The XB360 was the one system my younger brother had that I didn’t. I came home from college to find my brother with a new system. Over the coming years and subsequent visits, I would sometimes tool around with it. He didn’t have any of the games mentioned in the first hour (what I’ve listened to so far). Instead, we played
Morrowind. Got that sucker going on the 360 (I remember having to do something to make it work - it was backwards compatibility with a hitch) after I’d already played on PC. My brother loved it. So my most played game on the XB360 was an XB release.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. I played at least through No Russian but didn’t complete the game.
Geometry Wars. It was pretty good, but yeah, I miss the slipperiness of Asteroids and haven’t really loved a two-stick shooter since.
Lost Odyssey. I saw my brother play one segment of the game but never got to play it myself. As a JRPG fan, I would have loved to play it, but I wasn’t going to take my brother’s system back with me just to do it
I know I made an avatar that wasn’t a Mii.
There are a few other games in there too, I’m sure, but those came to mind immediately.
Last year I borrowed my buddy’s 360 for a few months for the sole purpose of playing Lost Odyssey to completion. This episode has convinced me that I should have just stolen the damn thing.
While we were still dating my wife bought me my 360 as a birthday present. She was doing marketing research for Microsoft in Japan and unfortunately for her not only did they not give her a discount but they didn’t tell her that it was about to get a price drop like a month or so later lol. (Apple was another client of hers and she also got screwed on timing there buying an Intel Macbook for one of the last model years before they switched to the proprietary chips.)
But anyway that ushered in an amazing summer of online Halo 3 with my friends back in the states.
Edit: also just realized that this means that I was in Japan with a 360 in the same time period Tim is talking about and I still haven’t played like any of these games hah. I was mostly playing PS2 still.
This video was definitely a learning experience for me, because most of the 360 generation was lost to me and I’ve never really understood the appeal. Between things like being in college, being fairly poor and my system being red ringed half the time this was definitely the least engaged I’d ever been with the medium. I definitely lived the casual experience in that time of playing games mostly with friends, on occasion playing the big new thing when it became cheap(or buying or borrowing it off a friend after they played through it) and being largely unplugged from the online conversations surrounding games and the whole game news cycle.
I remember at the time feeling like most of my favorite game companies(Capcom, Konami, Square) had strayed from the things that made them great in my mind and were making games that were trying to be Western-games(which I largely didn’t like) but just worse so I had lost a lot of enthusiasm for new games. I guess in hindsight this is somewhat close to the truth, but there were still good games to be found despite the lesser(or weirder?) presence of the big 3rd party Japanese companies.
Limbo: Damn, Tim really hates this one. The guy who is super particular about spoilers blasted it WHILE giving away the twist. I guess he’s potentially saved some would-be Limbo players from wasting their time.
Breath of Fire III: Cool to see Tim agrees with me on BoFs, surprised this is his favorite given the extreme praise he has for V, maybe he’s the rare soul that likes this series even more than me.
I never had a 360 (or any Xbox for that matter) and this episode made me realize that I know basically nothing about its catalogue. This rules! The presentation feels more like a Kotaku vid Tim would make in 2018 than an IC thing, but that’s an interesting layer of meta-nostalgia in it’s own way.
I kinda have a weird experience with the 360. It definitely was my most played console at the time but it was mostly for COD games online with kids from school. I think I literally just had COD Assasin’s creed 2, halo and rock band. I feel nostalgic for the 360 in the same way I feel nostalgic for my friends in middle school. I guess for me personally I was also a virtual console and PSP fiend and that was where the bulk of my other genres were played.
Man lots of cool games I now need to add to my backlog, and a reason to ransack my childhood 360 from my parent’s house.
I think the only games on the list I’ve played are Halo Reach, Dead Rising (although not to completion), Alan Wake, and Nier if you count the remake. Personally my 360 shmup of choice is Deathsmiles 1 + 2, but Caladrius seems pretty cool too.
“I still had a better time in five minutes than I had in the four hours I spent knowing the kid died before the game started when I played Limbo.”
I don’t care much about spoilers, I just thought it was comical that Tim who would normally tiptoe around most anything even spoiler adjacent just threw that out there, which further shows how much he doesn’t like it.
Edit: Never mind that. Reread Daveed’s reply, my brain initially interpreted that comment in the most backwards way possible.
Tim’s improvised Mountain Dew bit at the beginning gave me major ‘Adam Driver’s poetry’ in Paterson vibes. My spouse is still mad at me for making them watch that film (I have no regrets).
#3 on the list makes me want a list episode where panelists come up with the best games they’ve never played. It’d be Frank’s time to shine.
Being a 360 player in Japan in its heyday makes this video a historical insight gold mine, not to mention the bargain bin prices - hadn’t felt nostalgia in a long time but this video jump started it a bit
Being honest, I was in High school 2006-2010 and the 360 represented the CoD playing macho anti-JRPG crowd that was the opposite of me as a person. But then you’d always read about the ‘awesome’ Japanese games that sold like crap and/or didn’t make it over. Didn’t matter anyway, since all I had was a Wii. But I did have a rich friend who had all 3 consoles, and I had enough influence over him to make him buy his first JRPG - Tales of Vesperia - and he let me borrow his 360 to play it at my house. I ate that game like it was the last one on Earth.
Is anyone willing to spoiler post the list of games? I’ve already watched the YT video and almost finished listening to it for the second time, but unfortunately don’t have Tim’s rote ability to memorise and recall things at the drop of a (very stylish) hat. And kinda can’t be bothered going through myself
If i had 2 hours 05 minutes and 40 seconds to be uninterrrupted and not do anything else, this would be the best thing to listen while smoking a cigar (but i don’t smoke) with a hard drink (i don’t drink) in front of the fireplace (i don’t have a fireplace). Or put this on tv and fall asleep as a grandparent with the video going on and have some family member turn it off and bring me to the bed.
The 360 was a huge void for me, i was playing PC or PS2 when it came out and just kept playing PC or DS / PSVita by the end of it. But many games sound very interesting and now that i have a Series S i’ll try to see what i can get.
Also makes me think that a podcast with Tim just talking could be interesting.
