Ok, thanks for the suggestions everyone. It seems Knights of the Republic looks like a winner. I might have a look at the GTA series, but I’m not really a fan of games where you beat people up then steal their cars.
Are any of the games good for 4-player multi?
I like most games in general except maybe racing games, which all feel repetitive to me.
Unfortunately, I have yet to find a multiplayer Xbox game that even comes close to rivalling the depth of fun that 4-player (or better yet, 8-16-player) Halo offers. Haven’t found a multiplayer anything game that matches that, really. It’s the intimacy that comes with multiplayer console gaming that (along with the excellent game and level designs) elevates it above other multiplayer first-person shooters, IMO. Nothing beats 16-player Capture the Flag on Sidewinder, with each team sharing two adjacent TVs, all clustered within a single room for maximum strategizing and trash-talking.
I do have an XBOX and Toejam And Earl 3 is the only game I’ve liked so far.
Great fun.
Halo is definitely at the top of the multi-player mountain. I suffer from V.R. sickness (motion sickness) when I play first-person shooters, but when my friends get together with 2 t.v.s and 2 xboxes for some 8-player Halo action, I take Dramamine, which mostly helps. 8-player Halo is just too much fun to pass up, and worth a little bit of nausea.
Another good one is Hunter: The Reckoning. The single-player game is okay, but the 4-player cooperative is a hell of a lot of fun.
I’ll again back up Knight of the Old Republic. I got to demo it at E3 two years ago when they just started developing it (maybe it was last year…I forget) but that was the game that made me decide XBox was for me. Just knowing it was coming out in the distant future made me commit.
Oh, and I know I’m in the minority here…but I loved Obi-Wan on my XBox. The lightsaber fights were great.
I may well be the only person on the planet who loved this game, but let me suggest BloodRayne. It’s multi-platform, but the XBox version, unsurprisingly, has superior visuals and audio (we have all three platforms). It’s not what you’d call a difficult game, Rayne is ridiculously overpowered and only a couple of the bosses (specifically The Butcheress and the ending two bosses) pose any real threat. It’s also not what you’d call subtle, with blood, gore, and body parts going everywhere as Rayne rips through enemies - there’s an almost camp aspect, the game doesn’t take itself all that seriously which is probably why it works. Either because of or despite these things, the game is great fun. I’ve played through it about five times now between PS2 and XBox versions.
As has been mentioned already, both MechAssault and Crimson Skies are great fun. Both are surprisingly easy to control, both are more arcadish than sims (the concept of ‘stall’, for instance, doesn’t seem to exist in the alternate future of Crimson Skies). The single-player version of Crimson Skies has some very well done cutscenes, while the mission briefings in MechAssault are rather bland and can be quite annoying. Both are playable on XBox Live, which can be great fun.
Oddworld: Munche’s Oddysey is decent enough if you’re into those games. I am, and I think I’ve played every Oddworld game there’s been, including on the GBC and GBA. IMHO, this is not the best of the lot and the replay value is kinda low.
My husband is a big puzzle fan and, despite it having been savaged by the critics, loves Tetris Worlds Online. Granted, it’s no Halo, but puzzle games can have great replay value if you’re into that sort of thing (I’m not, really, and haven’t played this one myself). This one is also XBox Live enabled.
FWIW…
Myria