DidntKnowJack
Member
I'm RTTP for the Xbox 360, so to speak and starting to reacquire some old games I'd let go over the years. And I'm finding most of the games I want to re-purchase are these very early titles. And fortunately, these games are dirt cheap
Anyway, the long and short of it is; I'm knee deep in old Xbox 360 games and I want to talk about them.
PGR3 - launch title. I've actually always considered this to be one of the weaker titles in the PGR franchise, but now that I'm replaying it, I'm finding it to be a pretty solid racer. Though I have to say I find the game itself curiously dark in some areas. Not in tone obviously, but the picture quality. It's almost as if the gamma settings weren't tuned properly and there's no way to alter them outside of fiddling with your TV settings. Still, I have to say I'm having a lot of fun with this.
Crackdown - Guess what? Curiously, it's still fun jumping around the city looking for orbs. The campaign itself is pretty weak, the plot of the story is paper thin, and truth be told it's a pretty easy game. But I'll be God damned if finding those green orbs isn't still satisfying. Say what you want about RealTime Worlds, in many ways they set the tone for open world games this generation. Even with its flaws, I consider Crackdown a classic.
Need For Speed: Most Wanted - Not to be confused with it's namesake developed by Criterion, the original NFS: MW is a late PS2/Xbox game uprez'd for the following generation, but somehow it works. It isn't that the visuals are all that, one look and you can definitely peg this as an early 360 title, but this is an open world-ish racer that doesn't suffer too much technically even though it's rooted in much older tech. It's just a lot of fun. And who doesn't love a little Razor Callahan in their lives every now and then? It does get painfully difficult as the game wears on, one could even call it unbalanced, but all in all this is an outstanding game and the fact that this title still fetches a hefty price I can only guess people don't tend to trade it in.
Condemned: Criminal Origins - This was one of those games that caught my attention at launch because it seemed so different than all the other offerings at the time. I guess you would call this survival horror, but you aren't really searching for ammo very often, instead you're looking for a good piece of rebar. The thing that strikes me about Condemned is how fucking brutal it is. Not in the gore, but in every altercation you have with the enemies. They will curse you the fuck out as you're slamming a steel pipe into their foreheads and you can hear and feel the violence of it all. And the game maintains it's tension throughout. Who can forget the department store and those creepy God damn mannequins? This is another one of those early 360 titles I will always think of when I hear the words "Xbox 360 launch."
The Darkness - I'm sorry but I loved the Darkness. (Why am I apologizing?) Starbreeze created a world I had never been to before and being able to lounge on my couch with my in-game girlfriend and watch "To Kill A Mockingbird" (in its entirety mind you) just blew me the hell away. That's such a small part of the actual game that you can just skip past, but to me that exemplified how completely new this kind of game was to me. The gore in this game was pretty wonderful too, it really made an impact when I was digging someone's heart out of their chest and eating it. But I played through this sucker in a couple of days because I was so riveted. It had some problems like World War 1 hell, but all in all I absolutely loved this game. I haven't popped it in lately, so I'm not sure if it has come past the test of time unscathed, but I will always have a place in my heart for this game.
I'll leave it there. I want to hear some other early titles you guys consider gems. They do NOT have to be launch games. This will be great to hear because I'm still looking to pick up some more games.
