Soundtracks are incredibly unappreciated throughout all games. Some soundtracks can be amazing, while some can be only mediocre. Here is a list of some of the more fantastic soundtracks the Xbox Team has ran into throughout the Xbox 360’s life span. Music/rhythm games are excluded.
Hello and welcome to the new Xbox 360 feature (derived from the mind of Josh Margolis) called The Great Debate. This feature will be a recurring feature that will happen whenever we think a good news topic has popped up that we would all like to discuss a bit. During the great debate, I (Jay Malone) will type out the people that are discussing the current topic at hand’s opinions and what they say and then put it in front of your eyes to read.
This week it is more of a great agreement as myself, Josh Margolis, and Tristan Wong cuddle around a fire, sip hot chocolate, and talk about the Taliban. In it, Josh makes racist Taliban noises, I don’t say much, and Tristan is not a fan of Men of Valor. Join us as we discuss, agree, and debate about the Taliban and the reasons the Armed Forces are against it.
Fallout: New Vegas releases later this month and though it may seem similar to Fallout 3, it’s actually a very big deal for the series. Despite the blockbuster success of Fallout 3, the series has endured a bumpier road than one might expect. Though New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment may be a new name to the series, the studio is actually composed of members of the original Fallout team and New Vegas is the first chance they have had to return to their series in over a decade. To get a better grasp on this, let’s get in the Wayback Machine and head back to where Fallout began, the magical year of 1997…
EndWar is the newest RTT (Real-Time-Tactics) from famed author Tom Clancy (new universe?) and a fitting one with the same tactical espionage, same “what-if?” same shady characters; the whole nine yards of a Tom Clancy game. Set in modern times, it’s a very… standard war game—Russia is at war with the US, but then what the hell… let the Europeans band together and fight as well, because they to want a piece of the pie. As a real-time tactical game on the console, it is such a jarring fit for such an ambitious game marred by some annoying camera issues and visual scrapings that I believe to ruin the games presentation and general likability of the whole scene.
When somebody says the word “superhero,” you usually don’t picture Wolverine combing through his inventory and agonizing over how high his defense stat could be.
Yet that’s the picture painted by X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse. You would think the over-the-top antics of comic book superheroes and stat-driven RPG gameplay would be an awkward mash-up, yet X-Men Legends and its successors, the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games, managed to make that series work for the better part of a decade.
With Halo: Reach, Bungie has ended its tenure of one of the most influential series in the video game industry. We are all familiar with the accolades by now – Halo was the Xbox’s killer app, the series that legitimized Microsoft’s stake in the console business, the herald of Xbox Live, and a multi-million dollar, platinum gajillion-seller franchise.
The Xbox 360 has had its share of amazing games; games like most of the Halo series, Mass Effect 2, and Gears of War have definitely kept us playing our 360’s into the long hours of the night. But there are some games that just don’t hit the gaming sweet spot. These are the games that make you lament the fact that you turned on your console.
Welcome to Origins, a new player affinity feature where a writer will introduce or reacquaint our readers to the history, games, greatest hits and spectacular failures of a classic video game series.
With Castlevania: Lords of Shadow coming out next week, I figured we’d run through the 25 year history of Castlevania; from its platforming 8-bit origins, to its masterpieces and follies, laying down some knowledge about some of the more notable editions in the horror title’s history.
An addiction is a dependence on a substance or action. For instance, there are many people who are addicted to cigarettes and alcohol and still others who are addicted to sex. There is one addiction; however, that does not formally exist in psychological literature, video game addiction. Video game addiction is part of a larger set of compulsive conditions, such as compulsive gambling and compulsive eating. These kinds of conditions are not normal forms of addictions as they don’t rely on substance dependence like the one users get from alcohol and the nicotine in cigarettes. Instead, these users feel like something is wrong if they don’t do the actions, like something is out of place. They don’t do these actions because they make them feel good; they do them because they feel they need to.
Last gen you couldn’t go a year without at least five Japanese RPGs coming out. However, these days they are quite rare. In fact this generation alone I’m sure you can count the number of JRPGs with your hands (if not just one). However we have gotten a few gems out of the genre this generation, and I have to say Lost Odyssey is one of the good ones. It can almost be said that Lost Odyssey is the true Final Fantasy XIII. Sure it lacks the innovation that Final Fantasy XIII brought to the table, but it the soul of the series. Something Lost Odyssey seems to have inherited.
