A bold statement! I gotta find out more about these Atlus and Capcom titles. If Dino Crisis 3 was like $10 I’d still jump on it despite its reputation. Too pricey though. I know Capcom published Cavia’s Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance, intrigued about that one.
Bullet Witch probably goes without saying.
If you’re feeling brave From’s Ninja Blade is one of the more bizarre action games.
So my OP was specifically about OG XBox. BUT. I secretly also wanted to talk about 360 gems as well, so you’ve done good (the line is drawn at XB1 though). Bullet Witch is on my radar. Even as a FROM fan, I’m iffy about what I’ve seen of Ninja Blade. I may just go for it if I can find it cheap but that’s a hell of a lot of QTEs.
The one that’s currently got me very curious is Wartech: Senko No Ronde which isn’t too pricey these days. I’ll probably give that a spin next year.
Play galleon. It’s a dreamcast game.
One of the playable characters in otogi 2 is a tree. It’s more hospitable.than the first so less interesting.
Grabbed by the ghoulies is awful.
I assume the silent hill(s) are overly expensive.
Second sight maybe?
The QTEs are unitentionally hilarious because of how they endlessly cycle if you just fail. They rewind and keep playing themselves forever. It’s like playing a failure gif.
Phantom Dust is just awesome for being “taking the metaphor of M:TG literally,” but then also aesthetically interesting. Game rules.
Mandatory Booji Xbox post: Play Black, but only with the custom soundtracks.
Woohoooo. I did this back in the day and I did it a LOT. I have a folder on my computer that has survived so many transfers that is just xbox harddrive shit. I see that xbox-scene went to hell so it is a bit harder.
In the olden times you: bought an external memory card and the first splinter cell. You dragged and dropped a file on to the memory card and then you loaded that file in splinter cell contradulations your xbox was hacked.
It only has 8gigs. You could ftp over anything though. You could put in any xbox disc and rip to harddrive. It was cool!
You could go through a very extended process to put in a larger IDE drive.
Did you already open your xbox up and check on that fucking capcitor?
My oxbox at it’s height ran over component cables and use The 360 blades menu and had a boatload of customization everywhere. I loved that thing. I played through many snes rpgs on that thing. That’s how I played wvery single Gameboy game. It should still be in a friend’s closet!!! I should ask that friend!!
I kind of wish I had a mirror of that harddrive. Instead I have a complete nonsense folder full of inpentretable garbage.
The point I’ll end this post with is once you hack it you can easily burn and play any game. I don’t think I ever had trouble playing a burned game.
But being a snob and playing games instead of buying/burning them is cool.
Play Galleon.
Breakdown is like really cool when it is isn’t impossibly hard. I still beat it like a moron. It turns into half-life by way of halo as you go to Halo at the end.
Play Galleon
I will also recommend Galleon. It’s good and it was designed by Toby Gard, who was one of the designers on the original Tomb Raider.
360:
armored core for answer (cross platform but runs best on 360 and is one of the greatest games ever made), bullet witch, blue dragon, chromehounds, otomedius, project sylpheed, all the cave shmup stuff like deathsmiles and muchi muchi pork, and i do think ninja blade and enchanted arms are worth checking out at least
Deathrow for the original big box – it’s a combat sports game! Really fun and a pretty unique experience.
I got one of the models that doesn’t leak! (according to the internet) So whether I decide to go through the hassle of modding or not will depend on how badly I want to play those titles that are too expensive.
Yes! I’ve been watching copies of For Answer on EBay for a week now. Will probably start adding 360 games to the mix in January. Blue Dragon was great, not sure I want to play it again, but I’m going to take a serious stab at Lost Odyssey in 2021. Before then, going to see if I can’t hunt down bargains for:
- Galleon
- Crimson Skies
- Arx Fatalis
- Breakdown
I know, I love it!
I like this channel that uploads high level footage of a lot of xbox exclusives and other random ps2 action games. it’s cool to see people take games like this very seriously and play for skill.
I still contend that machinegames’ wolfenstein is the true successor to no one lives forever
also, despite prey being a complete system shock 2 fangame, the designers insist that it was actually more inspired by arx fatalis. which is just… lol
Dino Crisis 3 is amazing because they made the premise of Future Space Station Filled With Zombie Dinosaurs boring.
Reminded to get some of the programs an emulators for the OXbox you had to connect to a IRC channel and message a bot who would then message you A password for an ftp that you could access for two hours.
Then somehow I got IP banned from that ftp.
Ninja Blade is pretty useful if you grew up on SNES and wanna learn another button layout.
I have one of these big black original boxes standing around again because I wanted to play the Midnight Club games. Then I proceeded to softmod it and put the English-patched Thousand Land on its hard drive. Kinda wanna put English-patched Rent a Hero Nr. 1 on it too and try playing that again. It’s more proto-Yakuza than Spikeout imo. Spikeout is super hard and I’ll never finish it but if I ever try again I’m gonna install it on HDD because those load times are long. Just like with OutRun 2k6, but that lacks some polish anyway and I’d rather play the fixed Japanese PS2 or XBLA ports. I actually did not too long ago. After burning through After Burner Climax. What a soundtrack.
Anyway, I should play more original Xbox From Software games. At least I played Chromehounds and own a copy of Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor. But instead here I am buying and playing through Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War, just so I can play Wolfenstein 3D on a console. Which I did and enjoyed greatly. Already bought Doom 3 for the original Dooms and figured out that they’re only on the Collector’s Edition and Resurrection of Evil. So I bought that too. Already preparing to put Doom XBLA on my reset-glitched 360 because No Rest for the Living. Already confirmed that Sigil runs fine on my old Win98 PC in Boom. My N64 Everdrive clone arrived and is readied for Doom 64. Fuck.
Anyway, I highly recommend the jaw-droppingly gorgeous looking Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions and it’s Japan exclusive (but pretty much in English anyway) sequel Double-S.T.E.A.L.:The Second Clash. They’re like inofficial Runabout sequels. What more could you want?
Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge has the honour of being my first game finished in 2021. A great flyer fighter and even better Xbox game. I was surprised to learn about how extensive the world building behind it is (having started as a board game of all things). The story, a plastic-faced pre-rendered pastiche of 1930s serials, didn’t hold my attention all that much but the broad strokes are cool enough and shooting down zeppelins never gets old (I like the one that has to be taken down by flying into its razor-rimmed mouth, shattering an internal generator and bursting out its blimpy butthole before it all blows up). The hangoutable hub zones, seamlessly transitioning into and out of missions, are groovy smooth and I very much appreciate the snackable action servings in general.
Dogfights feel arcadey and weighty and fast and even disorienting at times but always thrilling (I love that button dedicated to camera-tracking nearby enemies and how it warps one’s sense of space and aerial control, what a rush). When you do a barrel roll in Crimson Skies it feels like you’re rolling in an actual fucking barrel, with a gun between your teeth, tongue on the trigger. I like that some foes drop health/ammo on little parachutes and you can fly (at some risk) to pick these up before they hit the ground so as not to waste time with the repair hangar during a mission.
Some things that make the game feel a bit slight: you can only upgrade each craft (of which there are 10) twice (with stats for speed, defense and firepower) and really, there are only 2-3 useful ones to keep in rotation. Also, you can’t go back to previous missions, the game marches forward, fixed to its plot. There’s no scoring system so perhaps there’s no point in that but I would have enjoyed the extra challenge/poking at the limits of mission structures. Also, I bet this was a blast to play on XBox Live 1.0 back in the day! Cool game. Definitely worth the $5 I paid for it.
Probably gonna stick with XBox for a bit, maybe Panzer Dragoon Orta while I contemplate buying Galleon.
I’ve finished Crackdown. Crackdown is good! For all its warmed over Grand Theft Authomages, the gameplay scratched a massive itch on the Likes Video Games part of my brain. It was also thought-provoking re: my own game. I took notes, impressed with how terrain and architecture are put together with varying levels of character ability in mind while feeling hands off in a way that offers players an individual, earned sense of discovery (the fact that you’re traversing somewhat realistic urban obstacles rather than “gamey” shapes designed with legible legitimacy creates a satisfying sense of ambiguity and overcoming). In the midst of my own level design (juggling jumping challenges, hangout zones and “puzzles”) a mantra which has quietly murmured in the background since I started working on my game emerged confidently amplified: THE PLAYGROUND IS THE PUZZLE.
At first, like a lot of games, I leaned into what I immediately found gratifying (jumping from rooftop to rooftop for collectibles) at the expense of “story” progression. My fighting skills and arsenal were woefully underpowered in a lot of the early missions (after which I would end my play session feeling exhausted) but once I paid a bit more attention to this, supercop cleanup duties went smoothly (and felt good, like capturing safe spawn points and bringing back weapons I’d collected in combat to store them for future use). At best, combat feels like an out of body Quake match. At worst, it feels like playing Minesweeper on a trampoline. Would this play as well (or better) with a mouse and keyboard? Locking onto enemies would still be a necessity, (which is good, it’s a jumper first and foremost, more about creating and juggling the tangents that tie you to a target instead of projectile parabolisms (grenades excepted because they’re big dumb fun)) but the game may have benefitted from that level of precision. Certainly they should have included the option to adjust aim speed/sensitivity. There were times when I COULD NOT move my reticle fast enough and I cursed the stubborn, literal nature of the lock-on system: Your reticle MUST be over your desired target before it can lock on. There’s no consideration for prioritising according to proximity which seems like common sense and GOD HELP YOU if you press the lock on button while your reticle is over a corpse. WHY can you lock on to corpses!? There are other quirky design discourtesies like being able to whack a railing in front of you when you actually want to be shooting the enemy on the other side of it. I’m going to say (without any serious justification) that this feels like a specifically western (British (90s (PC))) kind of third person thing. The way you stick shift your character through the air, for example, does not feel like a Japanese jumping game, especially the gross (but also OK) way you jump out from holding a ledge and force finagle your action figure around and above an obstructing overhang.
Anyway, the game is wise to emphasise violence via verticality with clustered enemy placements begging for death from above and ragdoll reincarnation, especially out in the open city. But what about the interior segments? Here things get dicey and spicy and hairy and scary. Hotline Miami + Counter Strike deathmatch energy requiring claustrophilic spatial awareness. I found the recycled premise of infiltrating these dense warrens endearing. Sometimes, through a glass window on the outside of their superstructure, you can see the boss deep in the heart of their labyrinth. That’s great. And the way you organically stumble across these boss bunkers (exploration giving way to more focused clusters of combat) is another instance of the game knowing what it does best (the landmarks of interest are rendered interesting not because they are titled or waypointed (your map starts out blank) but through player intuition (the shape of a structure, its locational relation to the surrounding topography, etc). And there are multiple ways to insinuate yourself into these henchmen hives. Again, the game is playing to its strengths: versatile engagement with geometry via super physics. “Is there a VS. mode to this game?” is a supremely complimentary thing to wonder while weaving one’s way through a level in single player mode.
So yeah, I really enjoyed Crackdown. And it was free! Some random loose ends:
- You can drive cars in this game and I spent about 2% of my time doing that.
- Being able to pick up and throw the corpse of pretty much every boss (often from great heights) is such a lovely game design gift.
- The 5 seconds you get to celebrate boss murder while your dossier updates (initiating your commander’s post-mission dialogue) is charmingly awkward.
- After defeating all 7 bosses in a territory, you have one more “Final Crime” to eliminate, marked with a big star on the map and it usually takes place at some iconic landmark (carnival clown statue, town square) and it’s ALWAYS easier compared to the missions that preceded it. This is a nice bit of icing on your supercop cake.
- The perverse teenager who delights in virtual metropolitan chaos and NPC abuse is alive and well in me. I wish I had more footage of said chaos and abuse. This game excels at emergent slapstick.
