Best games for xbox 360 series#

While some felt they were treated like children - the ability to literally lead people by the hand arrived in the next sequel - Fable 2 brought the RPG to a new generation and didn’t compromise on the sense of adventure. It’s an approach to accessibility that ran through the entire game, literally, in the form of a glowing breadcrumb trail that took you to your next quest objective. Fable 2 fit that trend, finding Lionhead ditching the RPG genre’s usual punishments for mucking up combat by eliminating player death altogether. You can see a theme developing over this period, can’t you? Of experiments in game difficulty and the consequences of failure. The painterly aesthetic, violins, and overwrought narrative might appear pretentious now, but they all helped sell Xbox gamers on the merits of indie games for the first time. But unlike Forza’s, Braid’s rewind function changes over the course of the game - at first undoing your actions, then tying the flow of time to the direction you’re running in, and eventually giving you a ring that alters time in the fashion of a gravitational field, slowing monsters and objects in its orbit. Things going backwards were really impressive in the 360 era, alright? We were primitive people. The primary tool for doing that is a rewind button.

Best games for xbox 360 series#

It uses the friendly and familiar grammar of Mario to suck you into a series of puzzle rooms that play with space and time. Jonathan Blow’s predecessor to The Witness, Braid looks like a platformer but isn’t, really. Super Meat Boy helped solidify the reputation of Xbox Live Arcade for affordable, credible indie games, an idea first put forward by. That means you’re able to tackle it again with the mistake you made still in your head, fresh as a sentient steak, pushed onward by the virtuoso synth-metal soundtrack of Danny Baranowsky. Levels are tiny, and so no death sets you back more than 30 seconds - Meat Boy simply reassembling at the beginning of the challenge, like cheap ham. But like Forza, Super Meat Boy introduced forgiveness to its genre. A quality Forza 3 has in common with… Super Meat BoyĮdmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes’ precision platformer looks farcically difficult at first glance - its levels comprised of gigantic circular saws and tall piles of exposed needles, any one of which will kill you at a touch, over and over. A gloriously game-like addition nabbed from Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, it enabled you to reverse a crash so that you could correct the critical moment of oversteer that caused it, ending the frustration of restarting the race and teaching you with each mistake. Turn 10’s masterstroke came in the third iteration - rewind. But for Turn 10, simulation was a calling.Ĭonveniently for the rest of us - and for Microsoft, pouring fuel into the series - that simulation turned out to have the structure of a great game: a deep, satisfying, and quite literal learning curve, as well as customisation that allowed for more build tweaking and optimisation than any RPG.

Forza Motorsport 3įor many studios, the pursuit of realism only goes as far as recording the ping of an M1 Garand as its last round is expended. It might take up less space, but you’ll scratch all the words. Just don’t stand this article on its side when you’re reading it. Which means that a list of the very best Xbox 360 games is packed with absolute stonkers, from shooters, to simulation, and the names that introduced indie gaming to the mainstream.

But there’s a reason we put up with the console’s quirks - it offered probably the best, and certainly most diverse, catalogue of its generation. Xbox 360 fans, let me hear you roar! I’m speaking directly, of course, to the incredibly noisy hardware in Microsoft’s machine.