Nostalgia is a form of grieving - gaming nostalgia doubly so. Falling back in love with the Xbox 360

 

I've spent the last few weeks falling back in love with the Xbox 360. First, through the excellent Xenia emulator on the Steam Deck which does a pretty good job of emulating most games at a fair old lick, but then via the gentleman to the left - the OG Xbox 360, the "Red Ring of Death" toting console that - by modern standards - sounds like a spinning jenny when it's switched on and reading from its optical drive. 

At home the cupboard of doom (the gaming cupboard where all my old collection is kept) had a stack of Xbox 360 titles in it, and I figured that it would probably be interesting to see what these look like - and more importantly play like - compared to modern console titles. 

So out it came, along with a joypad that had thumbsticks that were so worn flat from 20 years of use that they were practically non-existent. 

I switched it on, expecting to either see red rings of death, or for the thing to just not work at all, but Microsoft (back then at least) knew how to make good kit, and the new improved fixed Xbox 360 Arcade (as it was known, the model to the left at least) came up straight away. 

After an archaeological dig through the pile of old games, still boxed and in excellent condition, I present my findings below. 

On with the games

Without a doubt, the Xbox 360 was THE console for excellent arcade racers. From the brilliant work of Bizarre Creations and their truly stunning PGR3 and PGR4, through to their also excellent Blur (a game that doesn't work on ANY other console other than the OG 360), I had a lot of fun playing their titles, and as the top of this review says, grieving over the loss of a truly talented bunch of developers who really knew how to make playable and smooth racing games with a long-tail lifespan. 

I rattled through quick rounds of PGR4, Blur and the OG Xbox versions of PGR and PGR2 (which both work nicely on the Xbox 360 - OG Xbox titles are well supported, and back then Backward Compatibility was a courtesy, not a method of wringing more cash out of people who have already bought a stack of games and still owned them). 

Then I moved on to Black Rock Studios' output under Disney. Pure (a quad-bike racing game that is just so ridiculously playable and satisfying that it beggars belief that it wasn't a bigger hit) and Split / Second (probably one of the best arcade racers in history, let alone on the Xbox 360) are still rock solid titles that hold up extremely well compared to modern titles. 

Moving studios across to Bugbear, I had a quick few rounds of Flatout Ultimate Carnage (a Wreckless-like racer that really chucks around loads of crashes and debris) and Ridge Racer Unbounded (a game that is absolutely nothing like any other Ridge Racer game) were loads and loads of fun. 

Where I ended up was with the stunning Skate series from EA / Black Box Studios. Skate being surprisingly still playable but a bit long on the load times, through Skate 2 (getting better) then the utterly peerless Skate 3 - a game that would make my "Top ten games of all time" if I was really pushed to name such a thing. All buttery smooth and brilliantly playable but sadly a bit too much for my Xbox 360 controller which was so worn out it couldn't cope with the finer controls and flips in those games. 

I ended up buying a brand new third party wired controller for my 360, for a shade under £14. Worth every penny as the more modern controller was really tight and controllable for games like Skate 3.

Ow my ears!

One thing that surprised me about the 360 was how bloody noisy it was. The optical drive sounded like a rattling sewing machine in operation, and the background hum of the internal fans on the 360 were pretty damned noisy too. Installing games to the hard disk (which I'd totally forgotten you could do!) made things a lot quieter, but still very noisy compared to modern consoles (that said, the PS5 isn't exactly silent, the Xbox One is slightly better as it has a nice quiet optical drive and quiet / large fans). 

Thankfully I tend to wear over-ear headphones when I game, so I was doing OK with hearing the in-game sounds and music. 

Overall, revisiting the Xbox 360 was a solid console, which still works beautifully and doesn't require you to update games or log into some online account to access them. The games you own are still good and still load off the disk, you're not just getting an unlock key to download the game from some drip-fed server. It made me realise that I would buy the heck out of a modern silent upscaled version of that console with perhaps smoother frame rates and higher resolutions. All the games are still amazing and still compare exceptionally well to their modern counterparts (and in a lot of cases, you really don't GET that many modern equivalents of some of the better games, sadly). 

Could this be my favourite gaming platform of all time? It's certainly top 3, that's for sure