The Xbox 360 Twentieth Anniversary Special

Demetri: When we decided we wanted to publish an anniversary piece for the Xbox 360 earlier this year we had a pretty good idea as to how to go about it. What better way to celebrate than an internet listicle? Let’s even do 36 of them, because funny. None of us predicted it was going to end up turning into a eulogy.

The 360 was the first console I ever wrote professional coverage for, at the tail end of when it seemed like that was still a viable career path, and in the moment we recognized that the console’s run was damn near legendary. It seemed like Microsoft had figured out what people wanted (with the exception of the Kinect) and that the good times were clearly going to keep rolling post-seventh generation.

Fast forward to 2025. The Xbox 360 is nearly old enough to drink and we have feelings about it. Those feelings are significantly complicated by MS deciding to crash the brand directly into the dirt nose-first this year, burning unbelievable amounts of money and eliminating scores of jobs for seemingly no benefit. We are not fans of Xbox in this house these days, but once upon a time we all were, and now almost feels like the last chance to remember why.

Kyle: We are gathered here today to mourn the loss of a cultural legend and make a statement of what a company can do when it really wants to. Though we’ve mourned losses of this caliber many times over with its infamous Red Ring of Death, today we come to mourn the company that had the world in its palms only to get rid of the “blades” menu.

I have a lot of great memories with the Xbox 360: that first sweet sip of eSports competition, countless hours on chart-toppers spoken of to this day, some weird-ass JRPGs, hearing slurs I couldn’t even imagine through the right ear of a $30 peripheral. Many people say they were born in the wrong generation, but not me, man. I was in my ripe teenage years right as the internet learned it could make money by bleeding the long-term functionality of an entire population’s entertainment, and I got to enjoy the then-unknown-to-us waning of what would be considered the Golden Years of the Internet. It’s over kiddos, let’s look back at the good times.

Demetri: Let’s talk rules before getting into the meat of it, because I suspect this list is going to read a little weirdly compared to most!

• We have three contributors for this piece: Kyle, Demetri, and our pal Joe who’s often dragged along for our multiplayer excursions and has poked his head in now and again. He’s a loquacious type, you’ll like him. We sourced opinions from far more folks than that when it came to the topic of “hey, what games did you like on the 360?”, but this list is the culmination of us 3 heaping everything we deemed notable into a pile and constantly adjusting until we all agreed that we’d nailed it.

• Hard limit of one game per franchise. There were some killer sequels on this console, but we found it a lot more interesting to pick the best of each series rather than bulk the list up with better/worse iterations of those ideas. Sorry in advance, Assassin’s Creed fans.

• We’re only including games that released in the US. That’s…not much of a disclaimer for this particular console, but it seemed worthy of mention anyway!
  
• We are disqualifying simultaneous 360 and PC releases that were just better on the latter. That means this is going to be a best-of-360 list without Oblivion, Fallout, Mass Effect, Bioshock, everything Valve released, etc. This isn’t intended as a slight on those games; their impact is undeniable and they represent some of the most notable entries in the console’s library for bringing those experiences to living rooms, but we wanted to focus on the gems of this particular console’s library. Also, c’mon, let’s not pretend that the 360 is a good way to play New Vegas.

• Related to the above, we’re filtering games with better ports elsewhere. That’s not to say none of our picks exist on other platforms or haven’t seen remasters, remakes, etc., but if the 360 version was straight up worse we’re inclined to bump it down or off the list entirely. This one’s mostly by feel and enforced pretty unevenly, but if a great multiplatform game is mysteriously missing (or stuffed into our honorable mentions) that’s probably why.

Joe: The word of the day is chiaroscuro. I ain’t gonna explain it, look it up for yourself. Condemned takes a grimey brawler and wields that like Caravaggio. A launch title that uses lighting, and more specifically shadow in a way that draws you into that world of cramped corridors and vicious infighting. Unlike some of the other melee battlers on our list, you’re not gonna hit a high score, you’re not gonna level up, you’re not gonna feel anything but relief that it’s over and dread for the next blind, dark corner while you roll your way through the sickest fever dream nightmare an Alabama farmer ever had about the big city. Is it too big for its britches? Kinda. But I miss studios being ready to GO for it like that, without eighteen rounds of focus testing and early access.

Demetri: You may not get to flee from a kaiju-sized bear in this one, but it’s far and away the better overall experience when compared to its sequel. In many ways this served as a precursor to the modern first person horror games we’re now replete with, forcing you to desperately scrounge dark environments for resources, crack a pipe over the heads of your would-be assaulters, and feel the power trip surge whenever you stumbled upon a partially loaded firearm. There’s shades of Dark Messiah in the heft of your swings and I fully intend that as a compliment. It’s frankly buck wild a game this ambitious was a launch title.

Kyle: Yeah, we don’t get the glory that is “The Bear” in the original, but Condemned was a solid, underappreciated launch title for the 360 that was overshadowed by games like Project Gotham Racing 3, Quake 4, and 2 arms full of EA Sports/2K titles. Gritty, claustrophobic corridors with a RPG-lite weapon system and a “had-to-be-respected” fighting curve where feverish opponents wouldn’t just take getting slogged with a pipe without discourse made for a thrilling few hours of gameplay. Also, the mannequins. Those fucking mannequins.

Kyle: I don’t even play Metroidvanias like that but this game held a piece of the XBLA world that few ended up doing so. Utilizing a twin-stick shooter set-up with all the bits and pieces that you’d expect from a 2.5D game, it showed consoles kids outside of Nintendo’s bubble what a great genre games like this could provide and really ushered a time where the XBLA was something to sniff at.

Joe: Another Epic Games heater from the “Before Fortnite” era. Peter David on the script, doing a Metal Gear/GI Joe mashup, Orson Scott Card dropping a book in the same setting, this had some horsepower behind it. And the sales, unlike some of this list, delivered. Shattering all the XBLA sales records at the time, this is as clean a tribute to Metroid as you’re going to find. Fifteen bucks! Yeah, that’s 2009 money, but still! I absolutely paid more for worse games I still remember fondly. A lot of our discussions are focused on highs and lows here, but Shadow Complex is that sip of 16 year single malt whiskey; smooth all the way through.

Demetri: Remember when Microsoft could be expected to provide a generous corporate pack-in? Hell, remember getting pack-ins at all that weren’t just a priced-up bundle? Hexic HD was a testament to the sense of community that emerges from shared experience. You may have had an entirely different library from a friend, but you definitely both spent far more time than you bargained for spinning gems and failing to diffuse bombs. How do we get a Tetris Effect or Lumines Arise-tier treatment of this system?

Kyle: The OG. Every 360 that graced a living room TV had this bad boy installed in it, and for good reason. This game is addictive. I played this game for years and never hit the Grand Poobah but I did see a friend play this game for 5 hours straight and accidentally get a black cluster, nearly eviscerating his controller, only to stay up all night and keep the game one move from greatness until I woke up so I could see it finally happen. I will never know that feeling, but just casually playing the game after school took hours of my life and I’d do it again willingly if it were at all possible to play the game outside of its Microsoft bubble.

Joe: Your console’s gotta have a puzzle game. Tetris. Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine. Intelligent Qube. Lumines Plus. Hexic HD. We’ve got enough macho shootbangs on here to choke a horse. And in their own way, that’s what the Xbox 360 did best. It doesn’t have modern draw distance, but as long as your world is small enough, it does a fantastic job at rendering it smoothly. The other thing the Xbox 360 did so well was make it easy for you to find games you might never have given a chance. We’ll talk about Uno, but Hexic is another fantastic example of the Xbox marketplace and Xbox Live making these experiences more universal. Sure, it was a Windows game first. It’s just a Flash game, dressed up in a fancy launcher. But that in and of itself is iconic of the Xbox and indicative of what they did so right in that era. You know Microsoft is bungling it with the division when I can’t pull up Hexic 4K right the fuck now on the Microsoft Store.

Demetri: Bizarre Creations never got enough respect for their non-car output. Despite its generic veneer that turned off a generation of cover-judgers, The Club was one of the most high octane shooters on the 360, encouraging players to maintain massive kill combos while sprinting through increasingly lethal obstacle courses. As you start to master its courses, perfect your route, and earn gold medals, you’ll realize that this is the wildest Project Gotham sequel they could have made. There’s an alternate timeline where this ate everyone’s quarters in the arcade.

Kyle: There really aren’t many arcade-coded third person shooters nowadays so going into this game is already a head trip. But the snappy controls, addictive gameplay, and ear-worm responses of the game’s host (You will never say “Crack Shot” or “Head Shot” ever again without hearing it in his voice) will have you slapping down just ooooone more level every time you play.

Joe: In the same way Mirror’s Edge took the racing game formula and distilled it down to a person on foot, the same thing happened here. It’s a racing game with a trick system transposed onto a dirty action movie setting. Jesper Kyd had the main theme on lock, and a full suite of playables made it even easier to talk yourself into coming back for more. My guy Finn’s gonna make it big some day, you’ll see. Eight multiplayer modes, 4 player split screen, the nexus of the old ways of multiplayer and the new ways is right here. Even if you couldn’t get over to a friend’s place, you could compare your scores on the leaderboards and talk your shit. I absolutely would have burned too much money on the alternate timeline arcade machine.

Joe: Boar drifting, fishing, multiple endings, brawling and bullet hell, a collection of wild ideas and incredible music that’s absolutely best on the 360, even if you already know the central twist. There are two protagonists, with the west getting an old father as their musclebound avatar, and when they did the remaster they didn’t even offer it as an option, you only get to be a siscon j-rocker. The game loses a lot for the difference in the characterization, in particular the striking contrast between so much of the rest of the cast, and Papa Nier is the best way to experience the story.

Demetri: It feels weird to point to Nier in a post-Automata world and say “hey, what about this one?”, but it increasingly feels ignored when even the most passionate Yoko Taro Enjoyers seemingly skip it after playing Automata and jump straight to Drakengard. Due to the version differences Joe mentioned you kind of have to go out of your way to play this version to experience what I’d argue is the more emotionally-resonant rendition of this tale.

Kyle: Listen, I know I’ll be flogged by the Skate community for not immediately bending the knee to Skate 3, but hear me out. Does Skate 3 provide a better multiplayer experience? Absolutely, I’m not gonna fight that. But Skate 3 is a game where you fuck around with friends on a skateboard. Skate was THE skateboarding game to revive a nearly-dead genre of gaming with the Tony Hawk franchise throwing out strikeout after strikeout in the 7th gen. The flick-mechanic of using the analog stick to combo ollies into different flip tricks with directional moving made each trick feel earned, and the camera position laid directly at your deck made it absolutely clear where your focus should be. Sure you can do quad-backflip Christ Airs using speed glitches to go 120mph in the later titles, but turning on Band of Horses’ “The Funeral“, finding a fun line of a 5 stair with a kick ramp and a rail, and just hitting simple, clean lines is a drug that few games will ever, ever, ever replicate. Skate is the reason we have remasterings of THPS and the reason we get to bitch at how EA is fucking up the reboot of this franchise. It is not only one of the best skating games ever made, but one of the best sports games ever made.

Joe: I gotta be real with you on this one, chief; the last skateboard game I played for more than a few hours was THPS2. Underground was fun, but it was a game that someone else had on during hangouts. That said? I remember Skate. Skate is arguably the last authentic big game released for the subculture, and it boasted a whole slate of tech enhancements to make the console jump worth it. 120hz control inputs, joint modeling, video editing, and a grind engine that let you do lip tricks without having access to full freestyle tricks? Wild stuff. Yeah, it’s laden with ads and product placement. That’s how it WAS back then! Life of Ryan was on TV when this game came out. Chad Muska was repping Element. This game is right at the dividing line in a lot of ways, and it’s fascinating for it.

Joe: Were you there? I was there. Everyone who rates Battlefield over Call of Duty, everyone who loves scale in their conflicts, meaningful strategic and tactical choices, should have been there. People weren’t there enough. Yeah, they had a couple balance mishaps with howitzers and cannons, but this was a game that could be won or lost by a commander, a shooty mech game with all the skills a good moba team leader develops and beyond. In a better timeline, this game is on its third edition and a fixture of streaming sites. Instead, we had the best mech war game of all time and let it wither on the vine.

Demetri: I don’t even like AssCreed like that, is this the right pick?

Joe: Black Flag is a PS4 game, Assassins’s Creed 2 lacked the multiplayer and system refinements of this edition. Ezio Auditore da Firenza was the backbone of a trilogy.and this is the best of that set too. It’s the best one.

Kyle: The first one will always be the best and I will burn upon that hill.

Joe: You know how the Wii and Wii sports temporarily revolutionized an industry by making a machine grandma would love as much as the grandkids? What if instead of motion controls, you had a solid instrument, a thing people know, and you can just hand it to them and go off to the races? Simple color coding, tight timing, a fantastic breadth of soundtrack, and more replayability than my childhood Huey Lewis and the News cassette I ran till the magnetic tape broke. Everybody listened to some kind of music at some point, find something here and fire it up. Queue up Spoonman for me while you’re at it. You won’t regret it.

Demetri: I don’t have a lot to say about the peak of the Plastic Instrument Era – they’re fun games! My poison of choice was Guitar Hero 3 but Rock Band 2‘s command on a living room was undeniable.

Kyle: Man I got shit to say about the peak of the Plastic Instrument Era – I thrived in it! I got on the ground floor early with the first Guitar Hero to where I was ranked near the Top 1000 on Guitar Hero 3 before streaming brought out the absolute demigods for your entertainment. Rock Band was the Harmonix successor once Activision started doing Activision things with the Guitar Hero franchise, and Rock Band 2 was the best of the bunch. A tighter window for the instruments made a harder but more satisfying play, a banger soundtrack providing tons of replayability (not to mention a great amount of weekly DLC), and some of the best peripherals in the game going into the 2010s. Sadly, EA started doing EA things with the franchise and released 8 fucking titles in 2 years, but this sequel really felt like the days of old when the cow wasn’t strictly for cashing.

Joe: My father’s not much of a video game guy. He played NES Tetris back in the day. He’d try the odd game here or there. Solitaire, or a match 3 puzzle game. Sure, why not? This was the sum total of his gaming background when I set up my 360 and a TV for him, with Red Dead loaded. He beat the game, more than once. He beat the Nightmare DLC. I helped him with a few things that gave him fits, mostly taming horses as I recall… but Rockstar built a game that transported the man to a world of Louis Lamour novels and John Wayne. Hand-written notes stuffed into a guide, like God intended. They built a world that was so deep and approachable he stuck with those early hours of cussing and fighting the controls, and when he was done and I swapped my original PS4 for a pro, that became a Red Dead 2 machine. Westerns, not so much my thing. But you’d best come with the whole damn gang if you want to fight me on this hill.

Demetri: Mirror’s Edge felt like a game from the future. I vividly remember downloading the demo for this, which was basically a tutorial and one whole level, and playing it over and over in total awe in anticipation of release. This might be the most visually impressive game of the entire gen, and once you get your head around the control scheme it feels incredible to blow through levels that previously gave you grief. First person platforming rarely feels good, and Mirror’s Edge doesn’t always manage it, but when it does it’s genuinely incredible. Damn shame the franchise ended here and received no further entries.

Joe: The flow state meets a runner’s high. The rise of streaming proves there’s a lot of games you don’t really need to play to get what you’re interested in out. Mirror’s Edge says no. You can watch someone with muscle memory nearly old enough to drink make these stages look like an autoplayer from Mario Maker, but it’s not the same. This is a game you need to play, need to feel the right angle of analog stick, the timing on the trigger pulls, the urge to go back and do it better, cleaner, faster than before. They took all the One More Race aspects of traditional racing games and put it in a more immediate and obvious form. Man, remember when we loved EA? What a time.

Joe: Revolutionary. Asylum is perfectly spaced, perfectly timed, and is all set to chain through a fight scene so sharp your dopamine receptors never even had the chance to scar. It’s not just the combat, though the combat alone makes it belong here in the mid 20s. This game has just the right amount of collectibles and spacers to keep you from dunking your brain in the blender for too long. Batman makes you feel like a detective and not just a walking, talking reaction test in latex. Sure, you’re a detective always ready to DISCOMBOBULATE, but the initial pitch is placed right where it should be. Few superhero games get the sensation just right, and the streets were NOT ready for this one.

Demetri: The combat system that launched a million imitators. Arkham City is solid but Asylum is the tighter experience, and the further you go into the franchise the more cruft they piled onto this game’s incredible foundation. I specifically picked one of the post-accolade covers for this thing because I don’t think many people remember just how impactful of a release this was. A genuinely great Batman game? You can make those?

Demetri: I’d forgive you for seeing the infamous hog on the cover and assuming the worst, but Sumo Digital outdid themselves and every other kart racer with this one. Transformed is one of the tightest kart-adjacent games to ever exist, balancing the chaos of the genre with courses that reward skill and an incredible sense of speed. Its tracks pay tribute to a spread of Sega’s history and are still the best many of these Sega properties have ever looked. That last sentence brought me great sorrow to write.

Joe: Sega blue skies make this game a joy to play even when you’re getting tag-teamed by Danica Patrick and Football Manager. Great tracks, shockingly good online play for the era, and variations on your favorite characters that make it almost certain you’ll find some way to hit that podium with your favorite whosit of yesteryear. And really, if anyone’s going to challenge for the Mario Kart throne, who better than Sonic? Sumo Digital was on fire for this one, and the responsive movement and the command over those sweeping drifts stands the test of time. All gas, maybe just enough brakes to get sideways.

Kyle: God the drifting in this game felt so good. A rare instance in my gaming preferences where I was absolute ass at this game, it was hard as shit, and I still loved every minute of it. Never was able to unlock the Daytona USA Hornet but I respect it being there.

Joe: This game was ahead of its time in so many ways. “Make a weird vehicle and see it do stuff” sure worked out for Besiege and a host of other games made in its image. You couldn’t get the suits to believe in it without a mascot on the front and you couldn’t get the expectations out of the people who see Banjo, buy Banjo. It offers a fun time and some memorable images testing the boundaries of what will actually work, and a physics-based game working as well as it did when it came out is commendable.

Demetri: It makes sense that BK fans were disappointed with N&B. Most of them don’t have a creative bone in their bodies, incapable of imagining the Bear and Bird doing anything other than jumping, making silly noises, and touching Jinjos. We could have had an entire BK franchise with entries as varied as Mario’s spinoffs, but the nostalgia-addled 64-heads spat in Rare’s collective faces. They didn’t deserve N&B. You do.

Joe: Geometry Wars was magic. The old era of Tempest and Galaga on fuzzy arcade screens gave way to the bright bloom effects of a sharp LCD screen in the middle of the night, headphones on as you tracked laser-sharp shapes, aiming for just another round, a higher score, a little more time spent in a limbic world of pure reaction. That time you thought you were going to stop at vanished an hour ago. Don’t think, just be. Jeff Minter eat your heart out.

Demetri: My dad wasn’t much for video games either. Didn’t hate ’em, just not his thing, simple as. The exception to this was Galaga, which he was and is a demon at thanks to him having frequent access to a cab as a child, reliably getting absurdly far on a single credit to the point where I fondly remember him drawing small crowds at arcades as they watched him tick the level counter higher than they’d ever seen it go. This game, different though it may be mechanically, was the closest I ever got to the same. My typical shmup-ineptitude doesn’t apply to twin stick shooters – I would roll this for as long as it’d let me, to the point where this party trick was trotted out upon request on friends’ consoles. I don’t quite have it like that any more, too out of practice, but my fondness for this particular flavor of sensory overload hasn’t faded.

Kyle: I didn’t play this one, but I was dragged into duty for EDF 5 and gladly re-enlisted for EDF 6 (AFTER WAITING 5 FUCKING MONTHS FOR THE CODES, THANKS HUMBLE.) So I believe them for putting this title up here.

Joe: As far as I’m concerned, the Earth Defense Force series are the best bad video games ever made. No notes.

Demetri: I bought my first 360 a smidge late in the summer of 2007. Up until then I’d only ever played the console at friends’ houses, and while we had a great time, I wasn’t all that interested in its library. FPS was a PC genre to me and my lean towards action games and RPGs made the console feel wanting. The game that sold me, the one I worked my ass off for in a summer job so I could afford this box I previously didn’t care about, was Earth Defense Force 2017. I wanted to immerse myself in the musou-but-guns B-movie game so badly, and when I finally did it kicked off a long-term love for this franchise. 2017 is not the strongest entry – there are so damn many now – but it’s got a certain purity about it that always leaves a smile on my face when I sit down for a mission or 10. EDF! EDF! We don’t talk about Insect Armageddon! EDF!

Joe: The original Dark Souls is the one for me. The OG is slow souls. While I’d take other games over DS3 and, perish the thought, the alleyway gangbang simulator that is DS2, DS1 knows what it wants to do and does it perfectly. This is a game about consideration and exploration. Everyone talks about Sen’s Fortress, or Anor Londo, but it’s the strength of the paths that get you there, the choices made three sessions ago paying off, and the satisfaction of finding the build that fits you that’s really the strength of DS1. The only way you lose is to give up, DS1 is willing to hand you some ridiculous power if you want it. Giant dads, vacuum backstabs, and plenty of wild tech is out there if you feel the need, or you can do it the right way. Celebrate relentlessness.

Kyle: This game provided a level difficulty I didn’t know could exist while also being so fair. It’s never afraid to push you out of the nest and make you figure it out yourself. I’d lose days to this game just trying new weaponry and getting comfortable in areas just so I had some places to feel safe. PvP is a bag o’ dicks but I’d absolutely drop everything I’m doing to sword and board through it again, no matter how bad I am at this game. (The best in the series was soon to follow, but I digress…)

Demetri: I still haven’t forgiven this game for killing my first 360. That’s not a joke, I played it for two sitdowns and my 360 just noped out, both of its video outputs going kaput simultaneously without even having the courtesy to red ring. I’d like to think it tried to protect me. Didn’t work, but it tried! I’ll always give Demon’s the edge over Dark but I’d be a fool to not give this its flowers.

Kyle: Quite literally the best game you’ve never heard of outside of Loadout (stop lying, you’ve never heard of that game either), taking a MOBA genre still in its infancy given League of Legends was about 2 years old and DOTA 2 didn’t even exist yet, and instilling the class combat that TF2 had been politely dominating on PCs around the world: a sharply written, instantly humorous, and forever replayable display of roguelike skill base and tapping asses by just being better than someone else. Our friendbase have known each other for near 15 years now and this was one of the first games we all played together because some of us were too poor for good PCs back then. I’d trade a lot of things in my life to have this game back and spending hours with the boys again.

Joe: Shoot him in the pants, he’s got candy! A solid moba with a sports satire skin and shockingly good onboarding, this game was begging for you to pick up and play it, and if you like the genre at all, you’d find your GUY. Generic enough to be immediately understandable, specific enough to have just enough to master, the classes in this game were so well sorted. Shame they forgot they made one of the more interesting snipers in the genre when it came to map design, though. Ah, you can’t have everything, but for those few months this was more than enough for anybody.

Demetri: YOU HAD TO BE THERE.

Not even Super MNC was able to achieve what original recipe did. Deadlock is the closest we’re ever going to get to a true successor, and while that game is promising I will forever miss MNC‘s tight scope, sense of humor, and heavy focus on using your money to modify the map as opposed to just your gear. At least we kept the friend group!

Demetri: This is the best game Platinum has ever or will ever make. They came out the gate swinging – Bayo, Vanquish, Anarchy Reigns (which I loved but won’t pretend it belongs here), that Transformers game that kinda fucks – but none of those hold a candle to Raiden. Revengeance released as a niche spinoff often dismissed by press and players alike for not being a “real” MGS game, to eventually being recognized for all of its merits: incredible combat systems, best-in-class presentation, a shredding soundtrack delivered without a hint of irony, and memes galore. This retroactive canonization as one of the character action greats is entirely deserved and I couldn’t be happier that it’s this game that got its second chance at success. You hate to call a game ahead of its time, but you love to see its time arrive.

Joe:

Demetri: Orbs. Orbs everywhere. Orbs for doing fun things. Orbs for finding high places, orbs for landing sweet long bombs with explosives, orbs orbs orbs orbs orbs. With achievement hunting fresh as a concept, the wild scattering of orbs that made you more and more ridiculous for simply playing and enjoying the game makes Crackdown a flying leap above its peers. AssCreed eat your heart out.

Joe: The most satisfying character progression and on-foot controls of any open world game of the era. This is the closest I got to ever loving a game that did what we’d now call The Ubisoft Formula: getting on tall things and touching objects on a map.

Kyle: There’s not much else that really needs to be said that wasn’t already said by Demetri in his writeup earlier this year, but this game is for the absolute sickos and I’m proud to be in that group. I fucking paid retail for this game, and I’ll sip my soda while you try to tell me that was a bad idea. Seriously, just go back and watch the official announcement trailer for this game, tell me this shouldn’t have won awards. Outside of Dead Island (which pulled the world’s biggest bait and switch), I’ve never had a trailer move me in such a way that I just had to play a game. Is it perfect? Fuck no, but it is bold and unforgiving, and in a gaming world that’s becoming more and more cookie cutter at the AA and AAA level, it’s all the more exciting to see companies swing this fucking violently and pray they hit the stuffing out the ball without worrying about striking out.

Demetri: The poster child for “ahead of its time”. Modern Naughty Dog wishes they could make this.

Everyone throws the word “ugly” at K&L, and it is, but they often fail to acknowledge how much craft it takes to create a work capable of depicting this degree of ugliness so well. K&L2 is a playable panic attack, a stylistic masterclass that nothing else has so much as attempted to follow, which is probably a good thing. The 360 version might have some frame drops vs the PC. You won’t be able to tell.

Joe: I’m not as hot on Kane and Lynch 2 as these two knuckleheads, but I’m still going to tell you you should play it. You know that feeling you get when you throw off a case of food poisoning and eat your first real meal in a couple of days? That’s putting down Kane and Lynch 2 when you’re done. Yeah, it’s unpleasant and intense, but you’ll be a better person after it.

Demetri: You have Uno. Everyone does. Microsoft thought this port of a beloved card game with a few extra features was a reasonable pack-in for several of their bundles, granting thousands of people with crusty microphones and Liveleak-quality webcams the ability to subject strangers to their most deranged whims from across the card table. This wasn’t just a way to play Uno with strangers, this was the proto-Omegle complete with straight up illegal activity, and it was glorious. I absolutely saw hole on this more than once.

Joe: It came free with your Xbox. They didn’t understand what they were unleashing. There’s pro wrestlers who’re more popular and known for the time they spent playing Uno on youtube and streams than their actual in-ring efforts to a decent chunk of audience. Shoutouts to Chugs and UpUpDownDown. When you take one of the best party games ever made and add the Xbox Live playerbase to the mix, you get magic. And also on a watchlist.

Joe: You will generally hear me be ambivalent over platformers. I had an NES, okay? My brain was fully developed by the time the sound of collecting bananas and jiggies could inflict irreperable harm on the genre and a generation’s mental health. N+ is the best platformer of the generation, arguably of all time, and you could just download it for a couple hours of minimum wage work? Impeccable.

Demetri: This is what XBLA was made for. Pitch perfect platforming. The level design in this still beggars belief. Dodging missiles and spikes on the way to your collectables only to realize that the trip back is going to be even harder just rules. When you achieve flow and start clearing levels in one go you’ll feel unstoppable.

Demetri: 7th gen Capcom was trying anything and everything. Dead Rising is the epitome of clockwork design built to test the limits of new hardware as much as its players, every single choice a tiny piece of a deceptively intricate whole, and it demands perfection from its players lest they get caught in its gears. Alternatively, you can just fuck around in the sandbox! Live your homicidal photojournalist dreams.

Joe: Some games are improved by a lack of knowledge. If you don’t know the game already you’re going to find so many iconic moments out of nowhere, the constant time limit pushing you to engage with the game on its own terms. Don’t hit this with the dual monitors and a guide on your phone, okay? Let it unfold at its own pace, meet it in the middle, and you’re going to understand why this random DUDE occupies his place in the mythos of Capcom games. He’s covered wars, y’know.

Kyle: FAAAAAAAAAAAAAANTASTIC.

Kyle: In an era where EA could seemingly do no wrong (Skate, Rock Band, Burnout Paradise, Spore, Mercenaries 2, Mirror’s Edge, and Dead Space released within a period of 18 months), the survival horror genre outside of Capcom was nothing to write home about until this bad motherfucker dropped. Holy shit talk about a visceral slap to your adrenaline makers: limb-based combat using engineer tools and relentless grotesque enemies beyond hellbent to turn you into spilled lasagna all within a derelict floating science warehouse in space, criminy. Tight corridors, fast-paced but even quicker resolved battles, and AI smart enough to play dead with the gore around them for ambushes you don’t see coming, Dead Space thrives in the atmosphere of feeling truly alone against something you don’t know but having enough reflexes to just try and survive. And having no autosave made sections of this game tense. While Dead Space 2 and 3 harbored more into action and multiplayer to help sell copies, mostly to their own detriment, you can’t deny the syringe to the heart this game injected itself into the survival horror genre.

Demetri: One of the best Resident Evil games ever made. The combat in this game just hits on a level most survival horror doesn’t, and while the limb system is a major piece of why, I think the impeccable level design deserves its praise as well. Every area is expertly staged to create interesting encounters, and you’ll be tense as anything whenever enemies aren’t on screen, fiddling with the alignment of your cutter in a vain attempt at preparation.

Joe: This game made me buy my first HD TV. I was still gaming on a flat-screen CRT at the time, and between the text, the stuff hiding in the vents and corners, and the sheer texture of it all, I had to upgrade for the full effect. Very little beats the catharsis of stomping a necromorph out, and the starting gun is iconic. Yes, there’s a modern remaster, but it does change a few things, and there’s something charming about the stone-faced beast that is Isaac in this game. They tried to complicate it later, they tried really hard to wrangle this from an impactful, squirming horror into a Franchise and a Brand, and I think I’m happier for all the failed attempts that drift in its wake down the timestream.

Demetri: In a generation where Devil May Cry franchise lost its way and its imitators weren’t quite up to snuff, Itagaki was there to pick up the slack, and he did so by…basically turning Ninja Gaiden into a significantly better Devil May Cry. Where it differentiates, besides not being afraid to kill the player stone dead at a moment’s notice, is in having some of the most memorable individual levels in all of character action-dom. Anyone who’s played NG2 can be forced into a wartime flashback by simply uttering the words: “the stairs“. If you don’t know, you should, and the only way to do that is playing the 360 version. Sigma and Black 2 just aren’t the same game.

Addendum: RIP Itagaki. You were an absolute madman who never compromised, and we’ll always love your work for it.

Joe: The Stairs. Gigadeath. Fiend Genshin. There’s so many moments that make you feel like you’re headbutting a wall until you break through, blood streaming from your brow and a roar of triumph echoing in your ears. Chapter 11 on Master Ninja feels like completing a marathon. I’m pretty sure my tendons never recovered from that and I don’t think I care.

Demetri: Is this a safe environment for me to admit I like RE5 more than RE4? This is kind of an awful Resident Evil in terms of the broader survival horror genre and fitting into its own series, but in terms of combat? Holy shit dude. Some of the best coop shooting on a console with heaps of the stuff. I could play Mercs mode forever.

Kyle: This is absolutely a safe environment because Resident Evil 5 is my favorite game of the series. A full 180 on Dead Space‘s morals: get that big fucker Chris in there and start punching everything. Snappy gunplay, a fucking bonkers plot, punching boulders, and a Mercenaries mode that clears the franchise’s past and future iterations by a couple hundred feet: Capcom made quite possibly the most replayable game of this franchise and a contender for best co-op shooter of the 7th gen. This game rules so much I had a buddy who I 100%’d the game on 360, and then got it on PC and 100%’d it again with another friend. I’ve easily sunk 300 hours into this game over the years and I cannot think of another RE that even comes close to that number.

Joe: Mercs mode with a campaign built for two; if it wasn’t called Resident Evil I think it’d be less divisive, but if it wasn’t called Resident Evil it wouldn’t have the stock of lore and design for mercs mode to get away with it. C’est la mort.

Joe: Viva Pinata has no reason to be as good as it is. But it’s fantastic, a misshapen colorful creature brought out of the box and then knocked out of the park for the sweet, sweet chocolate inside. In an environment mostly built around macho bullshit and fully in the era of BROWN IS REAL, the bright tones of Viva Pinata stood out all the more. Gears of War didn’t get a cartoon series, y’know.

Demetri: This was the last generation where Rare was given room to experiment, and they did so with reckless abandon. For every whiff (Perfect Dark Zero, Kameo) we got something wickedly creative and brilliantly designed. There really hasn’t been a game that’s managed to achieve what VP did since, not even from Rare themselves, and that’s as much a travesty as it is kind of unsurprising. Lightning in a technicolor bottle.

Kyle: I don’t have a lot of experience with this title, but I watched my wife play this game and its sequel to dust. A wild premise that just absolutely makes sense when you know it was Rare behind the helm. A life-sim about creating the coolest garden so candy-filled living breathing pinatas look to call it home felt like this weird combination between The Sims, Pokemon, and FarmVille that, if nothing else, got Microsoft to make the world’s biggest pinata at that time to advertise the game. Though considered “incomplete” by the developer’s standards when it released, I think you could describe it by many of it’s fans in another word: “Perfect.”

Kyle: Really, how do you pick just one? Halo 3 is the quintessential example of Xbox Live and its cultural impact across the 360’s lifespan. But Reach is just, somehow, better. The campaign, the advancements in multiplayer, all the additional playlists, Forge mode, I could go on for hours. It’s a weird ass statement to say Halo 3 walked so Reach could run, but it’s hard to find a single thing wrong with this title.

Joe: Remember Reach? I do. The moment where one of the best FPS of all time uplifted itself into cinema. They made a hundred licensed novels out of this series, and I’d laugh, but I remember Reach.

Demetri: Demonstrates and benefits from all the mechanical refinements the series gained. Lone Wolf is the single best moment in playable Halo canon and I will quite literally die on that hill.

Demetri: One of the most unique games of the gen. Agonizingly addictive action puzzle gameplay backed up by layered, complex characters that makes its endings worth the re-runs, and a wildly underrated multiplayer mode that’d keep you coming back. I even had the pleasure of playing with a handful of competitively-minded folks back in the day and was blown away at the depth on offer. How many Atlus games can you describe as having tech?

Joe: How often do you have a JRPG with a niche competitive scene taking place at fighting game tournament sideshows? How often did a JRPG do question and answer sessions with its audience about real world topics, then show you the poll results? This game lifts above and beyond what you could have reasonably expected, and it’s the last time Atlus managed that particular magic trick.

Kyle: Flirting in the Top 5 games of All Time for me, this was my first injection of Atlus in my life and boy did find its way into my heart. I have a signed picture from Michelle Ruff, the VA of Katherine, for Christ’s sake. Call it how it is, but it’s refreshing to play a game rooted in an anime-style fixture that’s not in high school and you can have a drink with the boys and go over shit you probably shoulda gone to therapy for. The characters are rooted, believably normal, and the writing absolutely knocks it out of the park. And we haven’t even gotten to the chef’s kiss of puzzle gameplay that has you racking your brain right after pulling on your heart strings. A surprisingly adult game that treats its topics and its playerbase with respect, something very very rare in this day. Time to give Also Sprach Brooks another loop or 30.

Kyle: Ever play a game made better for being so broken? The multiplayer on paper should have folded this franchise: near lock-on positioning in a cover shooter that gave people the ability to juke like Barry Sanders, host advantage being 0.5-1 second of lag for everyone else on the peer-to-peer matchmaking in the year of our Lord, 2006. But do you remember hitting your first headshot with the Sniper and hearing that fucking pop? Do you remember one of the best shooter mechanics of all time, the Active Reload? Do you remember quite possibly the best shotgun in any shooter, ever? Do you remember revving that Lancer Chainsaw? Fuck yeah you do, and no game, not even its sequels, managed to harness the fucking un-hinged energy of a GoW1 lobby. It’s where I got my first taste of LAN eSports competition, it’s how I Red Ring’d not one but two 360s, and it’s probably where my love of Nu Metal and Emo Metal came about with those montages scattered on OG Youtube. The ultimate “You just had to be there” game of its generation.

Demetri: I was initially trepidatious on this beating Halo, but nah, we’re right. Halo: CE was The Reason to own an original Xbox, a genuine killer app, and the 360 Halos were never going to fully achieve those heights. Gears, though? Fucking bonkers. Interpreting the fundamentals of platforming into a forward-moving cover shooter – locate next spot, clear threats between, navigate, crash into it, repeat – makes for an endlessly moreish playthrough, especially in coop.

Joe: You can’t leave Gears of War off. It’s so emblematic of the timeframe. Big McLargehuge and the gang slaughter their way through brown, grey, and red and you LOVE it. Influential is an understatement. You can thank Gears for years of chest-high walls cropping up like mushrooms after a summer rain. The Hammer of Dawn will always occupy a little space in a dusty niche in my brain. Wonder what these guys are up to today… oh, oh no. Well, remember the good times, right?

Demetri: The better Final Fantasy XIII, and likely the last traditional JRPG with this level of budget and this strong of a pedigree behind it that doesn’t have “Dragon Quest” in the title. Lost Odyssey feels like the game we were all envisioning when 3D JRPGs blew up on the PS1, a future that we kind of otherwise never got as Squeenix and co. seemingly lost interest in pursuing them. It’s hardly joyless, but this game’s somber themes and revelations give it a sense of weight that few JRPGs across the entire genre achieve, and while its gameplay isn’t its strongest element it’s more than equipped to go toe to toe with its contemporaries. There’s a reason the Expedition 33 director named LO as a core influence. Also, this game’s side stories in particular will make you ugly cry.

Kyle: Final Fantasy X will forever be my #1 game of all time, but Lost Odyssey will forever be the game in the rearview mirror that’s closer than it may appear. Microsoft hit a fucking lick publishing this game and it’s not hard to see why: utilizing the tried-and-true turn based JRPG combat and adding a mini-game system that wears its Legend of Dragoon heart on its sleeve, with, God, such a good plot and hours of side-quests that you actually want to fucking do. It’s a sin that more people didn’t get the opportunity to enjoy this but those who did were given the hidden gem of the 7th gen. Also, that Microsoft money allowed them licensed right to a commercial with Jefferson Airplane playing over a sizzle reel of the cutscenes. You know how fucking cool that was to the 17 year old RPG-loving boy that I was?

Joe: Where’s the reprint? Where’s the remaster? Turn based with an active timing system, positionals, and character types. Takehiko Inoue knocked it out of the park with the character designs, Sakaguchi and Roy Sato knocked the cutscenes out of the park again, and the whole thing strikes a balance generally forgotten by modern JRPGS in terms of keeping the pace between talking and gameplay. They got someone more known for translating Murakami novels to bring the thing over! In a lot of ways, this game could have dropped out of a time portal from today, and at the time we just hadn’t built up the nostalgia for the form factor to appreciate it for what it was. It was a banger, is a banger, and will always be a banger.

Demetri: My most hardcore FGC pals might yell at me for this take, but I genuinely believe that Street Fighter 4 saved the genre. Its unprecedented success and popularity led to studios gaining renewed confidence, the creation of dozens upon dozens of games, massively expanding the live event scene, and the heralding of a bona-fide fighting game renaissance. It’s also just a damn good game, even if everyone looks like an action figure that lost a fight with a microwave.

Ultra is the “real” pick but it’s represented here by original SF4 because Indestructible goes ridiculously hard and I am tired of people pretending it doesn’t. Especially the instrumental version.

Joe: 09ers are an indispensable part of the modern FGC landscape. The arc of the game from the beginnings of Sagat, through Super, into the set play nightmare that option selects wrought out of the latter era of the game was the arc of a community coming to terms with what the game wanted from them. Short-term successes, long-term favorites, the era of streamers becoming names, all centralized around easily accessible internet fighting on a cheap and accessible console.

Kyle: Yeah, there may be better fighters but I agree with Demetri, Street Fighter 4 is directly responsible for many fighting games existing in 2025. Somehow faster feeling than Alpha 3 with a killer aesthetic, a beautifully done color palette, and a who’s-who of cast members to chew on some unbelievably hype additions to the game: Focus Attacks and the good ol’ FADC. You can’t tell me you didn’t watch EVO at least once if you put more than a hour into this game and think to yourself, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” You could suck fucking dick at this game and it didn’t matter, it was so fucking cool and it brought together a never-ending blend of seasoned veterans of the Coin-Op days to the modernity of internet-based matchmaking and provided now 2 decades of thriving FGC for everyone to enjoy.

Kyle: When I was in my “I’m gonna be MLG” teenage days, this game scratched an itch that probably looked like a 3rd degree burn by the time I was done with it. Old enough to utilize the power of online multiplayer but young enough to not be taken for all you had by the DLC pimps on the streets, CoD4 had the standard for multiplayer shooters. A plethora of unlockables that you earned by actually being good and not flashing that wallet, dozens on dozens of fun weapons, the fucking noob-toob to be an asshole, clutching up on Search and Destroy, lobbies that would give your parents a heart attack if they heard what was hurled. Fuck, I miss those days. The gaming landscape and its money hunger will never allow another title of this caliber to exist ever again, least of all in its own franchise, and I feel bad for the generations who got into gaming and didn’t hit the ground floor like we did with this.

Joe: Look, man, I was a Halo guy inasmuch as I was ever a console shooter guy. But even I respect just how far they launched this out of the park dinger. It holds up, even if your reflexes haven’t, and it’s emblematic of a simpler time in gaming.

Demetri: As a card-carrying Zombies Enjoyer it breaks my heart to not go with a Black Ops for our CoD pick, but Modern Warfare is undeniable. The campaign is a masterclass, the damn thing won BAFTAs for christ’s sake, and that multiplayer. Clearing out a lobby with an airstrike on vibes alone may be one of the single most satisfying feats in any competitive arena.

Joe: There’s some fantastic games on this list. Games that, on a given evening or lazy weekend afternoon, I’d go right back into playing. Almost none of them offer the ease and accessibility of Burnout Paradise. Oh won’t you please take me home.

Demetri: I’ve rewritten this several times and it’s gotten increasingly pretentious, so I’m just going to keep it simple and only mildly hyperbolic. There is a very real argument to be made that Burnout Paradise is the single best game about driving a car. Massive garage, each vehicle with its time and place, seemingly endless challenges to attempt, yet best played when you allow yourself to simply drive and see where your whims take you. It is devoid of any notable flaws, a beautiful gem moving at incredibly high speeds, a game that makes you feel like God herself is guiding your hand on the wheel, pressing down on your right thigh until you flatten the gas pedal, and screaming HEY HEY YOU YOU I DON’T LIKE YOUR GIRLFRIEND directly into your ears.

Demetri: The crown prince of Xbox Live Arcade, and I would argue the best beat ’em up ever designed specifically for home consoles. Peak couch co-op, eminently approachable, infinitely replayable. I need y’all to understand how many nights I spent with friends playing Castle Crashers until our controllers died, searching the house for AA’s like we were scrounging for copper wire, yanking them out of the TV remote or an equally unfortunate appliance, and going back for more Castle Crashers.

Joe: Often imitated, never bested. Even if you’re sour about some of the Newgrounds era humor, you can’t argue against how clean the gameplay is.

Kyle: It has to be an XBLA title, it just has to be. Microsoft took such a swing with digital-only titles from smaller indie and indie-adjacent developers, giving them the tools to make games without the conformity that AAA suffered from, and made it accessible to be on a major console instead of trying your luck on itch.io or Newgrounds. Castle Crashers blended couch co-ops of old with the accessibility of Xbox Live at an affordable price and brought a beat em up where hysterical moments abound, a surprising amount of depth, and replayability to the stars with up to 3 friends. That fucking Spanish Waltz at each shop is an earworm that you’ve heard so much you could probably play it on guitar right now. This game holds so much love within the gaming community it got Steam Workshop capabilities and a brand new DLC boss this year, 17 years after the game came out. If that doesn’t signify the cultural impact of just how amazing this game is, I’m not sure what will. Grab a controller, hit the couch, and let me show you: we got some deer to ride.

---

Whew! What a list. Thank you so much for reading. Rest in peace Xbox 360. We knew we had it good, we just didn’t know we were already at the peak.

Wait, is that a page break? What else could we possibly have to say at this point? Surely we don’t have an entire section of honorable mentions and deep cuts that didn’t quite make it to the top 36, right?

Pages: 12