Best XBOX 360 games?

Cafe Society
1

I recently picked up an XBOX 360, finally deciding against the Wii, though I was tempted. My problem has been finding good games for the 360. There’s been plenty of sports titles and a few others that seemed a bit bizarre, but not a lot of big hits. I picked up Madden 07 and Test Drive Unlimited when I first got the game, and then later I picked up Enchanted Arms and Table Tennis.

So far Table Tennis has been my favorite with some really fun rallies and tough battles. Its a really tough game though, even on easy I have epic contests with the AI. I can’t figure out how to reliably read the color of the ping pong ball quick enough to make use of counterspin, but for now I just try to vary up my shots and keep up with the patterns of the different AI players. The most fun part for me has been some of the hugely long rallies. And then of course AI Luc always gets the ball to hit the side of the table and I don’t have a chance to get it.

Test Drive Unlimited is something I’ve gradually started to enjoy more. The slow cars I have right now are a bit tedious, but I’ve done a few of those Car Transport challenges and man those fancy cars are DAMN fast. Its fun and scary to drive through traffic at 160 mph. So I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to move up to some fast cars soon. I just got my first D class.

I’m not so happy about Enchanted Arms. Lots of talking and silly stuff near the beginning, and now I’m stuck at a point where I have to get outside the academy and I can’t seem to find the way out. I’ve wandered around for quite a while but I just end up going in a circle and always finding a way back to the cafeteria.

As for Madden, it just seems to have so much complexity anymore, I have a hard time being successful in it. I’m used to struggling but eventually doing ok on pro level in most sports games, but I had to go back to rookie for this one. All the manuevers on offense and defense are tricky.

I also like the new playcalling system in that types of plays can be called, but the scrolling list makes it very difficult to quickly pick the right ones. Having to scroll right for five seconds just to find a formation is kinda silly.

Overall, I like that the XBOX 360 (at least the upper one I got), plays DVDs out of the box. Oddly enough it seems to switch to 480i on some games even though I have the HD hookups to my TV which says it supports all the way up to 1080. Is that because some games are not HD compatible or what?

I guess I kinda lost track of my question in there, so what I am asking is what games did you enjoy the most on the 360 so I can figure out what to get next?

2

Guitar Hero II is slated to be available for the Xbox in April, if you’re into that sort of thing.

3

For the longest time my brother only had Fight Night round 3 and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, both of them by themselves justified getting the 360 in our eyes. Madden is horrible, its full of “how could they not think of that” cheap tactics that make playing it against someone else completely pointless. Not having any competition is driving that franchise to the ground.

4

Gears of War is simply a must. Aside from that, the Halo series are worth checking out, especially with the new game coming out relatively soon. Dead Rising is another definite must, (woo! zombeh action!) and I had a great deal of fun with Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Call of Duty 3. (though the PC/PS3 versions are rumoured to be better, if you’re a PC gamer)

5

It’s a good thing they spent that 300 million to buy out the market instead of spending it to improve their game so people would voluntarily want to spend their money on it.

Fuck the NFL head office, and fuck EA in the ass.
…
Anyway, I have only played Oblivion on the PC, but damn, that shit is amazing.

6

IMO the best XBox 360 game is Dead Rising. Zombies overrunning a mall, and you can trash them with anything you can grab, including chainsaws, teddy bears, 2-by-4s, lawnmowers, and fish!

What’s not to love? :slight_smile: I highly recommend this game.

7

I <heart> Dead Rising, though some of the boss-fight mechanics can be somewhat clunky, and it’s one of those games that requires several run-throughs at different levels just to complete the game. But when you get the car in the underground parking garage and can rack up 5k kills in a few minutes? Damn, that’s sweet.

**Gears of War ** is my love, my baby right now. I was disappointed with the length, but if you’ve got Live or even just a 2nd controller and a friend it’s got awesome replay value in both the co-op and vs modes. Plus it’s pretty, very pretty.

Condemned is a great horror/thriller type game in terms of atmosphere, and the graphics are (again) beautiful. I haven’t got far enough into it to give a true opinion on the gameplay, however, because nobody will sit with me and I get too freaked out playing it all on my lonesome :slight_smile:

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is another great co-op game. If you like party-style RPGs and superheroes, it’s awesome. The graphics are great, the range of characters is neat and the gameplay’s pretty smooth. I find it can be a bit hard on solo mode, however because the AI is pretty pants.

Lego Star Wars II is just like it is on the PC/PS2, except slightly shinier. I love that game, but the only reason I have it on the 360 is coz I grabbed it cheaper at the time than I could have on the PS2 or PC. The main thing going for it on the 360 is that if you have Live, you can download a character pack that means you don’t have to have completed the first game to get all the characters unlocked.

Dynasty Warriors 5 is okay. I like the part where you belt around ancient China killing all that stands in your path. The faux-strategy game in between times pisses me off, though. If you like things like managing your kingdom’s income and forging alliances/starting wars with other kingdoms, then I guess that’s pretty neat.

Ninety-Nine-Nights. You have a big sword and you slash and kill thousands of enemies at a time. It’s fun in that regard, but the boss fights are killer hard compared to the game itself, and you can grind to a standstill just fighting the same boss over and over again until you get the lucky blow that takes it out. Pretty, and violent but kinda frustrating.

Chromehounds is big stompy robots (mecha). What’s not to like? It’s not my game, so I don’t play it but according to hubby the concept is great but the execution’s a bit sad. The game is geared more around the multiplayer, so the single player campaign is a bit lacking in substance and style. The problem is that you have to play the singleplayer campaign to get money and gear to skill up in multiplayer so you don’t get pwned the second you enter the game. That coupled with the fact that he’s never been able to get the multiplayer lobby in that game to work properly has caused him to give up on it of late.

**Perfect Dark Zero ** is a neat little shooter. Sometimes it’s out and out shoot’emup, sometimes it’s a james-bond-esque spy infiltration game. Before Gears it got a lot of replay from both of us as single and multiplayer. Even on the harder levels there’s a fair bit of skill involved, but it’s not so hard that you feel like you’re banging your head against a wall just to get through.

**The Outfit ** is fun and silly, but not terribly deep in terms of story. Again, another co-op game for the most part. It’s decent enough as a singleplayer, but it just seems more fun to shoot nazis with friends and loved ones.

8

Thanks for all the suggestions. After I get tired of Table Tennis and Test Drive, I think I’ll pick up Gears of War since everyone has been suggesting that.

I like mech type games so Chromebound sounds pretty cool too. I need to suck it up and get what I need to get connected to XBOX Live. The games should be more fun with that going.

9

I have had an Xbox 360 for about five months. The 90% of my time on it has been spent playing Oblivion. Great game. It has a little bit more direction than Morrowind but may still be overwhelmingly big for the uninitiated.

So far I’ve spent 111 hours playing the game and haven’t got into the main story yet. You’d be hard pressed finding another game that will give you that much unique play time. You can play the main story from the start if you like and the game will be a reasonable length, you don’t have to spend hundreds of hours playing it.

Get yourself onto Xbox live. Not because you can play against other people, but because you can download demos and get a feeling for what you’d like to play. I really enjoyed the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter demo and MotoGP06 is a fair improvement over previous incarnations. I also enjoyed the Call of Duty 2 demo, I imagine CofD 3 is just as good.

10

Definitely get Live. I was against it for the whole time we had our original Xbox. I didn’t think I needed to pay $100 a year to be called a n00b and teabagged whenever I got wiped in Halo. But 360 Live is a beautiful thing. Hubby mostly uses it to play online, I mostly use it to download demos, arcade games (I have lumines now!) and get updates/downloadable content for my games.

11

Another vote for Dead Rising. Let’s just say when I figured out you could run down zombies with a shopping cart I starting giggling like a school girl. True story.

12

Yes, Xbox Live is a must. When you do get it, the best (by far) arcade game is Geometry Wars. It’s not the type of game you can play for more than about 20 minutes at a time, but those 20 minutes are fantastic.

I disagree with everyone about Gears of War. My buddy and I love playing coop shooters, but GoW kinda sucked. The controls are way, way, way too “sticky.” In tactical shooters, you can “stick” to surfaces, like crouching behind a rock or peering around a corner. The problem with Gears is that it implements this with a sticky “mode.” As in, you press A. If you’re close enough to something you can stick to, then you stick, and you don’t have to keep pressing to stay stuck. You have to work (though not hard, of course) to unstick yourself.

So that’s a bad design. Even worse, the run button is also A, presumedly to support the idea of running to cover. Makes sense in theory, but in practice what ends up happening is that you can’t really run, because you keep sticking to everything on the friggin’ map. That makes it virtually unplayable, in our opinion, since the maps are claustrophobic enough to make it a real issue pretty much everywhere, and they’re also large enough to make walking (instead of running) everywhere a chore.

Now, for a tactical shooter that gets it right, try Rainbow Six. That shit rocks the house. Sticking is not a mode, but rather a trigger. Holding down the shoulder button sticks you to whatever you’re near, and letting go of the shoulder button unsticks you. Thus, there is no such thing as involuntary sticking in Rainbow Six, whereas is happens every 5 seconds in Gears of War.

For arcade shooters, Halo 2 is the way to go. Not all last-gen Xbox titles are playable on the 360, but Halo 2 is definitely one of them. And it has one of the largest online communities on Xbox Live, so it’s well worth playing. (It was the largest Live community the week Gears came out; not sure about now, though.) We played a bunch of online Halo 2 on the 360 while waiting for Gears of War, and then went back to it after we came to grips with not liking Gears at all. Since Rainbow Six came out, though, we haven’t played anything else.

We are big sports game nuts, and tried all the hockey and basketball games to see which were the best. NBA 2k7 and EA Sports’s hockey were the clear winners. Along those lines, we share all the complaints about Madden. WTF?

We also enjoyed Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, though it got old just before we finished it.

13

Gears of War is a great game and has some of the best graphics you’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, I suffer from a little bit of what **Ellis Dee ** has described. It’s a good game, but I don’t like it enough to spend time into being better at it. I don’t have a huge problem with sticking to walls, but it CAN be annoying sometimes. My main problem is with multiplayer. Running at someone and sticking them with a grenade is WAY too easy to do and it’s hard to stop unless you’ve got a shotgun. Even then, you’ve got to put the guy down with one shot or you get tagged and all you can hope for is jumping into the offender and take that person out with you. I’m also iffy with where to aim. In the single-player mode, headshots are rewarded. I’m sure they are as well online, but I have a MUCH harder time seeing it.

NBA Live is a good game. I heard NBA 2K6 is better, and I wouldn’t doubt it. Live this year seems to be lacking something. I remember the last 2K6 I played. I enjoyed it a lot. Might be the last Live I get.

Madden is a great game. They’re a LOT better this year about the cornerbacks that are looking one direction, then moving back in to cover a receiver suddenly. I wish they’d get the problem solved, though. I think that their insistence on having playmaker controls everywhere is cluttering it up. There’s a way to have the same amount, if not, more, and streamline it a little better. I have a beef with fatigue and think that players should fatigue faster. Also, and this is my biggest beef, the rankings are inflated. Why in the hell should Hall of Famers be 99 rank and Chad Johnson be a 95 ranking? That makes little sense to me. They need to make the speed (for an example) position specific so a 90 speed at defensive lineman is a 85 speed as a running back or a tight end. They should make it so you can put players wherever the hell you want, offense, defense, or special teams. They vastly overrate players for sure.

Dynasty Warriors 5 is meh. They turned Romance of the Three Kingdoms into a mash-button game, but tried to put some strategy elements into it. Not enough of them, I say.

Tiger Woods 07 has (relatively) few courses. Outside of that, it’s great. I’ve no complaints about gameplay, except to say that your custom golfer can get VERY beefy and in tournaments, computer opponents magically shoot a 57 to catch back up to you when you’re running away with a tournament.

Call of Duty 3 is graaaaand. I like it a lot and the graphics are REALLY nice. I’ve been playing it a lot online these days.

Then there’s Halo 2. It’s still got TONS of people playing it and it’s still fun as shit. I love kicking me some ass in that game.

If anyone wants to get together for a game or 5, email me or instant message me for my Xbox Live Gamertag.

14

You know, I’d say thats just about right. CJ is a stud, and if he maintains anything resembling this pace he’s a lock, first ballot HoFer. Considering the crappiest guy in the game is probably about a 60, that 4 point drop from HoF to the top guy in the league at his position is spot on.

15

Getting advice on video games is like letting someone else pick music for your iPod. So much comes down to personal taste. It’s probably helpful if the advice giver tells you about their taste first.

That said, I’m a console gamer who favors First Person Shooter (FPS) and Racing games. I played very few PC games since I never had a PC nice enough to play the best games. I prefer playing other people instead of AI. I’m a firm believer Xbox Live (XBL) was god’s gift to console gamers. My first Xbox Live game was Ghost Recon, and I’ve been hooked on FPS’s ever since.

So, to me, the best 360 game out right now is Call of Duty 3. The pacing is nice, the controls are fluid and easy to use (except for the melee attack), the mechanics for aiming and firing work realistically, and the grapics are outstanding. A drawback is the lack of the “lobby” for online matches. (A lobby, in case you are unfamiliar, is a screen where players appear before a game starts. It is usually run by the player who starts it, and he can boot players that are a problem.) It can be hard to tell who’s coming and going from a game, and the host can’t boot the jerks. Since you’d be starting fresh, this isn’t too big a deal. When you develope a freind’s list you like, you’ll find it’s better to play with them at the exclusion of the general population. That’s hard to do without a lobby. (If you want the lobby, Call of Duty 2 has it, and the game is just about as good otherwise.)

Regarding Gears of War, it’s not a FPS. Instead, you view your character from over the shoulder. I’m not a fan of that type of game. There is also the “sticky” problem mentioned above. You can work around that if you like the rest of the game. GoW is very popular. It edged out Halo 2 for most online players recently. When selecting an XBL game, this is no small matter. It’s better to have more online game sessions available. Otherwise, you will find yourself in 1v1 matches in games designed for 12v12. That equals boring.

I’m glad you are enjoying Test Drive Unlimited. I prefer the Racing Sims. You could probably pick up Forza for cheap. It’s a great game, but be careful that the backward compatible games don’t always work as well on the 360 as they did on the original Xbox. That’s because they use a software fix to make them work on the new system. I’ve found the Forza controls don’t work quite right on the 360. You may not even notice, and for the price it could be worth it.

One game I haven’t played, but heard a lot about is Viva Pinata. Everyone I know who has it, loves it. It sounds a bit like The Sims, only with living pinatas. You raise little pinata animals. I don’t know if you beat them later. That would be more my speed.

As mentioned above, a great way to check these out is download the demos on XBL. You don’t have to get a gold membership to download the demos. You just need a broadband connection. Of course, if you’ve already spent the money on the broadband, $50 a year is cheap to get the full XBL experience. (If you do, send me a friend request. Smooth Jack is my gamertag, too.)

Then again, you may want to save your money for the spring. Forza 2 is coming soon, hopefully. Also, Halo 3 will be out in 2007. Both are likely to be HUGE! We’ll see.

16

I agree about the “sticky” problem, but I’ll always pick 3rd over 1st person in a video game. I find FPS games to be disorienting too often, I can never tell if I’m really behind cover or not, and the motion sickness factor gets a little too high. Still, I get a little bit of motion sickness from GoW, especially from the “running” motion.

17

I just wanted to post here, and say that I hate and envy all of you for having 360’s.

sigh

18

I have a friend with the same problem. He can’t even watch another person play a FPS. This is why it’s important to know something about the taste of the person offering advice. If you like other FPS games like me, MindWanderer, then put Call of Duty 3 on your list. Halo 2 is a FPS, btw.

If you prefer the 3rd Person thing, you might like Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. A problem with that is they make you buy the additional levels if you want to play with someone who already bought them - even if you want to play one of the original maps. Othewise, the gameplay is pretty good. It does have the option to FPS, or 3rd Person. Unfortunately, the FPS mode puts you at a serious disadvantage in XBL games. (You can’t see around corners like your opponents.)

19

But I wouldn’t say that. Then that devalues ANY 99 that Jerry Rice would get. Would you say that Chad Johnson in his prime is as good as Jerry Rice in his? Would you say they’re 4 points away if you had to assign a number to it? I wouldn’t. I also think that the game has a hard time dealing with special talent. Take Barry Sanders for example. He gets a 99 overall rating, which is correct. He gets 99 speed, which is NOT correct. He also gets a 99 elusiveness, but he’s still just as easy to tackle as everyone else. In some cases, players should get a 99* rating to denote that they’re “above” 99. All I’m really saying is that a 99 is too easy to get in the Madden universe. It’s especially easy when you compare that 99 to a bona-fide Hall of Famer. Comparing Dwight Freeney to Reggie White isn’t a fair comparison, and neither is Chad Johnson to Jerry Rice.

20

You can come over and play. You’ve gotta bring over a controller, though.