Reasons to Still Own an Original Xbox
It seems everyone and their dog has an Xbox 360 now. Certainly more than ever owned an original Xbox; the Xbox 360 officially outsold its predecessor in November 2008, achieving sales in three years that the venerable old black & green box managed in the four before it was replaced. It was a definite step forward for Microsoft, as well as one in the eye for the critics who felt MS had no place in the video game market. In fact, the word “Xbox” itself has become practically synonymous with the 360, and references to the original machine often need to be clarified as such.
Largely, the original Xbox has been rendered obsolete as Microsoft sought to expand the 360’s backwards compatibility with old Xbox titles. This was quite a task, considering how different the 360’s internal architecture is compared to the Xbox’s, and also because nVidia (suppliers of the Xbox’s graphics processor) and Microsoft had a very public falling out resulting in almost no co-operation in the venture. From a shaky start – launch 360s, out of the box, were only backwards compatible with Halo and Halo 2 – the line-up of BC games was expanded every few months. Eventually, Microsoft ceased development of the backwards compatibility in November 2007, with some 51% of original Xbox games playable on the 360. Many of these are some of the older console’s best and most popular games, and chances are if there’s an old Xbox game you want to play on your 360, it will work – if, of course, you have a hard drive on your 360 (a requirement since all original Xboxes had hard drives and as such the games were written and designed with that in mind).
Nevertheless, there are a handful of gems in the Xbox’s surprisingly strong library that remain unsupported by the 360, for various reasons; and considering the lack of demand for original Xboxes now, a perfectly working example of the system can be bought for a very low price, if you don’t already have one hanging around and taking up space in your closet. Even better, most Xbox games are now extremely cheap, assuming you can find them since EB and Gamestop no longer carry them. So, if you’re in the market for some wallet-friendly entertainment – and who isn’t in the current economic climate? – here’s a few suggestions for non-backwards-compatible games for an old Xbox.
GUNVALKYRIE
In the immediate aftermath of Sega’s transition from hardware maker to third-party publisher, the company released several games for the Xbox exclusively. Some of these, notably the excellent Panzer Dragoon Orta and Jet Set Radio Future, would later become playable on the 360, but the steampunk-with-a-twist shooter GunValkyrie never did. Quite why is a mystery, and it’s a shame because it remains one of the unsung treasures of the Xbox’s line-up.
First of all, if you’re afraid of a bit of a challenge in your games, skip this entry entirely. GunValkyrie is a game utterly unapologetic for its steep learning curve, unique control scheme and savage difficulty. However, mastering the somewhat esoteric controls results in nothing short of a symphony of poetic motion very few games ever achieve, let alone a third-person shooter like this one. What could have become – and what may initially seem – like a somewhat substandard bug-hunt instead reveals itself to be the sort of game that would’ve been right at home amongst the late, lamented Dreamcast’s library of unusual classics, and somewhat cemented the Xbox’s status (more so than any of its contemporaries) as the Dreamcast’s spiritual successor.
WRECKLESS: THE YAKUZA MISSIONS
While the PS2 was riding high on the staggering success of Grand Theft Auto III, Xbox owners were left wondering if they’d ever get anything to compete. For a brief time before its release, Wreckless was held up as the Xbox’s answer to the GTA3 juggernaut. Quite frankly, it wasn’t, but it was a pretty entertaining game in its own right and was an amazing technical achievement to boot.
Wreckless’ plot is more or less irrelevant. The game drops players into various missions in an open-world rendition of Hong Kong, ostensibly to take down the Yakuza, but you could easily be forgiven for ignoring that. Not only are the game’s graphics absolutely spectacular, with filtering and depth-of-field effects rarely seen even on modern games, the level of destruction possible in the game’s environments is completely insane. Smashing through an entire market while chasing Yakuza cars, demolishing an entire mall, rampaging through dim sum stands in a monster truck; it’s all here and rendered so beautifully you’d swear it was a next-gen game. And, while the story may be completely forgettable and the game sadly doesn’t offer a free-roaming mode, the missions are varied and entertaining, and the CCTV-style replays are fantastic to watch.
The Gamecube and PS2 versions of Wreckless added weapons to vehicles (as seen in their adjusted cover art), but suffered a massive graphical downgrade as well. Since the game’s primary value is as a technical showcase for amazing-looking destruction, these versions are best avoided.
DEAD OR ALIVE: XTREME BEACH VOLLEYBALL
Cheesecake. That’s the one and only reason to play DOAX, right? Well, actually, no. The most surprising thing about this game is that there’s actually a game there.
The central volleyball game itself is simple, but fun. You control one girl while the AI plays as your teammate (it’s always two-on-two), but you can override the AI by using the right analog stick. Other than that, the control is as simple as it gets; D-pad or left analog stick, and two face buttons (one spikes and blocks, the other receives and sets). Jumping is automatic. Tomonobu Itagaki, the head of developers Team Ninja when the game was made, stated he wanted to make a game simple enough for his young daughter to play, and he largely succeeded. Whether or not the game’s impossibly-proportioned protagonists are similarly suitable for younger eyes is definitely a cultural divider; while it may be considered fine in its native Japan, it received an M-rating from the ESRB in America, unusually for a game with a social focus, no violence and only implicit (rather than explicit) sexual content.
Besides the surprisingly enjoyable volleyball, the game also offers a casino with several games to gamble on, and a pseudo-dating sim mechanic which forms a good chunk of the main game. Winnings can be spent on assorted outfits (of varying skimpiness) and trinkets, either for yourself or to give as gifts to the other girls to get them to like you more, usually so they’ll team up with you for volleyball. Even the game’s soundtrack offers an array of upbeat, summery pop music – mostly European, so if you’re afraid of J-pop you needn’t worry – that fits the atmosphere perfectly. There’s also a local two-player mode, but it’s only adversarial, not co-operative.
Get past the admittedly very in-your-face “zomg tits!” aspect and DOAX is an unusual and surprisingly fun diversion. The same can’t be said for its execrable 360 sequel, which beyond naturally improved graphics and Xbox Live two-player (replacing, rather than in addition to, the local two-player), is an inferior product in every way by a huge margin and should be given a very wide berth.
ODDWORLD: STRANGER’S WRATH
The Oddworld series originally gained its fame with two titles on the PlayStation and PC, and continued onto the original Xbox with two further games. The last of these, Stranger’s Wrath, became a poster child for the ire many Xbox fans felt towards publisher Electronic Arts in the waning years of the Xbox; since EA had picked the game up when Microsoft declined to publish it, EA asked developers Oddworld Inhabitants to port the Xbox-exclusive game to the PlayStation 2 as well. When Oddworld Inhabitants replied that that would have been simply impossible, EA decided to shove the title out onto shelves with the barest minimum of publicity (its only other Xbox exclusive to that point had been the original Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a game which practically sold itself). The result was that Stranger’s Wrath was critically hailed as a spectacular game, and sold abysmally. Later, of course, it would be left out in the cold again (perhaps Microsoft simply following up on dropping the game from its publishing deal?), as it never became a backwards-compatible title on the 360.
Primarily combining third-person platforming with first-person shooting, Stranger’s Wrath takes the Oddworld series in a new direction with a distinctly Wild West flavor. The titular Stranger needs to raise money for a procedure with a doctor, and so he takes on the cowboy role to bring in the bad guys.
Unusually, Stranger only has one weapon – a crossbow. It’s the ammo he loads it with, however, that makes the game so unique and memorable. It’s live ammo with a difference – it’s actually alive. Stranger will find many different types of small and rather peculiar creatures in his travels, such as skunks that produce gas clouds, spiders to web up opponents, electrically-charged zapflys, and chippunks (see what they did there?) that do no damage but instead start spewing out insults, distracting enemies who will try and step on them to shut them up.
Stranger’s Wrath is a sublime and supremely inventive action game that every owner of an original Xbox should have in their collection.
STEEL BATTALION
$200 at launch. A proprietary controller three feet wide, with about 40 buttons, as well as a gearshift and two joysticks. Oh, and a set of three foot pedals. Steel Battalion was built for the hardcore.
There’s no point going into the worthless plot, but at its simplest, Steel Battalion is a mech game taken to its extreme. Its mechs are called Vertical Tanks, or VTs, and live up to the name – these beasts are huge, heavy, cumbersome and often pug-ugly. You will drive these things in missions where you’ll usually end up blowing up enemy VTs. So far, so standard, right?
Wrong. Steel Battalion is relentlessly unforgiving. If your VT is destroyed and you fail to eject in time (by hitting the eject button on the controller’s top-right, and by the way it’s under a clear plastic flip-up cover), you are dead. Done. Finished. You’ll have to start the entire game again from the beginning. And don’t even think about ripping the Xbox’s power cord out before it can save that data; it’s already done it. To compound this supremely draconian element, the game is also savagely hard to begin with. And the only way to pause the game is to disconnect that mammoth controller.
Neat details abound; in early first-generation VTs, you’ll only have a black-and-white exterior view. Color appears as you move up to more advanced machinery. The controller will take you through a full start-up sequence at the start of every mission, so make sure those switches are in the right place and that you time your punching of the start button accurately.
The game would later receive a full-priced, online-only expansion called Steel Battalion: Line of Contact. This added significantly improved graphics and support for 720p resolution. Unfortunately, this was the era in which Capcom simply couldn’t produce netcode to save their lives, and the game was plagued by horrendous lag issues despite its six-player maximum. It did feature a persistent campaign, as Sega’s Chromehounds would a few years later on the 360, but this was ultimately shut down to save Capcom the expense of maintaining the servers. Thankfully, the instant action mode required only basic Xbox Live infrastructure and remained up, and Capcom issued a patch that made all the unlockable VTs, environments and equipment available.
While Steel Battalion doesn’t really fit into the more thrifty theme of this article, it can now be had for significantly less than its launch price, and is surprisingly easy to track down considering its fairly limited print run.
And here’s a couple that are backwards compatible, but still have more things to offer if you have an old Xbox kicking around next to your 360:
HALO
The system-defining Halo more or less single-handedly invented the concept of the console-based LAN (local area network) party, previously the domain of PC gamers almost exclusively. Halo could handle four player split-screen multiplayer on up to four networked Xboxes, using very basic and standard PC networking gear, for a total of sixteen players. The game also shipped with 13 multiplayer maps, including some uniquely-designed maps that provide a variety of gameplay styles not seen in the sequel games. The classic, of course, is Blood Gulch; a large outdoor map that would later serve as the primary location for the popular web series Red Vs Blue, and was ultimately heavily modified into Halo 2’s Coagulation map. Other great Halo maps include Boarding Action, set on a spacecraft ripped in two, with five vertical levels each visible from the other side for some classic sniper action; Hang ‘em High, later remade as Halo 2’s Tombstone, which is wide open but full of cover, narrow catwalks, and cramped corridors; Sidewinder, the vast U-shaped arena covered in snow and ice which later inspired Halo 3’s downloadable Avalanche map; and Battle Creek, with two large bases in very close proximity which makes for classic CTF matches.
If you have friends willing to temporarily ditch Xbox Live in favor of the more intimate local setting, Halo makes a valuable addition to your library so long as you have enough copies (one per console), and since it is fully backwards compatible, you can happily jack your 360 into the network as well. Hell, it’s probably already there!
SPLINTER CELL: CHAOS THEORY
This remains probably the highlight of Ubisoft’s long-running stealth-action franchise, offering not only a spectacular single-player campaign which offered more flexibility than its extremely linear predecessors, but also an expanded and refined version of the multiplayer mode which first appeared in Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, and an all-new two-player co-operative mode with its own story running parallel to the main campaign, and with a host of new gameplay features revolving around the two-person mechanic – even going so far as to take conversation between the players themselves over their Xbox Live headsets into the game world, so while you’re discussing what to do next with your partner, a nearby guard may very well hear you and come to investigate!
Unfortunately, while the single-player game survives the backwards-compatibility process virtually unscathed – impressive considering the liberties the development team took with the Xbox’s hardware to achieve the game’s spectacular visuals – the two other modes were not so lucky. The multiplayer suffers a bizarre glitch where the spy team shows up to players on 360s with a green outline when using their optic camouflage, completely defeating the point of the gadget and unbalancing the game in favor of the mercenary team. Worse, the co-operative mode suffers a hard lock a short way into the first mission, making this mode effectively useless.
While some players shrug off the multiplayer’s optic camo glitch or stick to multiplayer on one of the series’ other iterations, the co-op mode alone is worth the trouble of playing the game on an original Xbox. It can be played split-screen, over system link or over Xbox Live, and even has two free extra maps available for download.
Not only was Buffy the first exclusive Xbox game, it was a excellent beat-’em-up that you didn’t even need to be a fan of the show to enjoy. If that’s not BC it’s a damn crime!
Google says $100 for Steel Battalion, getting near my price range, though I should probably hold off until getting the Forza wheel.
Read a blog at night. In this post, let me fascinated … writings of great landlord.