Essential 360 exclusives

[clyde]

Man, now I want to play Shadowrun, but there's no way I'll be able to find an online match.

This would be a great candidate for the free-games-with-gold program. That would get the population up. And it's not like they will ever be able to sell more new copies.

[Bjorn]

Oh, speaking of Kinect (Dance Central above), if you have a Kinect The Gunstringer is a must play.  It's one of the most charming and well built Kinect games there is.  Simple gameplay that captures the spirit of the old light gun games in an arcade. Co-op is fun too, but we had some problems consistently keeping both players registered.

[Salacious Snake]

And if you have any love for stuff like Mad Dog McCree, the Wavy Tube Man Chronicles DLC for the Gunstringer is also worthwhile!

[Eric]

I bought an Xbox 360 for the sole purpose of playing Skate and those are still the only games I play on it. I've probably spent less on games than on the console. Exclusives are hell

[miffy495]

I haven't played it, but I really liked Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox 360, and NG2 was a 360 exclusive. The first one was pretty hard.

 

Untrue. The Sigma edition came to everything. If I wanted to play it, I could put it on my Vita. I already got Sigma one for free through PS+ for it, but don't really care about Sigma 2.

[JonCole]

Sigma only came to PlayStation platforms, not "everything". Not only that, but it's a different game. It's rewritten from the ground up, and the visuals are noticeably different as a result. There are also several missing or altered scenes from the 360 version to Sigma, and extra scenes in Sigma that aren't in the 360 version.

 

It may be a fine distinction, but there is a difference between a multiplatform game and a port/remake.

[feelthedarkness]

oh busted! I forgot about the Sigma (and Sigma 2) versions! 

[BadHat]

I wanted to say Hexen but I guess they brought that to other stuff. I got a 360 near launch with a few games and spent my first week or two mostly just playing that instead. Geometry Wars 2 was great too, some really creative modes, especially fun if you were constantly edging friends out of their top score.

[Squid Division]

Not sure if anyone else mentioned them, but Forza 2, 3, 4 are amazing, and actually some of the best RPGs of the generation.

[twmac]

How the fuck have we got this far in the thread without mentioning one of the greatest games of the last generation: Earth Defence Force 2017?

 

Splinter Cell: Conviction ended up being way better than I expected.Skulls of the Shogun is massively underrated and State of Decay was great.

[JonCole]

How the fuck have we got this far in the thread without mentioning one of the greatest games of the last generation: Earth Defence Force 2017?

 

Splinter Cell: Conviction ended up being way better than I expected.Skulls of the Shogun is massively underrated and State of Decay was great.

 

All three of the latter games were also released on PC.

 

This thread is increasingly "Essential games that were once or only perceived to be 360 exclusives"

[SecretAsianMan]

When I think of exclusive, I usually take that to mean exclusive among the consoles.  That's how most of these games are marketed anyway.  If we want to interpret exclusive literally, then this is going to be a short list.

[Sno]

Well, then Alan Wake? I did play Alan Wake when it was 360 exclusive.

That's really the story of 360 exclusivity though, especially if you look to a lot of those indie games like Braid and Castle Crashers. They were exclusive to the 360 for anywhere between six months up to a couple years, and then they eventually ended up on other platforms too. (It certainly can be argued that this is not actually a bad thing for Microsoft or for the developers they work with, it just makes it hard to pin down what counts as an exclusive.)

How about this one: Ace Combat 6, which is actually exclusive and is a pretty fantastic flight combat game with a few caveats. (Mainly that its multiplayer is hacked up into tons of small DLC packs. Most of it was inessential and largely cosmetic, some of it was definitely not.)

The game is incredibly beautiful though, and the campaign is awesome; massive, expansive battles and an amusingly overwrought and self-serious narrative set in that franchise's "strangereal" alternate-Earth fiction. (I think AC6 was the last game set in that universe before they abandoned it for real-world locales.) If anybody's never played an AC game before, AC6 is actually a pretty great one to start with. It has a few good accessibility concessions, like high-g turns, without just full-on jumping the shark and doing QTE stuff like the later Assault Horizon games did. (By extension, if all you've played is the Assault Horizon games, you should check out AC6.)

AC6 is also responsible for this thing existing for the 360.

[BadHat]

All three of the latter games were also released on PC.

 

This thread is increasingly "Essential games that were once or only perceived to be 360 exclusives"

 

Well I mean, looking over that exclusives list linked earlier in the thread was a little depressing. Besides the big name stuff, it seems like a lot of the titles that actually stayed exclusive are relics of Microsoft's desperate push to make Xbox relevant in Japan (did that ever actually pay off?).

[Sno]

Besides the big name stuff, it seems like a lot of the titles that actually stayed exclusive are relics of Microsoft's desperate push to make Xbox relevant in Japan

Yeah, that's pretty much the case.

 

(did that ever actually pay off?).

No, it did not.

[Sno]

So this is an unfortunate one, because you can't play this game anymore. Still, for me, it was a defining 360 game: Chromehounds.

 

So how about a massive faction and clan-based multiplayer metagame mech sim? (WIth gameplay at the far end of slow, lumbering machines.)

You join your squad, your squad joins a faction, and you fight across nodes on a metagame map where each node represents a unique map to fight over. There are loosely defined roles, like snipers and heavy gunners and scouts and commanders. (Backed by an incredibly elaborate mech building system where you're assembling almost lego-like contstructs of support struts and armor panels and weapons/engines/fuel tanks/etc, each piece having its own health bar and consequences for failing.)

You go find a match on your faction's frontlines, and you're out there trying to either destroy the enemy's base or the entire enemy team. You capture commuications towers that each have a certain range, and only in that range can you voice chat with your team, requiring multiple towers with contiguous communication fields for long-range communication. (It's been a long time, but i think the commander's gear could also see, on their personal map, any enemies within the contiguous communication field controlled by their team.)

This whole system led to things like an enemy scout being able to maneuver behind your lines and steal a tower to break communication between a forward group and a defending group on your team, for example.

You might also see scouts and commanders calling out map locations of enemies, for a heavy gunner to then do some simple head calculations based on their personal map so they can line-up their range finder for some long-range artillery bombardment.

Chromehounds was amazing... For about a year. It had some pretty massive balance problems stemming partly from its very free-form builds and moreso from people figuring out that heavy gunners could do just as well on the front lines. The introduction of the Xbox Live party system also proved ruinous for all of its communication-based game systems. Finally, people eventually figured out bugs that let them ignore things like the load limit in the mech lab and it was pretty much over. Sega shut down the dedicated servers for the game a few years ago, and so with the exception of a tiny, boring tutorial campaign, you cannot play Chromehounds anymore.

Even if it got a sequel, with things like Skype being so commonly used these days, it's a game that couldn't work anymore.

From's later Armored Core V games adopted a lot of the metagame and teamwork wackiness of Chromehounds, but AC is obviously a much, much faster paced game. There is far less of the incredibly deliberate, cautious scouting and strategy that defined Chromehounds in its prime. (ACV also kind of sucks. Verdict Day is pretty awesome though.)

[BadHat]

No, it did not.

 

Figured so. I always kind of wanted to pick up some of Cave's stuff, but there's no way I could justify the price.

[Sno]

Figured so. I always kind of wanted to pick up some of Cave's stuff, but there's no way I could justify the price.

You can find copies of the localized versions of Akai Katana for pretty cheap, and it's a really fantastic game.

 

Cave did just absolutely tons and tons of stuff on the 360, only a few of them got released outside of Japan. PAL regions got one of the DoDonPachi games, both PAL/NA got Deathsmiles and Akai Katana and a couple random other things, NA actually got the second Deathsmiles as a weird unlocalized digital-only release.

 

Treasure and G.Rev both also did a lot of weird stuff exclusively for the 360.

 

The first thing Treasure did was port Ikaruga to XBLA. Not as exciting as the other things, since Ikaruga's available in a lot of places and a version of the XBLA port is now even coming to Steam. (Unfortunately, the XBLA version is a little thin on features, the GC release is still probably the best version of the game.) Radiant Silvergun being ported to XBLA was way more exciting, by both being more or less the definitive version of the game, and the earlier releases being incredibly rare. Then the last thing they did was, depending on how you count, the 3rd or 4th Bangai-O game. (As it's an actual exclusive, I'd love to say it's awesome, but i think it might actually be the weakest game in that series. The stages are puzzle-like to a fault, and the game is just savagely difficult, even for me.)

G.Rev, on the other hand, put out a pretty rad and underappreciated shmup called Strania: The Stella Machina on XBLA, and they also put out the Senko no Ronde games exclusively on the 360. (Ubisoft localized the first one with a terrible new title, but left the game largely intact. It's dirt cheap to pick up because nobody bought it and critics slammed it. I really love it though, i think it's awesome. If anybody's into anything like Virtual On, they'd definitely be into it.)

Speaking of Virtual On, a bunch of those games were remade for the 360, but only Oratorio Tangram was released worldwide. (Which is maybe fine, because Oratorio Tangram is the best one, and its XBLA release is its best version.)

[SecretAsianMan]

So this is an unfortunate one, because you can't play this game anymore. Still, for me, it was a defining 360 game: Chromehounds.

 

Man, I didn't think anyone else liked Chromehounds.  I'm generally not into the mech genre because the action tends to be slower than I'd like, but I did enjoy Chromehounds.  I remember thinking at the time that the game looked really beautiful, and I was for some reason especially impressed by the game's ability to smoothly zoom in the camera in a realisitic way.

[Sno]

Man, I didn't think anyone else liked Chromehounds.  I'm generally not into the mech genre because the action tends to be slower than I'd like, but I did enjoy Chromehounds.  I remember thinking at the time that the game looked really beautiful, and I was for some reason especially impressed by the game's ability to smoothly zoom in the camera in a realisitic way.

 

I might be wrong, but i think it's one of the few 360 games that runs in true 1080p. Its environments were very sparse, but the hounds themselves and the various visual effects were all very nice. Night battles, in particular, were quite impressive to behold. Especially if your hound gets destroyed and you're forced to wander the field as a helpless infantryman, viewing the battle from a new perspective and seeing distant muzzle flashes light up the night sky.

[Dewar]

Man, I didn't think anyone else liked Chromehounds.  I'm generally not into the mech genre because the action tends to be slower than I'd like, but I did enjoy Chromehounds.  I remember thinking at the time that the game looked really beautiful, and I was for some reason especially impressed by the game's ability to smoothly zoom in the camera in a realisitic way.

 

Eventually all the scouts with the explosive spikes that could just run at the base and destroy it in a couple of hits ruined the game for me, but I loved that thing.

[Sno]

Eventually all the scouts with the explosive spikes that could just run at the base and destroy it in a couple of hits ruined the game for me, but I loved that thing.

 

Pile rushers are just why you always needed a good defensive contingent protecting the base.

[mikemariano]

I forgot about Snoopy Flying Ace, an Xbox 360 exclusive multiplayer dogfighting game.

 

I thought the demo was fun [EDIT: No I didn't.], and the full game entertained Sean Vanaman with decent dogfights and aerial tricks.

 

EDIT: Just did a quick Twitter search to see two former top Snoopy Flying Ace players reminiscing about the game and how empty the game is now.

[Squid Division]

Chromehounds is the best, but will unfortunately be lost to time. You kinda had to be there to experience it, and it'll probably be impossible to recreate. I never got a hang of the arcing weapons though, because for some reason they decided to make you have to adjust up so much that the think you're shooting at is no longer on screen. I'm really good at arcing shots like that, but I have to be able to see what I'm shooting at. It was a weird decision.

[Sno]

I want to bump this thread back up to talk about a game i really like, but was a game that had slipped my mind until just now.

Guilty Gear 2 Overture came out in 2008 and is an RTS game that leans fairly distinctly towards being a Lords Management, but retains having an army to control and puts you in direct third-person control of your hero. It's kind of clunky and ugly, but i love it.

 

It was a game that mostly everybody kind of dismissed out of hand when it came out. It's easy to understand why, it's an incredibly strange thing. Guilty Gear fans didn't want it because it wasn't a fighting game, and because it was branded under the umbrella of a fighting game franchise, strategy fans were never going to even look at it. (Additionally, because the third-person action is built around a fairly complex combo-oriented fighting system, it's a game that's really only accessible to a narrow slice of gamers who enjoy both genres.)

Probably not a great game, but one i played a lot with friends and always really enjoyed spending time with.