#and this one hits the criteria AND IS MULTIPLAYER

[vitamin-zeeth]

DISCORD HAS INBUILT GAMES YOU CAN PLAY IN CALL??????????

INBUILT GARTIC PHONE????????

INBUILT CHEF GAME??????

[alln64games]

Super Smash Bros.

JP release: 21st January 1999

NA release: 26th April 1999

PAL release: 19th November 1999

Developer: HAL

Publisher: Nintendo

N64 Magazine Score: 90%

Considering it’s humble beginnings, I don’t think Nintendo ever expected Super Smash Bros. to be such an important part of its line-up of games on future consoles. The first game was fairly light on what it contained, but it completely nailed the gameplay from the get-go.

It would have been very easy for Nintendo to make a regular fighting game – the N64 certainly had many failed attempts at the genre – yet HAL went for something new instead, something more geared for 4 players. Players no longer had a health bar, but rather a percentage damage (that could go way above 100%). The higher the number, the more you fly when you get hit.

The object of the game is to knock your opponents off the side of the map (or so far into the sky they launch into space). The main mode pits you against each character one at a time, but mixes things up with some team battles, fighting a horde of weaker opponents and fighting giant characters.

Every character has their own set of moves. The controls are simple (no combos to remember), so your focus in entirely how each of the powers work and the intricacies of how they can be used in multiple situations and alongside other powers.

Each player also has some special stages, such as breaking targets and boarding platforms. You’ll need to use the character’s full move set to complete them, especially if you want a good time.

The campaign ends with a fight against master hand, who does have a health bar, but also a set of moves for you to learn how to avoid. Once you finished, it’s not over, as a new challenger will appear.

While the roster starts with 8 very popular characters from Nintendo’s franchises: Mario, DK, Link, Samus, Yoshi, Kirby, Fox and Pikachu, there were four more slots to unlock. When you fulfilled the criteria to unlock, a screen would flash up with “A New Challenger Approaches”. This is sadly something the internet has ruined, as discovering these for yourself is no longer possible – instead, these reveals are left entirely up to trailers. Beat them and you would unlock them to use.

Super Smash Bros. is a wonderful game, but was just the beginning for the franchise, the other games have improved upon it in every way – although the game still has dedicated fans, including those who add new content to the original, with a ton of levels and characters added.

Smash Bros is as unique and essential as any Mario game – especially as its multiplayer ranks up there with GoldenEye’s, Mario Kart’s and Quake II’s. The fact that Smash Bros is still an office lunchtime favourite, almost a year after we first got our hands on it, is testament to its greatness. Do not miss it.

- Mark Green, N64 Magazine #36

Remake or remaster?

I don’t think this need a remaster due to later games, but it would be nice to have some of the bonus stages in newer games. It should definitely get re-released, though. Another option is that, if Nintendo feel they can’t top Ultimate, the next console’s Smash can be a port of Ultimate with various options (item sets, levels, moves, etc) from previous titles added as alternative ways to play as a sort of combined collection.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to play Super Smash Bros.

[theblogs2024]

How You can Cheats for Warzone 2.0 Present day Warfare three (MW3)

Modern day Warfare 3 (MW3) proceeds to captivate gamers with its large-octane action and gripping gameplay. For people planning to gain an edge or simply have far more fun, cheats can offer many different enhancements. Listed here’s an extensive guide to the most effective MW3 cheats which can remodel your gaming encounter.

one. Limitless Ammo

Among the most popular cheats, Unlimited Ammo makes certain you in no way operate from bullets. This cheat permits you to maintain firing without the need to reload, which makes it easier to choose down waves of enemies with out interruptions.

two. God Manner

Reach invincibility with God Mode. This cheat helps make your character proof against all kinds of harm, letting you to outlive any face unscathed. It’s perfect for People challenging missions or when you simply desire to investigate the sport devoid of worrying about dying.

3. No Recoil

The No Recoil cheat removes weapon recoil, supplying you with fantastic accuracy. This is particularly valuable for computerized weapons and sniper rifles, making sure your photographs strike their mark each and every time.

4. Wallhack

Acquire a tactical gain with Wallhack. This cheat permits you to see by walls and also other hurdles, making it much easier to place enemies and strategy your strategy appropriately. Use Wallhack in order to avoid ambushes and locate important goods swiftly.

five. Aimbot

With Aimbot, you may promise that each shot hits its target. This cheat quickly locks onto enemies, providing you with lethal precision. It’s Primarily successful in multiplayer modes, where swift and accurate capturing is essential.

6. Unlock All Weapons and Benefits

Why wait to unlock the top gear? This cheat quickly unlocks all weapons and benefits, enabling you to definitely customize your loadout to the liking. Experiment with different mixtures to uncover the ideal set up for your playstyle.

7. Pace Hack

Shift quicker than your enemies Along with the Velocity Hack. This cheat raises your character’s movement pace, supplying you with the higher hand in each offensive and defensive maneuvers. Speedily traverse the battlefield and outmaneuver opponents effortlessly.

eight. Stealth Mode

Turn out to be undetectable with Stealth Method. This cheat can make you invisible to enemy radar and eyesight, allowing for you to definitely execute shock attacks and steer clear of detection. It’s ideal for stealth missions and players who prefer a more strategic technique.

Significant Criteria

While cheats can significantly improve your MW3 knowledge, it’s essential to make use of them responsibly. Working with cheats in on the net multiplayer modes may lead to intense penalties, together with bans from the sport. Generally regard the Neighborhood suggestions and strive for fair Participate in to take care of a beneficial gaming setting.

Conclusion

By using these cheats, you could unlock new degrees of pleasure and method in Contemporary Warfare three. Whether you might be aiming to dominate the marketing campaign or outsmart opponents in multiplayer matches, these cheats will help you achieve your plans. Remember to use them responsibly and take pleasure in the recreation to its fullest. Happy gaming!

Learn more info. check out here: cheater pov warzone 2

[consolegamesin2023]

Monster Hunter: Rise - A highly skill-based ARPG

In World, it felt like Capcom's concept of design turned out to be to create classic Monster Hunter wisdom but add in the experience's quality for a game that was more user-friendly. Rise extends that philosophy deeper, focusing on the motion mechanics of the series to create the most enjoyable Monster Hunter recreation ever produced.

Story

Rise's story revolves around the Rampage, a calamity that was once a threat to Kamura village for 50 years but has since mysteriously returned. The rampage quests, act as a tower defense game in which you place turrets and traps to repel monsters before they kill the village's gates, Rampages work best when recreated with a couple of additional hunters; however, they're a great game alone and allow having a great time outside of regular hunts. Rise's multiplayer feature is one of the many ways it improves the world. In World Rise, every hunt in the game could be played through the same quest boards. While this was a great idea in theory, it resulted in lots of confusion as certain assignments weren't able to be played in multiplayer until certain criteria had been satisfied. In Rise, it's much simpler. There will be a town hub with easier low-rank adventures for solo players. Next is the Gathering hub, where the tasks crafted for multiplayer objectives are located. This is the place you'll spend most of your energy, as after completing the village quests, or low-rank quests within the multi-player center, you get the ability to access the meeting hub-exclusive high-rank missions. These provide fresh new beasts to hunt and more difficult versions of monsters from the past, along with brand-new weapons and materials that drop.

Combat

The core of Monster Hunter's comprehension remains unchanged. You go on quests, either by yourself or with a squad, with the intent of searching for several creatures. On the way, people will encounter smaller monsters, which you can battle with if you want, and resources that you can plunder. You'll be plundering. Anytime you last but not least appear against the focus, you'll discover that bringing them down isn't a stroll through the park. that they hit complicated targets and have massive swimming pools of HP, and for that reason, learning specific patterns of attack and other information about them is very crucial for success. Injuring different areas of their bodies can help, too.

Weapons

Monster Hunter: Rise, similar to the other games in the franchise, is a highly skill-based game that is highly dependent on skill. While you are going to improve your weapons and armor and gain special abilities associated with the clothes you wear, it's your own experience and skill to review every creature that will help you become a better hunter. Cheap Xbox Series X games are available to purchase here. There are 14 weapon archetypes, each with wildly different movements. Opting for the best one to aid you is an overwhelming task for a newcomer. For its part, Rise does ease people into the game slowly, requiring you to kill some simple monsters in the beginning and introducing you to things like crafting items and silk binding techniques as you progress.

Gameplay

The leading gameplay-changing innovations are The Palamute, which is a dog-like mount you can ride on, and Wiredash, which allows you to go in the air from any location by pressing L2+R2, and then follow it up with powerful midair strikes. The Palamute can be a game changer because it allows you to travel around the map quickly to find monsters. It is also possible to escape fights quickly when you're close to dying. Operating unfriendly monsters is also feasible and occurs if two monsters collide together. then you can take one of them and use it as a weapon to fight one of the monsters. This creates some interesting matches. These mechanics allow for a more straightforward game than World. Our website has good prices and the Best PS4 games.

Visuals

The overall game runs extremely smoothly with no noticeable drops in performance, either preprogrammed or not. If you want to experiment with the graphics settings to find your ideal setting, the game offers an impressive array of graphic options to choose from. It also gives them the possibility to modify settings like the quality of texture, image sharpness, illumination, and shadow effects.

Conclusion

Monster Hunter: Rise remains amongst the top action RPGs of the last many years, and the PS5 release is an excellent illustration of what needs to indeed be considered in this kind of port.

[stickersbanana]

Battlefront 2 mod loader conversion pack

#Battlefront 2 mod loader conversion pack how to

#Battlefront 2 mod loader conversion pack mod

#Battlefront 2 mod loader conversion pack update

Can I use this with ? Thank you for taking the time to talk with us Aragas.

#Battlefront 2 mod loader conversion pack mod

Two-player splitscreen is typically only available for console players in Star Wars Battlefront 2, but with this handy dandy mod from OtherBenji you can now use … Extract the mod archive to a location of your choice Browse through the extracted files and look for the subfolder with three letter names, for instance, BFX, and move it into the addon folder. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts.

#Battlefront 2 mod loader conversion pack update

The site may not work properly if you don't, If you do not update your browser, we suggest you visit, Press J to jump to the feed. frst you'll need starwars battlefront 2 Unofficial 1.3 patch and the conversion pack 1.1 and 1.0 for your plo koon and other jedi.if you want diffrent clone skin you should get starwars battle front extreme 2.2 it also gives you diffrent weapons and you could try ultimate battle clone wars which at random picks a clone region when you load a origanl map and a map that comes with the mod… We suggest you try the article list with no filter applied, to browse all available. Letting modders use any cosmetic mods in an online match opens the game up to problems like skins that make players harder to see or the like. Simple example would be the repcacement of the tiny android skin with some better (large) visible skin or simply changing to brighter colors.

#Battlefront 2 mod loader conversion pack how to

Battlefront 2 Rey Guide – How to Unlock the Resilient Skin Once you hit 4,000 points, quickly open the menu, select Respawn, and then pick Darth Maul. Make sure you're … No articles were found matching the criteria specified. Like the one in the image, The skin selection mod doesn't cause any problems, you can use it without worrying about it. Modder "Harrisonfog" has been hammering out dents and buffing off the rust on BF2's chassis for years … … you can even just use those mods offline using the frosty profile feature and just switch when you want to play online, You dont even get banned while using hacks it's so bad on pc, Ha, ok lol, so I guess Ill be sticking to instant action for a while lol, Skin mods are fine but the ones that mess with for example abilities are going to get you banned. The Fort Tarsis Lounge - Creators' Corner. More information: , January 2018 Capeless Dooku, Phasma, Vader. nachdem ich einige Spieler damit im Multiplayer gesehen habe, hab ich mal ein wenig gesucht. But, if there is a mod that allows play in arcade 25 v 25, instead of 10 vs 10 might be banned? Star Wars Battlefront 2 CLONE COMMANDO Skins and changes to the DC-17M weapon! #4. Even if they are just for skins, and make no gameplay difference besides appearance? January 2018. This mod replaces the entire First Order with Death Watch including Troopers, Reinforcements, and Heroes.

[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!

[foxgirlintestines]

I know I harp a lot on how much I hate the Commander Rules list, but their own criteria for bannign things should hit so much. The only positive thing I can take from this is that Iona did deserve to be banned, and that call of their’s was right, but otherwise look at this thing:   “No single rule can establish criteria for a ban; there are many mitigating or exacerbating factors. Some cards will represent an extreme on a single axis; others are a confluence of multiple smaller issues. The following list isn't exhaustive, nor is it a checklist, but it represents ways in which cards challenge the positive experiences players look for in commander games. It includes cards which easily or excessively • Cause severe resource imbalances • Allow players to win out of nowhere • Prevent players from contributing to the game in a meaningful way. • Cause other players to feel they must play certain cards, even though they are also problematic. • Are very difficult for other players to interact with, especially if doing so requires dedicated, narrow responses when deck-building. • Interact poorly with the multiplayer nature of the format or the specific rules of Commander. • Lead to repetitive game play.” - Commander Format Philosophy Expropriate, Cyclonic Rift, Omniscience, Flash, Ad Nauseum, Thassa’s Oracle, Hermit Druid, Tooth and Nail, Armagheddon, Ravages of War, Contamination, Blood Moon, Back to Basics, Winter Orb, Stasis, Decree of Anihilation, Jokulhaups and a pile of others all go against this list. I don’t nessisarily think this list all deserves to be banned, and the disclaimer in the list is that it is not iron clad, but I still think that there are a lot of problematic cards that go untouched. However, Sol Ring, Mana Crypt and other fast mana cards are not cards that go against their reasoning. This is one of the few things I agree with, enablers are not ban-worthy, as just accelerating a deck is not that problematic as long as that deck is not aiming to do something degenerate. Note that this list no longer includes one of the original reasoning for banning cards, which was price becoming a barrier to entry. This means the Moxen, and Library of Alexandria do not deserve to be on the ban list anymore. The last dot on the list does allow for the argument that tutors are not good for the format, however I’d still argue against it. If your deck is set up to the point where you are tutoring for a specific card then that is not the fault of tutors existing, but a result of how strong certain cards are that you would always select them out of your 99. Tutors can allow for better threat management by allowing you to run more narrow cards in your deck, or they can allow you to streamline your deck towards a certain combo. The problem in this case is how good those combos are. For example Flash Hulk is so strong that its hard to justify tutoring for anything else, but if that and similar combos were broken up then tutors could be used much more flexibly instead of as duplicates of game winning cards.

[jonasmatteo]

✏️David/Matteo: David coming out as trans to Matteo and Matteo's reaction (Congrats to 1k 🎉)

druck if a scene like this happens PLEASE make it go smoothly

—

David bit his lip as he and Matteo sat on his bed, playing Zelda together on David’s switch. The game wasn’t meant to be multiplayer, but they were trying to work through it by each using half of the controller. It was a lot harder, but it was fun to do together.

“I have something to tell you,” he said finally, setting down his controller and looking toward the other boy.

“Yeah?” Matteo asked, not looking up from the screen. “Can you hit crouch?”

“Can we just talk for a moment?” David asked.

Matteo nodded and set down his controller, looking at David to continue.

He took a deep breath. “Matteo, I’m a transgender guy. I don’t know why I’ve waited so long to tell you. I guess maybe I was just a little bit scared.”

“Okay,” Matteo said with a shrug, picking his controller back up.

“Okay?” he echoed.

Matteo nodded. “Yeah. I’m glad you felt comfortable enough to tell me, but it’s really not a big deal.”

“But, you’re gay,” David said. “You really don’t mind?”

“You’re a guy,” he said. “That means that you perfectly fit the criteria of my attraction. I really like you, David, in a ‘he’s an awesome person’ way and a ‘damn, he’s hot’ way, so who cares if you’re trans?”

David gave him a half-smile. “A lot of other people aren’t that accepting.”

“Then they’re stupid,” Matteo told him. “And, in the end, they’re the ones who lose because they don’t get to hang out with a guy as awesome as you.”

“You’re amazing, did you know that?” David asked. “I’m so glad I met you.”

Matteo leaned over a pressed a quick kiss to his lips. “I’m glad I met you too. Now, can you hit crouch?”

David’s grin widened as he he picked up his controller again. He was lucky to have such an awesome boyfriend that loved him for who he was.

—

join in on my 1k celebration!

[jackhealybct]

Catch-up

Controversy in Catan The Eurogame genre is what happens when the idea of having fun while wanting to avoid violence comes to fruition. Designed to be fun and friendly and nice to play it makes sense that they came out of a Europe that had been ravaged by war, and especially a Germany that had lost said war and was paying for it. Wanting to then avoid shooting, stabbing, or hitting one another for entertainment only made sense. However they also have a tremendous amount of complexity to master, despite their family friendly accessibility, and tend to lack a strong narrative in their gameplay. Not wanting to display too direct a narrative goes along with this non-violence, after all no-one tells a story about the farmer farming, they tell the story about the farmer that picked up his pitchfork, fought off the demons assaulting his farm and rode to New York on his hover-bike to rescue his daughter. Despite this, most of these Eurogames have some influence from history, and Settlers of Catan is no different. While Klaus Teuber didn’t seem to intend for a game about hostile takeover, on the blank slate of a story-less landscape it can be understood how Greg Loring-Albright saw the bloody history of the treatment of America’s native inhabitants. Loring-Albright’s view of Settlers of Catan is a clear example of Intention vs. Interpretation. Clearly the idea that you play as pioneers reaping and pillaging wasn’t in line with the Eurogame, but that didn’t stop Loring-Albright from being able to interpret what he saw. I think Loring-Albright also set aside, nearly entirely, the Eurogame ideal of just being a fun and economy based bit of competition, for a game that embodied the narrative he saw as being criminally ignored.

Staring into the Abyss Games can be a great way to take a look at who you are, and being the “heterotopia” as we discover, it can be great by mirroring and by contrast. When you play an open RPG like Skyrim you can discover who you are by making choices that you would when dealing with people, and by contrast when you play a story driven game like God of War (2018), when you have no option but to play a character who you can teach you about your values by frustration at a lack of choices when the character does something counter to what you would. I think the best example of my own values being reflected in games was my first run through of Kingdom Come: Deliverance. While you can make choices to play in all sorts of manners my first instinct was to play as a noble knight, however I was faced with lots of options that were made harder by the moral compass I was going with, and I found my own personal view of wanting to improvise and take sneaky routes to make some options easier come through. There was also a mission where I discovered I was too quick to trust someone based off what they were saying which had very dire consequences.

Connected Worlds The part that really intrigued me about the Connected Worlds installation was the water streams and rivers coming off the waterfall that the participants could change and play with using the logs. I thought that this was a great example of how you can give something very simple and objectiveless but that can result in all sorts of different play. Seeing the different ways people wanted to redirect and displace the river was interesting and is somewhat related to my studio project as we want to make a similar arena in which this kind of play very much might have a place. Where without giving the player a story or something to accomplish, seeing how they find play in interrupting the given flow of things.

e is for evil or exceptional? The first thing that leapt out to me was the huge discrepancy between South Korea’s gaming culture and that of New Zealand. While gaming is by no means rare here, it doesn’t appear to come even close to the scene in Korea and how all encompassing it can be for some. It is no wonder that South Korea leads the competitive gaming scene with the sheer time so many spend inside these PC bangs. Also interesting however, was that the host saw gaming as a whole as a non-social activity. While it’s true that it can be, it seemed that multiplayer and coop games weren’t being considered especially since they are likely to make up the majority of games people are playing especially when they go out with their friends to these internet cafes. Of course there very much was concern raised about the gaming culture in South Korea, especially with just how serious this gaming was being taken. While it is most often that games are defined by being something fun to do, this takes it beyond fun into serious competition. Hence where the e-Sports element comes in, especially with the story being featured. With anything where people can make money, people will abuse the system or people to do so, and especially dangerous is the young age at which these people playing games can get drawn in. However this isn’t isolated to e-Sports, traditional sports have had their fair share of scandals and I think that similarly, players of a young age are going to be manipulated, as professional players are seen to being groomed from incredibly young ages. I think that e-Sports however has another element that places it in a very strange place as far as professional competition goes, and that is that e-Sports takes place under a specific, active Intellectual Property. Soccer, Basketball, Chess, anyone can host a game of these under any terms but you have to meet very specific criteria to be playing a game of League of Legends or Counter-Strike. While the implications for the future aren’t clear, it very much begs a new question of who is liable for regulating these incidents, and does it mean that these games are likely to have a sustainable competitive scene. A game of Soccer can be played 1000 years from now as long as you have a ball. If the DOTA servers go down and the game is no longer supported, how will someone play a competitive game of it?

[radramblog]

Halo Through its Guns: 5 (Guardians)

This has been a long time coming. I’m arguably still unprepared to talk about this game, but at this point I kind of just want to get it over and done with, just to get the thoughts out of my head. So, let it be on record that this post and all its opinions and analysis are coming from the perspective of someone who’s never played a single multiplayer game of Halo 5 (and still doesn’t know how Warzone works), and hasn’t even finished the campaign, but has at least a familiarity with how said multiplayer works.

The other challenge with Halo 5 is that I couldn’t really pick a weapon to fill this series’ criteria of “new gun that you can look through as a lens to describe the game”. None of them truly fit what Halo 5 is and does, which is a little bit frustrating, but I think I’ve got something to go with. However, it’s not going to be the most consistent part of the article. To be fair, I’m not sure how much I’ve stuck to that theme in the first place.

Anyway. This is Halo 5: Guardians through the Hydra Launcher. But to talk about this game, and this gun, we have to start all the way from the beginning, and work our way back up.

Why the fuck does this game have a subtitle? I refuse to use it from here on.

Part 1: How do you play Halo?

Halo is a first person shooter franchise that was notable for a number of unique design choices at launch. Many of these design choices can be explained via an explanation of what a player can do, with the options the developers had to work with limited by the restraints of the Xbox controller.

In Halo, you can move freely on the ground, as well as perform a long, slow jump that you can influence the direction of in midair. Compared to other first person shooting games, the movement in Halo is sluggish, which combined with the relatively high, regenerating health/shields of the player, make firefights longer and thereby less a matter of who sees who first and more one of using the tools available to you to defeat your opponent. You can also crouch, though in all honesty outside of crouch-jumping and specific campaign areas, it’s not a particularly useful ability.

Speaking of the tools available to you, you have three combat options at all times- melee, guns, and grenades. Melee is quick and guarantees a 2-hit-kill in combination with a lot of options or itself, but it has a lot of end lag, so if you whiff then you’re very likely to get punished. Grenades are for close to medium range, and have a variety of uses depending on which ones you have- generally, frags are better for complex arenas and flushing enemies out of cover, while stickies are a bit more specific but more lethal. And of course, guns are their own beast entirely.

While many weapons are versatile enough to perform in multiple situations, it’s pretty often that they’re limited in their range- only so many guns have scopes you can use to improve accuracy at range, and so outside of that handful you’re probably not looking to engage at such range if you can get away with it. Halo 2 onward added a pseudo-scope to all unscoped weapons- more like a set of binoculars than anything, this zoom lens default cannot be used when firing a weapon, and lacks a reticle, basically flat out telling you that this is not a long range weapon.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to Halo’s gameplay to that- I haven’t even talked about vehicles, or any of the other additions made by other games in the series, but really what you need to talk about Halo 5 is just this- movement and combat. The fundamentals of any game in which you fight other players, really.

 Part 2: What does Halo 5 add?

Halo 5 was, excluding the Master Chief Collection, the first new Halo game for the now-previous generation of consoles. Along with the improved fidelity and scale that this implies, it also was a convenient time, in 343’s eyes, to seriously “modernise” the franchise, to keep it more in line with its contemporaries. And this has had drastic implications on how the game plays overall. One could argue this started with 4’s introduction of sprinting and the loadout system (the latter of which the game largely casts down), but there’s kind of a whole new layer to it in 5.

Jumping is quicker, and you can now use a thruster which recharges after a few seconds to get  a burst of speed in whichever direction you like. You can still sprint, and you can vault up certain obstacles rather than jumping up them, which is faster and leaves you less exposed and more able to immediately move a new direction. You also have the Spartan Charge- essentially, a sprinting melee that uses the thrusters to really smack the shit out of someone, as well as the ground pound from midair that has you impact with a shockwave that…I assume does damage.

In addition, every single weapon has a scope now. Even things like the Needler and Plasma pistol can be aim-down-sighted, to improve range and accuracy. While I’m not really a huge fan of this choice, it makes sense considering the movement buffs that range should also end up getting buffed- something like the H2 SMG would be pretty terrible if the opponent could see you wielding it and immediately sprint out of its effective range. This also has other implications, which we will get to.

There are a lot of other changes I saw within the gameplay, but considering how campaign (and maybe Warzone) specific some of them are, such as the kind of incredibly silly revival system, but there’s only one other big one I’d like to highlight- that is, everything does way more damage. Or alternatively, everyone has way less health. It’s not as noticeable in campaign (or maybe that’s just the difficulty I was playing on), but from what I’ve seen of multiplayer, you just die so fucking quickly to just about any gun. And the shield and health recharge is so fast that I’m honestly unsure of what the point of having them separate- like, I didn’t even realise I had a separate healthbar for a while, because it came back up so quickly.

In short, Halo 5 took a relatively slower paced action experience and kind of turbo-charged it. A lot.

 Part 3: How do I feel about this?

Fuck yeah, time for my ill-informed opinions. I’m sure everybody’s had their take on this game at this point, considering it’s like almost 7 years old, but it’s new to me, so.

In making these grand sweeping changes, the developers of Halo 5 kind of shifted the game’s axis from an arena shooter to a twitch shooter- as in, one much more about reactivity and catching people off guard than about extended firefights and literal slugfests. While both types of game play to map knowledge, it’s a very different emphasis- 5 means you need to know sightlines and likely places your enemies are going to come from, while earlier games reward knowing when and where certain unique weapons are going to be and how best to counter them should you not be the first to get to them.

The reason I can confidently say this about multiplayer in a game I’ve never played is because it’s what all the big shooting franchises were at the time. And by that I mostly mean Battlefield and CoD. Those games were defining what a “modern” FPS was, so 343 decided to make Halo into a “modern” FPS to suit. This does, ultimately, strip a lot of the uniqueness away from the franchise and its gameplay, and is kind of my biggest issue with the game.

What Halo 5 is, in my limited and biased experienced, is just kind of…boring. The level design is pretty uninspired, and the new toolkit isn’t actually particularly interesting either. While I respect the changes they made to the Promethean weapons a lot, the sheer lethality of everything  kind of paves that over, and I can’t help but be sour on them still because of how the campaign handles them.

Halo 4 was guilty of this too, but it was particularly blatant in parts of 5- Prometheans are effectively an enemy you can literally just drop into a level, since they can teleport. This means you don’t have to go to the effort of designing an interesting area that has bad guys in places that make sense, and you can’t predict their approach in a dropship and plan ahead, because they’re just there now. This of course also applies to the Warden Eternal, the game’s recurring miniboss, which kind of just is a Hunter but More when you get down to it.

The changes made in Halo 5 remind me a lot of the experimentation done with Call of Duty: Black Ops III. I don’t know how well that game was received in retrospect, but it did a lot of movement stuff and high-techening stuff that was pretty out there, even for the more future-focussed entries in that franchise. The thing is, CoD is a yearly series that can kind of get away with messing around like that, because if it doesn’t work then they can just not do it next time around. Halo doesn’t have that luxury, because its games come out slower, and therefore a swing and an (arguable) miss like this is going to leave a more lasting impression.

Something else Halo doesn’t have the luxury of is using a mouse and keyboard for controls, at least until they fucking release the game on PC. And with the speed of Halo 5, aiming on controller is going to be unwieldy, even with autoaim- so how we solve this problem? This brings us to our weapon of the evening.

 Part 4: hey aren’t you supposed to be talking about a gun

One of the surprisingly few new weapons in Halo 5 is the Hydra Launcher, a multi-barrelled rocket launcher that is designed to be effective against personnel and vehicles. It’s got 6 shots per magazine which can fire pretty quickly, and is pretty solid at medium and close range. More notably, when using the scope, it can lock on to targets, much like the Rocket Launcher in previous games, but unlike the ol’ classic, the Hydra can also lock onto enemies and not just vehicles.

The Hydra kills someone in two shots at medium range, and homes in. While it’s obviously a Power Weapon, there’s usually a bit more nuance to them than this. Your only real answer to one of these is to outrange it, which is unlikely, or to kill them first, which requires either a power weapon of your own or to be at real close range with an automatic or melee (or both). I’m not convinced it’s overpowered or anything, but it does pretty heavily communicate the message of Halo 5.

That is to say, homing weapons are everywhere in this game. Halo has always had a thing with homing weapons- the very first game has two in the Plasma Pistol(‘s overcharge) and Needler, and they were clever ideas, being slow-moving projectiles that the player could learn to dodge, adding a lot of play to the campaign. The problem is, that moving as slowly as they did in those games would be completely fucking useless in the speed-fest that is Halo 5. So they move faster, and with the modified Boltshot and Suppressor now also having homing properties, there are more of them.

On its face, having homing projectiles is not a bad design choice for this game. It’s hard to aim on a controller, so we’ll let some basic guns home in and make it easier on newer players. The issue is, this makes it less interesting for more experienced players, and the tracking being so good means they’re more obnoxious as there’s a lot less play to them. Particularly with aim-down-sights adding a sizable chunk of range to the weapons, guns like the Plasma Pistol are now ludicrously effective at ranges they really shouldn’t be, and because of damage being turned up, there’s not a lot you can do about them if you can’t see the first shot coming.

Also, this means that the basic weapons carried by all the baseline enemies in the game- just about every (non-sniper/fuel rod) Grunt, Jackal, and Crawler have homing weapons that travel faster than you can dodge, because they’re designed to catch you running. And that can make certain campaign areas miserable.

The Hydra isn’t the perfect representation of this, admittedly. But because the movement was increased, and the range was thereby increased, and the health was also decreased, the power of homing weapons was led to increase to an arguable breaking point. The Plasma Pistol, the gun I started this series with, the useful but niche sidearm that added extra functionality but wasn’t reliable on its own, the tool to teach the player they should go slowly so they could dodge the bullets, that you could start every game with in 4, is now one of the most powerful guns in the game. That’s fucking nuts.

As for the Hydra itself…I mean, they basically took the Plasma Launcher and split it into this thing and the Plasma Caster. And it’s a lot less interesting as a result. Try harder next time.

 Part 5: The rest of the weapon sandbox

I was actually kind of surprised at how few new guns are in Halo 5. As far as I can tell, the Hydra and Plasma Caster are the only new standard weapons featured in campaign, though to be frank, getting this list together was a huge, awful pain. It’s surprisingly hard to get solid information online about this one. But this is the fewest new weapons in any Halo game save ODST, which was explicitly an expansion of the Halo 3 engine.

What fills in Halo 5’s roster is two things. The first is a huge list of returning weapons, with several (e.g. the Sentinel Beam) coming back after long absences from the franchise. It’s pretty interesting to see how these weapons are recontextualised in this new era of Halo- for example, what does aiming down the “sights” of an Energy Sword mean? What is the Brute Plasma Rifle without its counterpart?

As I mentioned earlier, though, the Promethean weapons were pretty much rebuilt from the ground up, in a move I do enjoy. The Lightrifle is simplified, now pretty much just firing faster unscoped as its gimmick, while the Boltshot, Supressor, Binary Rifle, Incineration Cannon, and new grenade are pretty much unrecognizable. I’m extremely for this decision, frankly, though it’s hard to tell how much an impact it’ll have had in a multiplayer I haven’t played.

Speaking of multiplayers I haven’t played, the other thing filling out 5’s weapon list is the long, long list of weapon variants. These are of extremely limited availability in campaign, so I can’t say much about them, but it’s an interesting idea, I guess. I’m sure someone better equipped to discuss these has done so.

There is, therefore, a fair chunk of sandbox bloat in Halo 5. The list of guns is really big even without a lot of new ones, and that’s without even noting the variants. I’m still not sure I’ve managed to list all of them, actually. And it frustrates me to not be able to talk much about how this affects the gameplay, because the availability in campaign feels pretty normal? And I ain’t got no multiplayer. In case you couldn’t tell, I’m really annoyed that local multiplayer doesn’t exist, and that an online pass for a 7-year-old console still costs so much money.

 Part 6: What does Halo 5 imply for the franchise as a whole?

Halo 5 was very much supposed to be a new beginning for the franchise. Which is an interesting choice for the second game in a trilogy.

In Halo’s early days, it was unquestionably an innovator. It defined what console shooters would look like for a decade, and other franchises spent years trying to catch up to what it had, only really succeeding over halfway through said decade. Even in the waning years of the 00s, Halo deliberately set itself apart, innovating and experimenting and trying to lead itself as the most interesting FPS in gaming, and the reason to buy an Xbox. Or a 360.

I’m not sure that many people bought an Xbox One for Halo 5. I did think about it, admittedly.

Halo 5 is the reversal of what Halo was. Now that the franchise is no longer the dominant force it once was, it’s now in the role of playing catch-up, something that 5 has chosen to double down on rather than focusing on what made the series unique. In trying to meld the traits of more popular games into the Halo formula, it ultimately leads to a game somehow less innovative than either its predecessors or its competitors.

Halo 5 is, in a word, generic. It is not awful by any means- my understanding is that people do quite like the multiplayer. But is it really Halo? By the letter, yes, by the spirit, I’m not so sure.

 Part 7: Sanghelios

I’ve spent a lot of time being negative about this game. I don’t think I’ve been unfair about it, but I do have things about it I liked, and I’d like to go through some of that now.

I played through Halo 5’s campaign at a friend’s place, often very late at night because that was when we were both free. I’d sometimes be going while he or his wife were working on things, sleeping, or some combination of the two, and I’m incredibly thankful that they put up with me ranting about the franchise while playing an entry I wasn’t huge on.

Fortunately, when I finally made it through the slog that was the series of levels on Meridian station, and the retread that was Reunion, I was not alone when the series finally touched down on Sanghelios, the homeworld of the Sangheili, A.K.A. the Elites. To my knowledge, Sanghelios has never been before seen in any piece of Halo media, save for one of the shorts in Halo Legends- and the artstyle of that short made it kind of hard to glean anything about the world itself (again, from my knowledge, it’s been a while). So I was very concerned about how this blighted game was going to handle something that could be so important to lore nerds like myself, considering the track record it had shown me to that point.

Sanghelios, and its opening level, Swords of Sanghelios, blew my fucking mind.

This level is utterly gorgeous. The gameplay is honestly pretty solid- largely because you are fighting Covenant again after these games spend so long on Prometheans, and it introduced the Plasma Caster (look, I was just happy to see any new gun). But more importantly, they made Sanghelios wonderful to look at.

I have found no official confirmation of this- no developer commentary exists for this game- but those of the more international persuasion relative to me might be somewhat confused as to why I love this place so much. It’s just an earthlike alien planet, right? Thing is, the landscape of Sanghelios, particularly at the start of Swords of Sanghelios, is almost definitely an imitation of the rock gorges and flora of certain parts of Western Australia, particularly in spots like Kalbarri and Karijini. It’s wild seeing a video game look like a place I’ve literally walked through, especially since WA barely ever gets a passing glance in most non-Australian media (and honestly, we don’t get that much out of the eastern states, either). To see a franchise I love, even in a game I’m not as big on, so perfectly capture the beauty of my home state, to tie it to such a big-name place in the universe, and to spend so long in it, single-handedly makes this game worth the time and money I’ve spent on it.

(We don’t have the ruins, though.)

And that’s not even mentioning the return of Thel ‘Vadam. Or friendly Elites in general. Just go ahead and shove that Halo 2/3 nostalgia in my face, this is when I’m here for it.

Part 8: Closing Thoughts/Infinite

Halo 5 is a game I have a lot of complex thoughts about. I’m pretty confident in labelling it as the least good game in the series, but I’m hesitant to judge the game as flat-out bad. It’s probably because I’ve not played all it has to offer, so I don’t feel like I can really measure it properly yet.

I always knew this was going to be the hardest blog post to write, and to come up with, because it’s the only game in the series I wasn’t coming to retrospectively. This is coming from fresh eyes, whereas every other Halo game I played through the late 00s and early 10s, in my early 10s. I have no nostalgia for Halo 5 specifically, nor did I have thoughts about it bubbling in my head for years on end like I did with the other games.

Which leaves Infinite, I suppose. I am optimistic about that game still- they do seem to be heavily leaning on nostalgia, which is I suppose alright (despite what I said earlier, I generally dislike being pandered to), but the game also seems to be innovating in a way that is unique to itself- which is really what I want from it, I think. Worst case, if it sucks, I can just keep playing the Master Chief Collection. Or Cursed Halo.

As far as this particular blog series goes, I have a few ideas, but I’m going to wait until Infinite properly releases to write about it as in-depth as I have here. Halo is and has always been more about the Campaign to me, and so I’m not going to judge the next game before I can even play its one.

So for now, this is the end of Halo through its Guns. Hopefully not my worst series idea? I dunno. In my head I think I built this entry and the last one up too much, so I at least have them done by now.

…wait shit, now I have to think of something else to write on Wednesdays, don’t I?

[faqblog89]

Airships: Conquer The Skies For Mac

Airships Conquer The Skies

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Airships Conquer The Skies Manual

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Dragons are large fire-breathing reptiles that use Suspendium to help them fly.1 Dragons can be encountered in the game. It is possible to tame dragons that have appeared and use them in one's army, or to fight the dragons and loot their nest. Dragons attack by shooting streams of flame, similar to a flamethrower, at enemy constructions. The juvenile form of a dragon is called a wurm, and has.

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Airships: Conquer the Skies - In Airships: Conquer the Skies you'll need to use all of your creativity and skill to design and build fearsome airships and land vehicles to give you the edge in massive aerial battles.Construct your vehicles by piecing together a vast array of modules, choosing weapons, armour types, structures, equipment and resources in near endless configurations to allow you.

Setup airships conquer the skies 1 0 18 5 (42567) Size:205.89 MBTitle: Airships: Conquer the Skies - SoundtrackDate:17 Aug, 2018Developer:David StarkPublisher: David StarkGenre::Action, Indie, StrategyAbout This Game:The soundtrack for Airships: Conquer the Skies, created by Curtis Schweit.

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Demonstrate your battle prowess as the ultimate sky-commander in this multiplayer steampunk pixel air shooter. Tanki online – steam pack crack. Give intensive commands in this FTL-esk management simulator as you command an ever-growing ship into the finest vessel in the sky. Challenge your friends and defeat your foes in this ever challenging test of wit, strategy, and battle-prowess. Will you Conquer the Skies?

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Here are the Airships: Conquer the Skies System Requirements (Minimum)

CPU: Info

CPU SPEED: 1.8 Ghz+

RAM: 256 MB

OS: Windows 7 or later

VIDEO CARD: 128 MB VRAM+ w/OpenGL

PIXEL SHADER: 2.0

VERTEX SHADER: 2.0

FREE DISK SPACE: 1 GB

DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 128 MB

Airships: Conquer the Skies Recommended Requirements

CPU: Info

CPU SPEED: 2.2 Ghz+ Dual-core

RAM: 2 GB

OS: Windows 7 or later

VIDEO CARD: 1 GB VRAM+ w/OpenGL

PIXEL SHADER: 4.0

VERTEX SHADER: 4.0

FREE DISK SPACE: 1 GB

DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 1 GB

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Aug 22, 2018

This guide is intended to be used as an additional tutorial/refrence manual for a vanilla, non-modded, Airships: Conquer the Skies. It will include some of the less obvious features of ship design within it as well.

What Is Required to Make a Valid Airship?

Almost nothing is absolutely required to make a functional airship in this game. Ships without weapons can actually sometimes be viable, but we won't be covering specifics yet. All you need to make an airship is a form of lift, and a way to move about. You don't need to go high or particurlarly fast, but being able to do both is very helpful. This for example, is an incredibly cheap, and supprisingly decent medium level bomber, and it's only got two berths, for 6 sailors, a small propeller, and a tiny suspendium chamber. I could reduce the crew requirement even further by removing ths suspendium chamber and sticking a suspendium tank on instead, but the AI seems to be drawn towards shooting those, and suspendium explodes, so I didn't in this particular case. Of course going bigger leads to a tougher, and more durable ship, but cheap spammable ships are a very valid tactic to go with, until your enemy start to counter your designs. The example above, for example will pretty much die immediately if shot at with a few rifles, or explosives. Larger designs with redundancies are less vulnerable to being knocked out immediately.

Overlays

Overlays are a key tool to be using when designing an airship, landship, or building. They will show you where key weaknesses in your design are, and give hints on where you can improve on the designs. By default, the U key will bring them up as a shortcut key. Alternatively you can also click the button at the top of the screen to bring it up.

Overlay #1 - Pathing

Most modules have different components that take up a large area of the ship, wether it be suspendium chambers, engines, or just a whole bunch of bunks, your ship needs to be moved around in. All guns start with one clip of ammo loaded at the start of the fight for example, but poor pathing choices means that you aren't going to be able to reload those guns in a reasonable period of time. This ship for example is divided by the suspendium chamber. If that's inaccessable for any reason, the rest of the ship would be cut off crom the coal store. Fortunately the design only requires coal at the rear section however to power the engine, and said blocking suspendium chamber.

Overlay #2 - HP

This is a rather important overlay to look at occasionally. All components in a ship have a HP value that starts getting eaten away if the armor is broken through. This overlay is showing the HP pool of the modules behind the armor itself. Adding armor won't actually increase this HP pool of the component, but surrounding the component with other pieces will make them tougher to finally kill. Certain decorations can also add additional HP to any adjacent modules they touch as well as evenly distribute extra HP to the rest of the ship, so even decorative figureheads can become integral in making a survivable ship design, as you can see with the dragon figureheads over the cannons.

Overlay #3 - Water

All weapons carry a chance to set something it hits on fire, though explosives cary a higher chance, and flamethrowers have a significant ignition chance. Modules themselves can also catch fire if hit while their HP is low. Should you decide to add water to your ship, this overlay will show how long it takes your crew to get the water from the fire point to the fire itself. Generally sticking to under 4 seconds is safe for particularly flammable components, notably coal. Ammo, and other explodey weapons should have shorter times if possible.

Overlay #4 - Repair Tools

Tools are optional, but good to have around if you want your ship to keep fighting. This overlay will show how long it takes to bring tools from the repair bay or machine shop to it's needed location. You can't repair armor with tools, but you can repair internal structure.

Airships Conquer The Skies

I'm unable to confirm this for sure, but a damaged weapon can potentially explode if it was previously damaged, while firing, leading to an explosion. Repair tools help to reduce that chance.

Overlay #5 - Ammo

A fairly simple overlay. This shows how much time, in seconds it takes for ammo to reach its destination. If you can keep this metric under a second, you will have uninterrupted fire of the weapon meeting the time criteria.

Overlay #6 - Coal

Same as the above, but for coal and things which need to eat it to run. How much time it takes for coal to get to, commonly, suspendium chambers or engines of a variety of description, as well as a few specialty components. You want this as low as possible. You can get away with half the required time for the component to be reloaded, though that's incredibly dangerous in an actual combat situation. Not having coal usually means the ship will fall from the sky, or lose control of the engines.

Overlay #7 - Explosion Damage

Basically everything on an airship can explode. This overlay shows the intensity of any potential explosions, wether they be ammo explosions, suspendium explosions or potentially even rifle explosions. Try to keep key components out of the radius of the red tiles if you value them surviving a major explosion. This is especially true of ammo though, which likes to go off harmoniously if placed directly next to each other. This ship for example will almost end up being bisected if the ammunition cooks off.A good ship design, unless the vessel is designed to be disposable will try to ensure that an ammo explosion can still enable crew to move about the ship, as well as ensuring the ship can still move after the fact.

Armor Types: When to Use Which, and How to Unlock Special Armors

Wood Wall

Why use it? It's FREE, it's light, and that's about it. There's not much going for it, except the fact that it's the second lightest armor in the game. Why not use it? Unless you have a very specific idea which requires the lightest possible mass and lowest cost, it's a terrible idea to use this armor. Everything can go through it, even rifles. That tends to mean lots of ammo explosions. It's also completely useless against explosives, which will shred off almost all of this plate.

Wood Armor

Why use it? A decent HP pool to add on top of your modules, as well as a fairly decent pierce absorption make this quite an acceptable armor against lower caliber weapons, such as rifles. It can withstand a singular shot from a deck gun as well, which is quite good for the price. Why not use it? It's got some pretty poor blast damage absorption compared to steel wall armor, and as a result tends to be weak to explosive weaponry.

Reinforced Wooden Armor

Why use it? 'Barrel armor' has rather high HP at 65 per block of armor, and has some decent damage resistances against piercing and blast, triple that of regular wooden armor. It's also cheaper than actual steel armor. Why not use it? It is HEAVY, and costs a fair amount. It will slow down a ship mounting it exclusively, and it will significantly drop the service ceiling, almost as bad as using brick armor.

Steel Wall

Why use it? It's the same price of wooden armor, and it has a higher resistance against explosions, while also keeping the pierce resistance. It's also lighter than wooden armor. It's also almost capable of ignoring flak guns. Why not use it? Wooden armor can resist a deck gun shot, this armor can't. As a result, wood holds out slightly longer against larger guns.

Steel Armor

Why use it? It's got noticeable blast and piercing resistance, capable of ignoring rifle fire, as well as flak. It's got higher HP, and is overall very good armor. Why not use it? Weight, mostly. Cost may also be a factor.

Heavy Steel Armor

Why use it? It's twice as good as regular steel armor in every metric, and can ignore a large majority of weapons, including some powerful explosive weapons like grenades, but not bombs. Why not use it? It's very heavy, and very expensive to field.

Brick Wall

Why use it? It's cheap, and it's got a lot of HP, at 45. Why not use it? It's extremely heavy, as it's intended for buildings, and it has no damage absorption features. Enough rifle fire can easily get through it if they all hit the same spot.

Stone Wall

Why use it? It's rather cheap for armor, a lot of HP, great for buildings. Some resistances, but not much. Why not use it? There's no reason to not use it on a building. Using it on a ship will basically prevent it from moving however due to the sheer mass.

Massive Stone Wall

Why use it? Take regular stone wall and add half of all the stats, and double the blast resistance.

Why not use it? It's MASSIVE. I don't think it's possible to make a ship armored completely in this type of armor.

DragonHide

This requires clearing an Elder Dragon nest in order to be used by your Empire in Conquest. Why use it? It has NO weight, it's got a HP pool comparable to barrel armor, and it's nearly got the blast and pierce resist of steel armor. Why not use it? Killing an Elder Dragon nest is very hard to do without specialized ships. It's also very expensive to field.

Shell Armor

This armor requires clearing a Turtledove nest to be used by your Empire in Conquest. Why use it? HP of steel armor, a bit of pierce and blast resistance, and the kicker here is, the armor generates it's own lift. Enough to get most small ships off the ground on their own without added suspendium. Why not use it? It's a bit expensive, on par with steel armor, but doesn't net you the damage resistances that steel provides.

Boarding, Your Crew, and Other Thoughts on the Matter

Boarding ships is a thing in this game, and without proper planning, chances are that you're going to lose your ship unless you plan ahead to deal with boarders.

Airships: Conquer The Skies For Mac Os

What is the goal of a boarding team? Their primary goal is to reach the bridge and take it out, if they successfully manage to do that, they will offically capture the ship (note that this does not apply to mech spiders, or any monsters, who just want to kill the crew). Unfortunately, there is no hard counter against being boarded, but there are plenty of soft counters you can add onto your ship to make boarding a nightmare.

Countering Boarding

Guards are almost overpowered, a single guard barrack can usually withstand an assault from most types of humanoid boarder.

Speed counters most boarders, except Air Dragoons (though that depends on the command cooldown). If you dodge your ship out of the way of boarders, they can, and often will plumet to the ground after missing their jump. This does require a bit of micro however.

Small arms are very potent counters to boarders, most weapons can directly target troops approaching the ship, as well as any additional small aircraft being deployed. Rifles, gatling guns, flamers, and even grapeshot guns are good counters to boarding.

Excess crew can defend the ship. Sailors aren't very good at defending a ship as they only have pistols instead of rifles, and presumably less training, but they can defend a ship on their own in a pinch if they aren't already busy with another task.

The sickbay works for your etire crew, sailors and guards. If you lose a guard, chances are that you might be able to get them back if they can get to the sickbay.

Buildings are crewed by soilders, not sailors, as a result they are slightly more resistant to being boarded than ships.

Place supply doors in akward positions for your crew and any possible boarders. Ideally, if you have guards, you want to force the enemy to run into them. If not, you want them kept as far as possible away from the bridge to buy as much time as possible for the crew to possibly defend the ship.

Boarding the Enemy

There is a small variety of boarding troops, each of which best on certian ship designs.

Marines need to actually directly jump aboard a targeted ship to get on board it. They are also extremely susceptable to dying due to missing their jump against a moving vessel. You do get 8 per barrack however, and they are decent boarders and ship defenders.

Grenadiers are fewer per barrack, but it appears they are a bit more effective at taking out defenders than marines. They also have the benefit of having grapples, so they usually won't die if they miss their jump. They can, and often will try to swing ship to ship to reach their target.

Air Dragoons are somewhat special, as they can be deployed anywhere and board almost anything since they use jetpacks. They are about as effective as the grenadiers, but they are also extremely squishy outside of an airship as they are extremely slow. They are great counters to bombers not mounting rifles or other forms of small arms.

Mech spiders are mean. Their sole purpose to board the target ship and shred any crew within them. You can't capture with them, but they are extremely tanky boarders, and they have the same, if not more mobility with grapples as dragoons.

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[dexthedragon]

team sonic racing (crosspost from scalie.club)

after hearing some of the e3 impressions, i'm actually going to hang fire on this despite really loving all stars racing and transformed

in other team based racing games i've played (e.g. crash nitro kart), you're still scored individually, the team is there to give you boosts

or if someone on the team gets 1st place, that team wins

but team sonic racing uses combined scores for your team of three

so if i get 1st place, but my teammates come last & almost last, we still lose

----

so in single player, even if i come first in every race, i have to hope that the ai is competent enough that we can scrape a victory for the grand prix

and in online multiplayer, if you're paired with someone that just wants to drive round the track backwards, what can you do about that?

from what i've heard, onrush at least uses two very large teams with different criteria than "get to the finish line first" so scoring as a team there feels more fair

----

also being 100% fair, if I'm playing VS races against the AI in Mario Kart, I normally will prefer team mode so I get hit with less things, and that also combines the scores

but again, that's 2 larger teams rather than 4 smaller ones, so it averages out better

[aion-rsa]

25 Best First-Person Shooter Games Ever Made

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Game genres go in and out of fashion all the time, but for nearly 30 years, first-person shooters have been one of the industry’s most reliable sources for blockbuster experiences that often help dictate the future of the medium. 

There’s no one element that makes FPS games so brilliant, and that is, ironically enough, exactly what makes them brilliant. The history of the genre is written by developers who used a certain point of view and a gun or two as the basis for a variety of experiences that continue to surprise us even after we told ourselves that we’ve seen it all. 

Those are the games we’re here to celebrate today. The best first-person shooters ever may have inspired each other, but each ultimately brings something special to the table that helps it stand out among some considerable competition. Many offer something different, but the one thing that most share is the feeling you get just from hearing their names. 

Before we dive into the list, here are a few notes about the criteria used to make these selections. 

Defining a first-person shooter can be tricky. An FPS must obviously have a first-person perspective and shooting, but when in doubt, we looked closely at the “shooter” part of the equation. The more a game emphasized shooting/combat as a core part of the experience, the more likely it was to be considered part of the genre. 

How “fun” an FPS game is ultimately determined whether it was selected and how it was ranked among the rest, but innovation, historical significance, and longevity were all used as prominent “X-factors” to determine rankings.

Single-player only and multiplayer only FPS games were not necessairly faulted for lacking either mode. However, special consideration was given to games that did both well. 

25. Superhot

Superhot is one part puzzle game, one part FPS, and one part cinematic gunfight simulator. This unique shooter is built around the ability to slow down time by standing still. Taking a moment to survey the situation is the key to victory, but only speed will save you in this impossibly stylish and devilishly difficult game. 

Definitely play Superhot in VR if you ever get the chance to do so, but there’s no bad way to play one of the most creative and engaging FPS games ever made as well as one of gaming’s most potent shots of pure adrenaline. 

24. DUSK

2018’s DUSK may be a tribute to several genre classics that came before it, but the way that this game so perfectly recreates the feeling of playing those games rather than how so many of them actually play today strangely elevates it above many of those FPS pioneers.

Even people who usually don’t like the “find the key, labyrinth levels, blistering pace” style of FPS game that DUSK pays homage to often find themselves hopelessly addicted to this game’s airtight mechanics, exceptional pacing, and how it reminds us that, above all else, game are meant to be fun. 

23. Metro 2033

Metro 2033 owes a debt to some games that came before (including S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, which many members of the Metro 2033 team worked on), but when it comes to this style of atmospheric FPS game, it may still be the very best.

Metro 2033 embraced its survival horror concepts in a way that even the incredible entries into this series that followed were never quite able to recreate. The atmosphere in this game is so thick and intimidating that it can make you feel like your gasping for air as you play it, which makes it that much more impressive that you’ll feel consistently compelled to push forward no matter how daunting things become.

22. Borderlands 2

While I feel like the original Borderlands is honestly kind of underrated in the grand scheme of the franchise, it’s hard to deny that Borderlands 2 is when this series really found its footing and remains the game the Borderlands franchise is chasing to this day.

Not everyone was a fan of this game’s humor, but that desire to go this far over the top is arguably the reason why Borderlands 2 so confidently combined the best aspects of co-op games, looter RPGs, and first-person shooters. From its base campaign to its incredible DLC, this is still one of the best FPS adventures you can share with friends.

21. Far Cry 2

As the Far Cry series (and the FPS genre) continues to “evolve,” it’s easier than ever to appreciate Far Cry 2 and how so many of the things that this game was initially criticized for now feel like a breath of fresh air.  

Far Cry 2 is a hostile game that is constantly trying to kill your through disease, often uncontrollable fires, a lack of resources, aggressive enemies, and a lingering bleakness that only grows more powerful as you begin to understand its story and world. It’s an oppressive game that forces you to think on your feet in ways that few other FPS, open-world, or survival games have ever equaled. I’d say I miss this Ubisoft, but honestly, this was a bold and brilliant experiment even for that studio’s glory days.

20. Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus

I think the best compliment you can pay Wolfenstein 2 is to say that Wolfenstein: The New Order exceeded nearly every expectation possible and not even that game could prepare us for the places this sequel would go. 

Wolfenstein 2 is the greatest tribute to excess this side of a cocaine party on ‘80s Wall Street. Just when you think you’ve seen the most shocking thing this game will do, it finds a way to up the ante time and time again. It certainly doesn’t hurt that it also improves the surprisingly tight action mechanics that helped make its predecessor such a sleeper hit. 

19. Team Fortress 2

It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say that nobody thought Team Fortress 2 was going to be a success. Actually, many people at the time expected it to be a very good game. Yet, few were prepared for just how engaging TF 2 would be and how its growth would change the video game industry forever.

Look beyond the ways TF 2 controversially moved us towards the “games as a service” era, though, and you’ll find that it’s simply one of the most mechanically enjoyably multiplayer FPS games ever made as well as a testament to the ways that personality can turn an already great game into something magical.

18. SWAT 4

What separates SWAT 4 from so many incredible tactical FPS games that came before and after? If I had to attribute this game’s brilliance to any one thing, it would have to be “level design.”

SWAT 4 uses its somewhat unusual premise (compared to other tactical FPS games) as the basis for some truly creative missions that somehow make seemingly common environments more compelling than even some of the most elaborate fantasy worlds. From infiltrating a cult leader’s camp to descending into the basement of a serial killer’s home, SWAT 4 constantly finds new ways to use its incredible tactical gameplay to surprise you.

17. The Operative: No One Lives Forever

It’s true that No One Lives Forever’s seemingly permanent residence in licensing Hell has only amplified the voices of those who call this 2000 FPS game one of the best ever made, but that doesn’t mean that Monolith’s spy shooter doesn’t deserve all the praise it gets.

The thing that impresses me most about NOLF all these years later is that it’s actually a comedy game. While being a genuinely funny comedy game is usually an accomplishment in and of itself, NOLF goes one step further by also offering one of the most creative and engaging FPS campaigns ever crafted. This game holds up favorably under even the most discerning design analysis, but its most lasting legacy is the smile it puts on your face.

16. GoldenEye 007

Perfect Dark may technically be the better game, but if innovation, historical context, and fond memories are all tie-breaking “X” factors, then GoldenEye 007 absolutely deserves a spot on any list of the best FPS games.

A million words have rightfully been written about what GoldenEye did for console FPS games, but I don’t know if it’s possible to praise this game enough for the ways it celebrated the unique joy of local multiplayer or the surprising strength of its single-player campaign. Some at the time may have written GoldenEye off as a lesser version of the best PC FPS games, but the years have been kind to the purity of this experience.

15. Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Bad Company 2’s multiplayer is chaotic, creative, memorable, addictive, and all of the other things you associate with the Battlefield series’ legendary multiplayer at its very best. What separates this game from the other amazing entries in this franchise, though, is the strength of its single-player campaign.

Bad Company 2’s loving embrace of destructible environments is perfectly complemented by an often dark sense of humor that you rarely see in military shooters. It’s hardly a surprise that some Battlefield fans are still chasing the high they got from playing this game for the first time.

14. Halo 3 

Halo 2 was an incredible game that changed the console FPS landscape forever, but it was also a game plagued by development issues that led to an unforgivable crunch period, a campaign that fell well short of its potential, and some notable balance problems. Your fond memories of that game are well-deserved, but when it comes down to it, Halo 3 offers a more complete experience.

Halo 3’s incredible multiplayer is arguably the perfect version of Halo‘s legendary multiplayer and the kind of competitive game that’s easy to miss at a time when there are so few titles that try to do what it did. This brilliant sequel’s campaign also felt like a proper send-off for the series (even if it ultimately proved not to be), while Halo 3’s Forge mode brought the creativity and longevity of the PC mod scene to Xbox 360 gamers everywhere. 

13. Titanfall 2

Before you decide to be too hard on those who can’t stop talking about Titanfall 2 and refuse to stop begging for a proper sequel, consider that Titanfall 2 may just be one of the most complete FPS games ever made.

Titanfall 2’s multiplayer arguably realizes the considerable potential of its predecessor, but it’s Titanfall 2’s campaign that often inspires fans to scream at you to drop everything and play this game. Few games from even the golden age of FPS campaigns rival the ambition and creativity of Titanfall 2’s narrative, and fewer still have nearly as much heart.

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12. BioShock

I’ll leave the “Is BioShock a first-person shooter?” debate up to you and instead focus on how BioShock used the core concepts of a first-person shooter to elevate the art of video game narratives through the often-overlooked benefits of environmental storytelling.

BioShock’s story and world explore the dark underbelly of the entire first-person shooter concept. Are our actions our own, or have we been forced into the perspective of a largely helpless instrument? BioShock may have followed in some pretty big genre footsteps, but that strangely makes it all the more impressive that it’s often seen as the definitive experience in this particular subgenre.

11. Quake 3 Arena

Many who doubted that Quake 3 could abandon the single-player campaigns of its predecessors and sell itself based solely on the appeal of its multiplayer deathmatch modes were typically silenced the moment they played the game and experienced its exhilarating speed.

Quake 3 emphasizes speed in a way that few games before and fewer since ever dared to. Slowing down is often a death sentence, but what’s really impressive about this shooter all these years later is the surprising depth of its seemingly arcade-like gameplay and how it challenges you to master a series of mechanics that are often tragically underutilized in modern multiplayer gaming.

10. Unreal Tournament

It’s still incredible to think that Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 were released just weeks apart, and it’s even more incredible to think that Unreal Tournament arguably beat Quake 3 at what some considered to be its own game.

Putting aside that debate for the moment, let’s just come together to praise Unreal Tournament for its mechanics, visuals, modes, weapons, and, most importantly, arguably all-time great multiplayer map design. This is simply as satisfying and intense as PC multiplayer shooters get.

9. Doom (2016)

It’s easy to forget now, but there was a time when most people were expecting Doom to be one of 2016’s great disappointments. Not only was the Doom franchise on the ropes at that time, but this game’s rather disappointing multiplayer beta left some fearing the worst

Instead, Doom turned out to be arguably the best first-person shooter of its era. Even if you were an optimist who predicted the ways Doom would so successfully harken back to the breakneck pace of the best games in this series, you probably couldn’t have guessed the ways that this game’s amazing soundtrack, humor, and genuinely incredible storytelling would effectively combine the best of retro and modern FPS games while raising the bar for the genre.

8. Call of Duty

With all due respect to the Medal of Honor franchise and its many great installments and lasting innovations, it’s a testament to the quality of Call of Duty that it offered such a definitive WW2 shooter experience that you now have to remind people that Medal of Honor was even a thing. 

The Call of Duty team went for broke with this one and somehow found a way to turn the most intense moments in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault into an entire FPS campaign. Call of Duty challenged every perceived technical limit of its era and boasts level/campaign design that you could argue has never been bested.

7. Left 4 Dead 2

Left 4 Dead wasn’t the first game of its kind, but the co-op zombie shooter tapped into something that many of us never knew we wanted. Its blend of almost arcade-like action, incredible level design, cinematic presentation, and near-perfect difficulty made it an instant addiction for millions. 

Well, Left 4 Dead 2 was all of that and more. It’s certainly the best game of its kind, but in the grand history of FPS games, the thing that really sets Left 4 Dead 2 apart is how easy it is to return to it all these years later and how the desire to play this one with friends just never seems to go away.

6. Counter-Strike

Released at a time when multiplayer FPS games were supposed to be as fast as possible, Counter-Strike bucked nearly every genre trend by forcing players to embrace a methodical form of gameplay where just a couple of bullets could determine a game. It was the kind of bold experiment that could only have come from outside the industry, and it was absolutely brilliant. 

Counter-Strike is arguably the greatest competitive FPS game ever made. Even in its early stages, it was an intelligently balanced multiplayer experience that required a unique set of skills. Remarkably, though, learning the ropes in this game rarely felt like a chore. It’s one of the most important FPS games ever, and it’s certainly one of the best.

 5. Halo: Combat Evolved

It’s a shame that the “Combat Evolved” part of Halo’s full name is so often overlooked as that’s really the thing that separated this legendary shooter from nearly every FPS game at the time. The methods you use to battle Halo’s Covenant enemies may seem standard now, but the way this title forced you to carefully consider your combat tactics against truly intelligent A.I. opponents really did help change everything.

Then again, how can you fault anyone for mostly remembering Halo for its multiplayer? 16-player LAN matches may seem humble now, but the fact is that even the biggest online multiplayer games can’t quite match the feeling of experiencing Halo‘s local multiplayer at its biggest and boldest.

4. Half-Life

Nobody was really looking for a game like Half-Life in 1998. Honestly, few people at that time could have envisioned such a thing. In an era where FPS games were defined by their heavy metal style, B-movie campaigns, and deathmatch multiplayer, the idea of a first-person shooter with a story to tell and a world to sell that wasn’t constantly sacrificing action for narrative seemed impossible.

Do you know what’s really impressive, though? Half-Life didn’t just use the FPS format to tell an incredible story: it did it in a way that redefined what we talk about when we talk about immersion in games. Few developers to this day are able to replicate that style of storytelling, and even if they were, fewer still would ever be able to innovate the FPS genre quite the same way that Half-Life did.

3. Doom

The often-cited “godfather” of FPS games really needs no introduction. There’s a reason why first-person shooters were called “Doom clones” for years after this game’s release.

What’s truly amazing, though, is that Doom did things in 1993 that modern game developers still struggle to recreate. Even an unmodded version of Doom still has the ability to grab you by the throat and not let you go until you’ve seen the end of its brutal campaign. Doom was certainly the first in a lot of ways, but the thing that matters most may just be the ways it’s still the best.

2. Half-Life 2

It’s been said that part of the reason why Valve has hesitated to finish Half-Life 3 is that they reached a point where they felt like the expectations for the game had become unrealistic and detrimental. Well, you could argue that Half-Life 2 was released under similar circumstances. How do you make a sequel to one of the greatest, most innovative, and beloved PC games of all time? How would that game ever meet expectations?

Well, Half-Life 2 didn’t meet expectations: it exceeded them. Half-Life 2 didn’t so much blaze a path forward for the genre as it leaped into the air and landed somewhere other developers couldn’t quite see but desperately wanted to be. This is a nearly perfect single-player game that does things with pacing and level design that honestly feel even more refreshing all these years later given how many studios have strayed from the light of this title’s brilliance.

1. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

There are two eras of Call of Duty games, and each of them represents two distinct eras of FPS design. The first era (as represented by the first few Call of Duty games) was more about single-player campaigns and complimentary multiplayer options. The second era of the franchise focused on evolving a style of multiplayer that would turn this series into a global phenomenon.

Well, Call of Duty 4 is the game that bridges those two eras and somehow manages to feature arguably the best single-player campaign in FPS history and some of the best multiplayer in FPS history.

Even at a time when we were spoiled by incredible Call of Duty campaigns, Modern Warfare stunned people with its shocking story and brilliant missions (highlighted by the legendary “All Ghillied Up”). We didn’t know it at the time, but the game’s multiplayer would also go on to change competitive FPS titles forever and help turn this franchise into a multi-billion-dollar household name.

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This is a complete FPS package that represents nearly everything we’ve ever wanted from this genre. It’s a true triumph that delivers in terms of multiplayer and single-player in a way that few games since have ever dreamed of attempting to replicate.

The post 25 Best First-Person Shooter Games Ever Made appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[homearama]

10 Best Headsets for Xbox One Reviews in 2020

The US technology giant Microsoft likes to promote the Xbox One X, currently the most powerful console in its range that ordinary consumers can buy. But what use are razor-sharp textures and impressive multiplayer sessions if the whole story doesn’t hit the right note? For an immersive gaming experience, the harmonious sound is at least as important as the optical opulence.

As we all gamblers know, good headsets offer the best conditions to immerse yourself in the acoustics of a game. In order to save you from unnecessary bad purchases, we have selected the 10 best headsets for the Xbox and show you today which models will flatter your listeners the most. Have fun with our contribution!

Best Headsets for Xbox One Reviews – Buyers Guide [Bluetooth and Wireless]

Beyerdynamic MMX 300 Premium B06WGVJ9GY

The undisputed king among the best headsets for the Xbox One comes from Beyerdynamic and bears the name “MMX 300 Premium”. In order to avoid confusion from the outset, it should be mentioned at this point that we are explicitly referring to the headset model from the second generation. In view of the rather high price of around 250 to 300 €, one or the other of you should probably weigh twice whether you really want to buy this headset. From our side, however, we can give an unreserved purchase recommendation for the wired device. The advantages of the headset start with its high-quality workmanship: The over-ear earpieces come with a convincing foam padding that keeps any pressure away from your ears.

The decisive criterion, namely the sound , can simply be described as excellent . The individual sounds are reproduced powerfully and well-balanced. The fine sound mix even allows us to perceive marginal background noises in the game that we had not even noticed before. So we can not only lose ourselves wonderfully in the background noise of our game, but thanks to the coherent surround sound we also locate opponents in multiplayer games long before they waddle into our field of vision.

Speaking of multiplayer: all commands that you communicate to your fellow players via the microphone reach the recipient with excellent sound quality. It may be true that you have to invest a large amount of money for our test winner, but you will receive a 1a product that will heave you into sound spheres that you did not know before.

SteelSeries Arctis 3 B07G12Z1HR

For a purchase price of just under 100 $, the SteelSeries Arctis 3 is a bit cheaper than the model just presented. It doesn’t take long before the buyer realizes that this headset has been tailored exactly to the needs of Xbox gamers. The device can be connected to your Microsoft console in no time thanks to the integrated Xbox wireless connectivity. Just press a button and the wireless headset connects to the games box, just like a controller. The very long battery life of the SteelSeries Arctis 3 is particularly impressive. It takes almost 28 hours before the product’s battery needs to be charged. If you prefer to hear a pushing song while gaming than the in-game drivel, you can use the processed Bluetooth function to connect to another device during the gaming session. The well-sealed auricles hide unpleasant background noises, so that you can completely delight in the crystal-clear timbre of the headset . The quality of the microphone was also highly praised by the users. So if you’re looking for a headset that clearly focuses on Microsoft’s in-house console, you can’t go wrong with the SteelSeries Arctis 3!

HyperX HX-HSCA-RD Cloud Alpha B074NBSF9N

In the usual way we present you with the third place on our list at the same time as the winner in the “price-performance ratio” group. Anyone who is thinking of getting the HyperX HX-HSCA-RD Cloud Alpha should plan a budget of 85 to 100 $ for it. This makes the visually appealing headset one of the medium-priced models. But does this mean that the technical properties of the product do not go beyond mediocrity either? We can give the all-clear on this point.

Thanks to its high-quality auricles, the headset is not only extremely comfortable to wear , but also scores with a pleasantly robust workmanship. Of theThe sound is excellently balanced, but does not quite reach the broad sound spectrum of the Beyerdynamic MMX 300 Premium . Nevertheless, the integrated technology is completely sufficient to create immersive gaming acoustics.

Because the headset is connected to your controller via cable, you never run the risk of being surprised by the sudden loss of sound. In the same breath, this also means that your freedom of movement is minimally restricted. There are no compromises in terms of the microphone . Thanks to noise suppression, your voice reaches the ears of your fellow players in razor-sharp state at any time . By the way, you can not only use this model for your Xbox. If the corresponding device has an input for the headset’s jack plug, it also connects to the HyperX HX-HSCA-RD Cloud Alpha.

Razer Thresher Xbox One B07471GW41

The Razer Thresher for the Xbox One shines with its 50mm drivers , which, in combination with the surround sound created by Windows Sonic, ensure an impressive soundscape . However, we don’t want to ignore the fact that the sound spectrum is not quite as well balanced as with the first two devices on our list. This shortcoming is compensated for by the virtual surround sound, which allows us to precisely locate ambient noises within the corresponding game.

The product, which costs around 135 $, works entirely without connecting cords and is very easy to connect to your console. The battery life is around 16 hours before the headset slowly but surely runs out of juice. The optically simple housing of the headphones has been refined with a few discreet splashes of color, which blend elegantly into the external appearance of the headset. The well-made foam pads create a comfortable fit that lasts for many hours of play without your eavesdroppers feeling warm.

It’s important to mention that Razer offers its Thresher headset in several different models! So make sure when you buy that the addition “Xbox One” is included, otherwise it may be that the purchased product is not compatible with your Microsoft console.

Astro Gaming A50 B01G3WBCQY

The refreshed A50 lives up to the name Astro, and a lot more. With its futuristic design and 5.8 GHz wireless technology, this high-end headset delivers one of the best sounds in our entire collection. The A50 is equipped with Dolby Digital 7.1 surround sound, which offers an impressive soundscape regardless of the type of playback. To improve your gameplay even further, you can adjust the sound in three different EQ modes – so you can quickly boost the bass or treble while the unidirectional microphone isolates your voice from ambient noise.

The A50 also has all of the added benefits you would expect from a quality headset, including auto power off, hassle-free wireless connectivity and long battery life. But most importantly, the A50 makes games more engaging and fun. For the serious gamer, audiophile, or those who just love great sound, it’s a must-have – provided you are willing and able to spend the money. For Xbox gamers, Astro offers an Xbox One-specific version that includes a wireless adapter for the console to get the most out of the headset.

Sennheiser GSP 500 B07CK4J1SW

At first glance, the GSP 500, which costs around 130 $, shines with its adjustable headband, which allows you to adapt the headset to your individual head shape. This works really well over a certain period of time, but after an hour-long gaming session, a slight feeling of pressure can arise. The volume of the game can be easily adjusted by screwing on the built-in controller, which was attached directly to the device.

The sound quality is without a doubt in the top league. The sound spectrum is extremely clear and impresses with its profound balance . As with other models we have presented, the Sennheiser GSP 500 also knows how to shine with its immersive space. A plus point that ensures that you can immerse yourself even deeper in the game. Due to the open design of the product, however, it is possible that noises from the surroundings are not blocked out satisfactorily. If you gamble alone in your gaming room, this shouldn’t be a problem. On the other hand, if the loud tone is common in your household, this fact could prove to be annoying.

While this headset clearly outperforms cheaper competitors, it has to admit defeat to higher-priced models in some points.

Plantronics RIG 600 B01M636IJ9

In order not to burden your wallet too much, in the course of the seventh place we present you a model that is available for a final price of well under 100 $. In fact, the Plantronics headset doesn’t even cost 70 $, which is why the product should arouse the interest of bargain hunters in particular. But what can the buyer expect for such a narrow thaler?

Basically, the RIG 600 meets all the important criteria that a modern headset should master. The sound with its 40mm drivers turns out to be surprisingly full-bodied, especially the basses were able to please us with their intensity. However, there are some drawbacks in terms of noise suppression. Because the ear cups of the device are relatively small, your eavesdroppers are not completely shielded from your surroundings. Conversely, this means that loud background noises are unfortunately perceived very well. Good for those who can call a quiet room their own!

The microphone, on the other hand, does particularly well. Your own voice is conveyed to your fellow players in excellent quality . Here we would have only wished that the microphone could be aligned more flexibly. If your home environment offers the right circumstances, with the Plantronics RIG 600 you get a rock-solid headset for a more than fair price.

Beexcellent Gaming Headset B07GGCM89X

While we have just arrived in the low-budget segment, we will continue with a model that is very difficult to undercut in terms of price. Because the Beexcellent Gaming Headset doesn’t even cost you € 25. Instead of exercising discreet restraint, the manufacturer chose the approach of equipping its device with opulent LED lighting. This may certainly be a matter of taste, but the bluish lights offer a successful visual change from the often too simple models of the competition. With a headset, of course, it’s not primarily about the external values. We can say one thing straight away: Despite its rather bulky construction, the Beexcellent gaming headset feels pleasantly comfortable .

The quality of the sound should also meet the expectations of most gamers satisfactorily . The same applies to the microphone, which enables communication with online friends without major losses. However, if we take a closer look at the sounds reproduced, we cannot avoid noting that the sound spectrum is not particularly broad. These deficits are particularly noticeable in the mids and highs.

In view of the very low price, however, we would like to hold back a bit with our grumbling tirades. The bottom line is that the Beexcellent Gaming Headset fulfills its purpose and is therefore an excellent entry-level model for a particularly small budget.

Razer Kraken Tournament Edition B07G5FQMJ8

Thanks to THX Spatial Audio, the Razer Kraken Tournament Edition takes its users into a whole new sphere of Dolby Surround experiences. The 50mm drivers, which, according to the manufacturer, cover a particularly wide range of sounds , also fit . A cooling gel is used inside the ear cups. This significantly reduces the development of heat, so that the player can literally keep a cool head.

The common 3.5mm jack plug turns the Razer Kraken Tournament Edition into a multi-platform headset that can be connected to all current consoles. In terms of acoustic fine adjustment, the headset shines with its individual adjustment options. This also applies to the microphone, which can be easily retracted and extended. If you are considering buying the Razer Kraken Tournament Edition, you should expect it to cost anywhere from 80 to 90 $.

Creative Sound BlasterX H5 Tournament Edition B01L1JXI0M

With regard to the optical components, the manufacturer chose a rather cautious approach. Thanks to the coherent foam padding, your ears are embedded in soft ear cups that completely enclose your listeners. Thanks to this isolation, you are protected from annoying background noises from your home environment.

The sound of this model is particularly powerful and delivers a solid, well-balanced sound experience . While the Creative Sound BlasterX H5 Tournament Edition is convincing in terms of “sound”, the headset’s microphone has a few weaknesses. Although we can be consistently understood by our fellow players, the sound of our voice is at most sufficient. Here the focus of the makers was clearly on those tones that are transported through the ear cups into the gamer’s ear canal. However, if you mainly gamble in single player mode, we can warmly recommend you tenth place on our list today.

source https://homearama.tv/best-headsets-for-xbox-one-reviews/

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A match which blends thirdperson actions with MOBA and also hero-shooter mechanics to build an appealing but flawed activity esport.

After you get eight situationally mindful players, even nevertheless, there's a lot to adore. The characters-- both their design and balance--are the optimal/optimally aspect of become alpha sex game. From the conventionally cool graffiti-artist street samurai Daemon to Maeve, the cyberpunk witch, to Cass, an E Mo assassin with robotic bird bottoms, each of those 11 characters in the initial roster has an exceptional and interesting appearance.

become alpha porn is really a self-evident aggressive multi player"brawler," but exactly what does this actually mean? Depending upon your own purpose of reference, you might call it a"boots onto your ground-style MOBA" or some"third-person hero shot ." It truly is an activity game where two teams of four fight within the narrative framework of competing at another of 2 team sport --a King of those Hill-style"Objective get a grip on" situation and"energy Collection," a more resource-hoarding style where people want to violate vitality canisters and reunite their own contents into specified factors at specific occasions. Though the two versions possess their own quirks, both boil down to lively point control. Whether you are delivering protecting or energy your"hills, then" you want to shield a position. If you're attempting to dam the enemy from scoring in mode, you ought to have a situation. There is a little room for customization: in between games, you could equip a set of mods--which you can generate by playing with with specific personalities or acquire in-game forex --to Enhance your stats and techniques in various manners. In the event you believe one strike or special ability much more significant than the others, you can min-max those boons to adapt your playstyle. Each character begins having a set of default option mods, therefore there is an inherent sense of dealing emphases, in place of construction power as time passes. Movements in aggressive multiplayer matches is frequently a fool's gambit--most matches damage their stability with overpowerful gear--but become alpha porn games's mods thread the needle. They truly are successful to punctuate certain skills, without creating them unstoppable. What's more they also have a set of abilities that causes them specially well-suited to their precise sort of playwith. In modern day competitive manner, each and every character have a special collection of rechargeable and stats special moves that make sure they are useful in a particular context, which only presents itself when coordinating with your teammates. The characters have been divided into three classes--harm, Support, Tank--but each personality's approach into this job is exceptional. As an instance, Buttercup--a human-motorcycle hybridvehicle -- is a Tank designed for crowd controller: She forces enemies to engage with her from yanking enemies for her having a grappling hook and also use an"oil slick" capacity to slow them down. In comparison, fellow Tank El Bastardo is marginally less durable but deals more damage thanks to a exact powerful standard attack and also a crowd-clearing spin strike which may push enemies apart from him. It will take just a little exercise to fully understand these distinctions well-enough to take advantage of these but it is easy to learn how every fighter functions. In some ways, building on the base created with additional E-Sports works to become alpha sex game's advantage. Inspite of the fact that it has a brand new game using lots of of guidelines and idiosyncrasies to find out it can quickly feel comfortable and at ease to enthusiasts of competitive games because so many of its gameplay elements, from match types into character talents, are modeled off ideas from other video games. No character normally takes very long to learn, which means you are definitely going to locate your groove and begin having pleasure quickly. And, eventually, become alpha porn games's third-person perspective and a roster with tons of melee and ranged fighters distinguishes itself from the remaining portion of the package. As soon as you begin playing, it's simple to check past the things you comprehend and appreciate the advantages with the new configuration. Still, for all that become alpha sex games gets appropriate, it actually seems like the game's"early days." It's overlooking fundamental principles of competitive games, such as ranked play, that enables you to invest the experience and keeps individuals taking part in, long lasting. I want to believe Microsoft and Ninja principle will keep tweaking and enlarging the match so that it can compete together with additional competitive multiplayer matches, but it feels as a temporary multiplayer fix for gamers looking to divide the monotony, as opposed to the next E-Sports obsession. While each and every personality is well-balanced separately, the roster as an entire feels unbalanced on occasion. Considering the fact that you just have 4 players on every team, it's simple to receive forced to a specific role and sometimes perhaps a specific character. With 11 characters (and one more announced fighter in the way)there are a limited number of alternatives at every placement. On top of this, the certain personalities satisfy out the job a lot better compared to many others. Zerocool, the user, may be the only pure healer, for example. Unless teammates use the other support personalities in tandem, it truly is tricky to justify not selecting him when playing this role. The absence of choice can be bothersome: Actually in match making it could make you feel obligated to engage in since a personality which you really don't like and could result in you actively playing from personality, which isn't very fun. The caveat, though, is that everyone else needs to"play their class" as soon. With only four people to some workforce, having one man who isn't focusing to the purpose or with their skills that will help the staff could drain the fun out of this match very quickly. This ends match making in to a tiny crap shoot. You will never know if you will get teammates that understand the score, or certainly will drop what to start fights, or play the objective too much and ignore the team. Even though a warning after you turn the match for the first time that communication is critical, only a small number of players employed headphones in my adventure. While there's an Apex Legends-style ping method that works reasonably well for quiet players, so most players do not listen into it. Despite solid communication options, the rigid demands of this gameplay help it become easy for a single stubborn human being to spoil the exact game for the others. A game that combines third person action with MOBA and also hero-shooter mechanisms to produce an appealing but flawed action esport..xxx. There's no easing in to producing a competitive match in 2020. Already bombarded with matches like Overwatch, Rainbow 6 Siege, the battle royales, the MOBAs, and also the vehicle chesses, people have plenty of selections, Thus in the event you want to present another, it'd been ready for prime moment. become alpha porn games, the new third-person competitive brawler from DmC developer Ninja Theory, does not feel as if it is there yet. There's a good deal of possibility : Its four-on-four scrums combine the mashy feeling of the old school beat-em-up using the strategic criteria of MOBAs and hero shooters, setting it apart from anything you are going to find in common scenes that are competitive. However, it is affected with"ancient days" increasing pains which can push away players, rather than simply draw them . Both things need all four gamers to work as a group. While a few fighters are far best suited to one-on-one combat than others, moving and fighting since a squad is compulsory as the team with larger numbers more often than not wins, irrespective of ability. Inevitably, every single match gets to be a collection of staff struggles for control of an area. In the present time, these battles can feel a bit mashy and sloppy since you rapidly hit the strike button, but there's a lot of technique involved around creating favorable matchups, mixing abilities to optimize damage coped and reduce harm obtained, and positioning to avoid wide-reaching audience control strikes. On top of the, each of the amounts pose some type of environmental danger around one or more of those crucial points onto the map, that can throw a wrench in the gears of their most pivotal moments in a suit. We ought to also deal with hyper-intelligent 800-pound gorilla within the space. become alpha sex games cribs far from Overwatch. Though unique and clever, the character designs collectively exude the exact same faux-Pixar veneer because the Overwatch throw. Then again, they cut it pretty close some times. Mekko, the 12th become alpha sex game character, is just a marathon commanding a huge robot,'' that sounds much such as Wrecking Ball, Overwatch's Hamster at a huge robot. But on the technical degree, each of become alpha sex game's modes feel very like Overwatch's"get a grip on " Don't get me wrong: King of the Hill is not particular to Overwatch by almost any means--multiplayer matches have been riffing online for years--however, the MOBA esque skillsets of all become alpha sex games's personalities guide one to technique people scenarios using hero shooter approaches.