise in the genre so please give his takes a listen below! -The Telltale adventure/choose-your-own path story-driven games originally started off on PC, but became more and more popular with their console releases. I was 100% into the first two seasons of their Walking Dead games like everyone else. Loved the first one more, but my favorite Telltale episodic game is still Back to the Future. The Wolf Among Us was a fascinating twist on a mature dystopian fairy tale world. I was not impressed by their take on Game of Thrones, but I surprisingly enjoyed all eight episodes of Minecraft. I originally got that for my nephew who was huge into Minecraft at the time to play with, but he was not all that into this genre and I found myself getting into it instead. Telltale was pumping out so many of these episodic series that I could not keep up, and still one day want to go back and play through both Batman seasons they released, and their Borderlands series too which I hear is their best work.

Back to the Future remains my favorite Telltale episodic game, but the event-like nature of the first season of Walking Dead was an undeniable zeitgeist while it transpired. -The LEGO co-op games we know today based off nearly every license imaginable became ubiquitous this gen. Only one I put serious time into and was able to finish was LEGO Marvel Superheroes. This one is special to me because it was the first game that I got my nephew Carter really into right when he was old enough to start grasping modern controller-based games. Had to help him out in quite a few parts, but we got threw it, and now several years later his gaming skills have greatly improved, and I will gladly give him a humble brag on his conquest of finishing the tough-as-nails Cuphead.

-I subscribed to the Official Xbox Magazine for several years, until around 2009-ish, and I was surprised that they stuck with including demo discs for another year or two after that since downloading demos quickly made the discs obsolete. OXM did attempt a few exclusive disc goodies though, and one I always came back to was their own take on an episodic game called OXM Universe that lasted for about a couple years. The disc itself awarded up to 1000 “OXM” points based on checking out all the demos and videos on the disc. Those points could be used in the space ship station game, OXM Universe, which was entirely menu-driven to build space station tech and explore a galaxy. It did lead up to a decent conclusion if you stuck with it all the way to the demo disc that came with issue 100 and upon completing all the final tasks you are rewarded with a lengthy video filled with OXM staff past and present thanking everyone. THAT IS MIGHTY COOL OF THEM TO GO TO ALL THAT WORK FOR A DEMO DISC EXTRA!!! -I think one thing we take for granted in today’s console space is the ridiculous amount of weekly sales and specials on digital games across all platforms. It was not always that way. In the early years of the 360 digital marketplace, for a couple years all that was available was one weekly game on sale and one piece of DLC on sale each week and that was it for a couple years. Luckily, Steam was catching fire with their acclaimed Fall and Winter sales with their monster savings, and that eventually rubbed off on 360 and PS3 and by the end of those system’s lifecycles both started offering a surplus of weekly deals and flash sales. -Digital game preservation is something that is brought up more and more lately, and one thing that periodically ruminates in my mind is how the 360 handles patches/updates. For the longest time, most games had limits of 4mb patches until the later years in the system’s life where they started to change into the larger file sizes we associate with them today. However, the 360 has a nasty habit of auto-purging a game’s update on the 360 after several different games get played on the 360. So if you were to revisit an older comfort food game many years down the line long after the 360 online servers got shut down, any updates for that game were likely auto-deleted and cannot be re-downloaded. This could be huge for a lot of games whose patches likely helped patch out game breaking bugs and other issues that can no longer be downloaded whenever the 360 servers go offline. Just food for thought.

-Final random item I want to bring up is something you saw in the header image to this special. Yes, that is a leaning gallery of 360 faceplates! Remember those? They were kind of a thing for the first couple years of the 360 when Microsoft was flexing the customization options of the 360 so anyone can snap on or off a variety of 360 faceplates to make their system stand out in their own way. I never bought a single faceplate, and only procured them if they were pre-order bonuses, or part of some promotional giveaway. The only highlight of this was how I got my Madden NFL 08 faceplate, and that was when I participated in my Gamestop’s yearly Madden tournament where no more than four people showed up for the few years I participated. The year I won, was when I got the Madden NFL 08 faceplate, which sure as hell beats my Madden NFL 07 plastic beverage cup from the previous tourney! It will forever remain in my drawer with my faceplates for Full Auto, Eternal Sonata and Deathsmiles. It is not like there is some uber-popular YouTuber who has a unique fandom for that particular version of Madden who could benefit from it in any certain way. To the drawer the faceplate remains! ”It’s an Ocean” (THE END!!!) OMG, this took me a whole month to gradually pick away at. I did not come close at all to releasing this in time for the 360’s 15th anniversary of its launch. I feel that I could have made this into a mini-eBook and charged six cents for this!!! As you can tell from my many memories I have shared thus far, the 360 is a platform I hold in high regard. I waited three years to upgrade to the Xbox One and PS4 in 2016, so from late 2005 until late 2016, the 360 was one of my primary go to consoles. Which is why I had so many memories, good and bad, to get out of my system. If you want to catch up on one of about a dozen other flashback specials I have crafted like this (which are thankfully significantly shorter) over the years check out the links below. In the meantime, I will close this off with two embedded videos of episodes of my old podcast I recently un-vaulted circled around the 360. They are the final installments of our history of comic book games and RPG games series. Both episodes focus on the games that hit for those genres up until the point the episode was recorded for 360, PS3 and Wii. Many thanks once again if you have stuck with me for these near-18,000 words of garbled memories of mine, I sincerely appreciate it and I will see you all next time if I can somehow muster enough energy after this beast of an entry for yet another anniversary flashback special!

Listen to us break down almost all the RPGs that his this gen released through 2008

And here we dissect all the comic book games released on these platforms through April of 2011 My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary NES 35th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary PS2 20th Anniversary PSP 15th Anniversary and Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th Anniversary and 32-X 25th Anniversary

If you made it this far and have yet to experience the THING that is Rogue Warrior’s end credits theme song, then I dare you to click it above and not have Mickey Rourke’s lyrical lashings remain forever stuck in your head!

Enjoy this montage of the many creative demises of the worst sidekick in the history of videogames! You’re Still Here!? Well Then, Let Me Tell You Another Story About the Shephard….Not That Shepard

It is not my tale to tell of “another story about the Shephard.” Hopefully, EA and BioWare will right that ship as they teased at the recent Game Awards a few weeks ago. I am talking about the other Shepard on Xbox 360, that being Lost: Via Domus’s Jack Shephard. Jack and most (not all) of the cast from the first season of Lost are in that game, but are not playable. Instead, a new offscreen Oceanic survivor is introduced as the playable character, Elliot. The game was an average licensed adventure-lite game affair (find out all about by click or pressing here for my original review), but at the time when it released Lost was in its fourth of six TV seasons, and I was eating up every bit of fan service that game offered. It did have a couple minor things never seen in the TV show like the Dharma magnet, and I loved its ending which got my mind reeling with it possibly tying into new fan theories from the latest episodes of the show at the time. One in particular being my favorite episode of the series, “The Constant.” Not a great game, but loved how it treated the license. That said, this hit a few years before Telltale hit big with its Walking Dead games, and I can only imagine if they were the ones to give their episodic adventure game treatment to Lost instead. Now that is another story about the Shepard I would be all-in for day one!