Video Gamers Podcast - Bonus Round: Top 5 Xbox 360 Games - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

Gaming hosts Paul and Josh are bringing you a truly incredible episode. An icon in gaming history, the Xbox 360 is chock full of amazing games, but which ones stand out as some of the best? We answer that question as both hosts pick their top 5 Xbox 360 games and share why some made the list, and others ended up on the gaming room floor. If you’re a video game fan, trust us, you don’t want to miss this one! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad  Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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we love talking about gaming, we're so excited to be talking to you guys here today as we break down our top five list of games that came out on the Xbox 360. If you have not already done so, please rate our podcast five stars, make sure to leave a review and we might read it on the show. And also if you head over to multiplayer squad.com, you can become a Patreon supporter, which will give you access to exclusive quick take episodes.

You'll have a shout out on the show, and you can also support us by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. I am your host, Paul. And then joining me here today, he's got his 360 wrapped in a towel, praying to the gaming gods that it'll be resurrected from the dead, from the red ring of death. It's Josh. Man, you're bringing back some bad memories paul do you know oh boy remember the days of like turning on your xbox 360 and seeing the green light and just being like oh thank goodness you know and then all of a sudden you'd go to turn it on or it would crash and then it's just red and then you just just go like, no, no, no.

You just yank it out from the power slot as quickly as possible and just hope that by turning it back on, you won't get the red ring. Oh, man, so many memories about the 360. I can't wait to jump into it. Although before we do that today, you've got a couple of reviews that we're going to read here on the show, right? I will say this, man. The reviews have been rolling in lately. So thank you to everybody

that is submitting reviews for the show. We have gotten a lot of new reviews in the last couple weeks. We love seeing them. They help the show immensely. So thank you to everybody out there. If you have not left a review, please take the time to do so. It only takes a few seconds, but it is great. If you don't have an Apple phone, you know somebody that does. The Apple Podcast app is built into it. So all you got to do is find it, search for our podcast, leave a review. Good chance we're going to read it on the show, but it is one phenomenal way to help us out. So I've got a couple here. First one comes in from Wainerman.

And it is titled Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And the review says, I am your biggest fan. Yes, you do have fans. And I am your biggest. Why?

Because I am. You guys are what? Awesome. All right. So I think the keyword in this review is awesome. Am I getting that right? I was thinking it was wainer man, but you know. Yeah. Good old wainer man 01.

Thank you so much for the review. We really appreciate it. You're awesome too. And we're your biggest fan. Oh, you know what, Paul? I agree. I think so. Yeah.

At least until I read this next review. All right. This next one is titled Three Thumbs Up, and it comes from Pluko, who lives in Great Britain. So our friends from another

country there. And the podcast reads, a well-polished podcast from day one. No need to change anything. Good guys to listen to have a load of fun. Brings back my gaming days from the late 90s to 2008 and slowly twisting my arm to get back into gaming. Keep up the good work, guys. It's a three thumbs up from me. I don't know how often we are accused of being polished. I will take it. I do not think we were polished on day one, but I will definitely take the compliment. I'm fine with it. I don't know that anybody has ever accused me of being polished unless they're talking about my bald head. Exactly. So thank you, Pluko, for the review. Yeah. So man, like I said,

we've got lots rolling in. So please, if you haven't already, go ahead and leave us a review as well. Yeah, we really do appreciate it. It does help the show get out there more and show up on more listings. So it's a great free way to help us out. All right. So today's episode here, we have a bonus round episode. We do these every other Monday where we basically pick some kind of gaming topic. There's several different types of formats that we've done on these bonus rounds. And one thing that we have been doing the last couple of months, every once in a while, we will just make our own individual top five lists of something. And then we basically will bounce back and forth. We'll go through our selections for the top five,

whether it's like top five gaming series or top five shooters or whatever it might be. And today we decided, you know, we thought it was time to break down another console. And so we briefly talked about what we wanted to cover and ultimately we landed on the xbox 360 now i think that pretty much everybody would agree this is one of the greatest consoles of all time for sure on our show i believe we have crowned the nintendo 64 as the greatest console we had also talked about the the PlayStation 2 being right up there, neck and neck with it. But I think we probably would put the 360 third. Do you think that's fair? Yeah, that's like your podium at the Olympics, you know, where it's like the top

three get to stand there and stuff. These are your trifecta of best consoles. Yes. Now, I know the answer to this, but for some of our newer listeners, did you own an Xbox 360? Oh, I did, man. And I loved that thing. I had that console. I want to say I had that console for a decade, and it lasted me a really long time. I did actually run into the Red Ring of Death, and I know I made fun at the beginning of the show, but that was legitimately my reaction when I finally got hit with the red ring of death on that thing, man. But yes, the Xbox 360 is the console that I owned for the longest period of time and that I had the most playtime on. If I was going to say,

what's the one console that you played more than any other that was a part of your life more than any other console out there? It is hands down the Xbox 360. That is exactly what I was going to say as well. So the 360 was not my favorite console. I would probably give that to the 64, but I definitely clocked in the most hours with the 360 i actually worked at best buy when the 360s released oh and i have just in my memory stacks of returned 360s from the red ring of death and warranties you know being used on the 360 but what a fun time i mean it came out when i was 21 years old so this is a time when you have money, but you have zero responsibility. And I just spent an awful lot of time playing games. The 360 was more than happy to provide a plethora of amazing games.

I went to metacritic.com and went to go check out the highest rated Xbox 360 games. And I'm going to ask you a question, Josh. If I see a game that's rated 85 or higher, that means it's going to be a really, really good game. All right? Yeah. Just take a guess. How many games on the 360 do you think have a Metacritic rating of 85 or higher? Like percentage-wise or number-wise?

No, just how many game titles do you think had that kind of rating, 85 or higher? A lot is my guess. I'm going to say hundreds, to be honest with you. 174 games are rated 85 out of 100 or higher. I mean, it had a lot of really good games, man. You know, it had great exclusives, but it also had great games that weren't necessarily exclusive to just the Xbox 360. But that doesn't honestly surprise me. It's wild. And some of those games are still really good. Max Payne 3, which is a great game,

is the 139th best game on the 360, according to Metacritic. So the fact that you have 138 games that are way better than Max Payne 3, I think really speaks volumes. All right. Now, before we do jump in and break down our list, one last question for you. Was there any particular philosophy you had behind making your list of your top five? I tried to mix in a couple. I didn't want to just think about Xbox 360 exclusives, because what we're going to talk about is just top five games that we played or were available for the 360. And so if we go only exclusives, I feel like that limits it a little bit. Because that time when the Xbox 360 released, if I remember right, it released in 2005. Yeah, 2005.

Yeah. So that timeframe was... I know for you and I, it was a great time of life. You're playing with your buddies. You're having a good time. People are coming over. You're doing all that stuff. And I felt like it would be unfair for us to say, hey, what are the top five games on the 360 if we only considered exclusives? And so I feel like including all of the games out there is definitely the way to go. But at the same time, I wanted to make sure that I tried to think of some of the exclusive titles that were on there that were really, really good to jog the memory and bring back that feeling as well. So for me, it was just... There's games that I think are phenomenal that I intentionally did not include because they were

available across the board. And I think everybody knows about those games. So there may be a listener out there that at the end goes, well, I can't believe you didn't mention this game. How can you say it's a top five without including this one? I know. I did that on purpose. But it's like, I want games that jogged my memory or that I remember playing and thinking like, wow, this is really blowing my mind or this kicked off an entire series or something

like that. So I've got a little bit of a mix there. Yeah, I kind of or something like that. So I've got a little bit of a mix there. Yeah, I kind of did something somewhat similar. What I tried to hone in on are what are my personal top five games that I played on the 360. So for example, Red Dead Redemption 1 is an absolutely fantastic game. I played it on PS3. When I borrowed my friend's PS3, he and I would swap systems. So he bought a PS3, I bought a 360, and every once in a while, if we got bored,

we would swap our games and consoles and play each other's stuff. So I did not include Red Dead 1 because I played it on another system. Also, Elder Scrolls, I went through those on PC, so I did not include those on my list and also i did leave off a couple other titles i'm leaving off all of the mass effects because we have spoken about them uh ad nauseum at this point on the show and also i decided to leave halo 3 off my list because we just had a halo episode and i feel like we've talked a lot about Halo. So I kind of like put those to the side, you know, the ones we've spoken about a lot recently and then trying to just break down my top five that I personally played on 360. Currently removing Halo 3 off of

my list. You can include it if you want. Halo Reach, that one's out there too. Oh, man. All right. So how about you go first, Josh? And I think you and I don't have these in any particular order. It's just our top five. And then we'll basically say the game. The other person will say whether or not they had it on their list. And then we'll just spend a few minutes talking about it. Yeah. To be clear, you and I have not talked about our lists at all.

No, I have no idea what you have. We generally don't just to find out if we think the same on some stuff. So we do not know the games that each other is talking about here. Number one for me, this is the game that immediately jumped to mind for me. This was legitimately one of my favorite games on the Xbox. I thought it started an entire series that at the time was unlike any other. A lot of the mechanics in this game have been copied multiple, multiple times now. But dude, Gears of War. Gears of War on the Xbox 360 was, to me, was groundbreaking at the time. It really honed and

perfected cover-based mechanics. I don't know. I'm sure there was a game out there where you took cover before Gears of War, but Gears of War made it, number one, fun to take cover, necessary, but it had this almost cinematic feel to it. When you were rushing from one cover to the other and the camera would kind of pan down low behind your guy and shake, that just sucked you into the game so much. You felt like you were legitimately running for your life. I mean, the chainsaw gun, when you could get up close to one of the guys and just rip them in half was something that people really hadn't seen before in a game like this. It had through-the-roof production value. The story

was good. The shooting was top-notch, man. There really wasn't anything about Gears of War that I didn't like at the time. I thought it was just a phenomenal game to come to the Xbox 360. It set the stage for all the other Gears of War. Now, to be fair, I have not played Gears of War 5. The series started to get a little eh towards the end for me. But man, the original Gears of War, in my opinion, was absolutely top-notch. I still remember playing that game to this day. All right. So you picked Gears of War 1. Yes, correct. To be on your list. Okay. So I picked Gears of War 2.

Ah, not a bad choice. We can just kind of talk a little bit about the whole series, I guess, at this point. So since Gears of War has kind of fallen out of favor with the masses. And I don't really totally understand why that is. But Gears of War was a third person shooter. And basically, long story short, you've got the good guys who are the cog and you've got the bad guys who are the locust. And basically, the locust exists because there's like scientific experimentation gone wrong it mutates humans they end up going underground starting their own civilization they end up getting uh i don't even know the right word but basically there's a substance that they're exposed

to makes them want to kill all humans and so basically you are like humanity's last defense and you're trying to defeat and push back the Locust Horde. And one thing that I think is so funny about Gears 1 and 2 is that you play as Marcus Phoenix as the main protagonist, and he is such a gaming hero locked in time because he's got the soul patch, which is so firmly mid-2000s that it cracks me up seeing it today because it immediately looks like, oh, did he listen to Smash Mouth? That's exactly what I think when I see Marcus Fenix. I loved the characters in that game too, man. Like I said, it was one of the most complete games at the time. It really reminded me of Halo. We've been talking a lot of Halo lately, so I one of the most complete games at the time. It really reminded

me of Halo. We've been talking a lot of Halo lately, so I'm not going to beat that horse to death. But it really reminded me of that complete world building. You cared about the characters in that game. Humanity was desperate. You really felt like you were fighting for the fate of humanity. If you failed your mission, like, oh boy, there goes the world, buddy. And I love that the enemy in this game, the Locusts, they were humanoid in a lot of ways. They were super deadly. Humanity was losing. It just wasn't like this positive vibe at all. You really felt like you were there to save the world. And you had this grizzled group of these soldiers, Marcus Phoenix leading them. People remember Coltrane and stuff

like that from some of the later ones. But they did a phenomenal job of number one, making you feel like you were just one bad dude with your Lancer. I mean, your main gun was this Lancer, which was a machine gun, but had the chainsaw on the end. So you weren't afraid to get up close and personal. I really... It was just... Man, that game was so much fun to play. And the multiplayer component of that game... I don't know if you ever played the multiplayer component, but that was a top-notch multiplayer experience as well to play with your friends.

Did you know that they coined the term horde mode? No one used that before Gears of War 2. They're the ones who invented it. And see, that's what I'm seeing. The Gears of War series pioneered so many things. Number one, cover-based mechanics. Like I said, I'm not going to search through the video game archives to see if another game had cover-based mechanics or not. I'm sure there was one out there. But no one... You had Time Crisis in the arcades. That was cover-based,

stuff like that. Right. But nobody did it like Gears of War did it. You could dash from cover to cover and they had that cinematic sequence where, like I said, the whole camera angles, the sound design where you were stomping super heavy and then your guy would slam against the cover. Do you know what I mean? Everything just... You felt that game. And that's something that a lot of developers are missing nowadays is just that feeling of playing it. And it was such a memorable experience. I don't know how it translates. I have not played Gears of War in a very long time. So it would be interesting to try to go back and say like, oh, well, how does this game hold up nowadays? Maybe not so much because now lots and lots of games have cover-based mechanics and stuff like that. But man, back in the 360 days, this was one of the pinnacles of the Xbox 360, in my opinion. Yeah, I feel like they also threw in a lot of

just like flair to the game. It wasn't just shooting stuff. Like the chainsaw in and of itself would probably be enough. But even more than that, I don't know if you remember this, but in Gears 2, they introduced a mechanic where you could down an enemy and then pick them up and use them as a shield while shooting. So you could just an enemy and then pick them up and use them as a shield yes while shooting so you could just walk forward while this enemy's getting shot by his own buddies oh my goodness i i don't know if i've ever laughed as hard as holding down sprint with marcus who looks like he weighs i don't know 350 pounds yeah like these guys are built like i don't know, 350 pounds. Like these guys are built like, I don't know if it's just the suit, but they look like they belong in an animation cartoon.

They're just super bulky and just full out sprinting with that cinematic camera and then just chainsawing locust over and over. It was just so much glee and fun. I mean, you would just flat out chainsaw the locust in half. Like they would literally fully split in half. There's blood spurting everywhere, which kind of sounds gross, but since they're like mutants,

it, it, it wasn't, it didn't really feel really gory. It kind of felt like, um, what's the, the big bug movie,

Starship Troopers. Yeah. Over the top. It was so over the top that it wasn't like gory at that point it was just like splatter you know yes but like like that felt so good man that gun because the screen would shake it would zoom in on you it had this like little little sequence it you know that was great i think in two i don't remember if they had it in one but i know in gears of war 2 they introduced they introduced some of the vehicle sequences and stuff, almost like Halo had. Those were super fun. You cared about everything that was going on. The transition from one environment to another

as you progress through the story and why you were going from one area to the other, everything made perfect sense. The culmination of these games was incredible. I remember the end levels on both of them were just mind-blowing. This is so great to end this game this way or to fight the boss of the game and stuff like that. When you ask me, hey, what's one of the top games that you remember about the 360? Gears of War was my very initial game that just jumped to mind instantly. Yeah, I feel like if I think about the 360, I immediately go to Gears of War. So that's exactly what I thought about going into first.

Now, what's really funny is that in my head, I remember Gears 5 not having a whole lot of fanfare, but I saw that it actually got really good critical reviews, and they're not done. They're still making a Gears 6 game. I kind of thought the series was dead, so I don't really know why it fell out of favor so much, but the multiplayer was great. The co-op campaigns were great. I was talking to our buddy michael butler who was a guest host a couple episodes back and he immediately went to why don't we have more co-op shooter campaigns and i was even saying like we've got halo on the horizon but even when the campaign drops they're not going to have the co-op campaign yeah so we're going to have to wait but i do wish that we had that with more games. Yeah. I want to say, I think I played Gears of

War 4 was the last one I played. And I played that one a lot. The multiplayer in that one was pretty good. They really honed in on the horde mode. That was a lot of fun. I mean, it was just really done. It was really well done. I think that they need a little bit of innovation. That's the thing. I remember hearing about 5. I remember watching some videos, and I feel like exactly what you said. The general review is like, it's a fun game. There's nothing wrong with it necessarily. But I feel like they're getting to the point where they need some innovation at that point. Almost like Far Cry. Far Cry 6 came out. I have zero interest in playing it. I watched a lot of the reviews,

and they said it's literally just more of the same. Now, that same is not bad. If you like the Far Cry series, all of the games are perfectly fine. But for me, I'm starting to get tired of that... Same format. You know what I mean? Yeah, that format. So it's like, if you're giving me Far Cry 6, Far Cry 7, Far Cry 8, and they're all the same, I'm losing interest at that point. And I think that might be what happened with the Gears of War series. Yeah, you might be right.

All right. So you picked Gears of War 1. I had Gears of War 2. What you got next in your list? Boy, we just knocked out two of them right there, didn't we? Yeah, two for one. Next up for me, I mean, I guess this is an easy segue into this one. Gears of War 3? No, right?

We talk about an introduction into a series, and we talked about maybe that series being overdone or not innovating a whole lot. But man, sometimes the first entry is so good. So for me, Assassin's Creed. I remember when Assassin's Creed released. I remember the video watching the trailers for Assassin's Creed. And forgive me if I'm wrong here, but I think the guy's name was Enzo or Enzio was the initial guy in the initial Assassin's Creed. I could be wrong. So if you're an Assassin's Creed fan I could be wrong. So if you're an Assassin's Creed fan, I'm sorry. Sharpen your pitchforks. Yeah, exactly. I think it is Enzo.

I think it is. But I remember watching him climbing up to the top of the building and being perched up there. Number one, I don't fear a lot, but fear of heights triggers me really, really bad. That's one fear I can't really deal with. And I just see this guy standing at the super tippy top of this cathedral and then just swan diving down and landing in the hay cart. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was so cool looking, man. I was like, I want to do that. He had the little hidden dagger thing that would pop out of his wrist so he could blend into the crowds and then he could

assassinate people. And then the big thing was you, you had to get away. Like it wasn't just about killing people, right? Like other games, it's like, oh, go murder this guy. Have fun. But with Assassin's Creed, you had to do it in a different manner. You had to do it in a stealthy manner. You had to get away with it. You had multiple ways of approaching it. For me, that was, at the time, was very groundbreaking. There were not any games that had done it like that. Now, I don't know when Hitman came out, but Hitman never grabbed me. But Assassin's Creed, the initial one, boy, was that such an amazing game. And I remember playing the heck out of that game.

I remember being just completely enthralled with the gameplay. The climbing mechanics were super cool because they made it so intuitive to be able to climb up these huge towers in these cathedrals and stuff like that. So all of the control schemes were top-notch. The plot got a little weird. Especially as the entries went on. Right. Because, well, it was the whole like you're going back. I forget the machine that they had. It's been a while since I played in Assassin's Creed.

I'm not going to lie. But you had the machine to where it would rip you back to present day. And then you'd realize that you were living the memories of these people and actually going into those memories to affect the past and stuff like that as well. Which I thought was a very neat twist. So I really liked that almost sci-fi aspect that was very much like behind the scenes at that point. But man, the original Assassin's Creed did so much right at the time. And that was another game that was on the Xbox 360 that really just hit it out of the park for me. So this might sound super nerdy or super weird to our younger listeners. I remember the first time turning on Assassin's Creed and playing it with my buddy Curtis.

And we would just walk through crowds because games were not populated with hundreds of people like Assassin's Creed, where it would be a bustling marketplace. And if you tried to walk between people, he would put his hand on the one person's shoulder and turn sideways and squeeze through. You did not see stuff like that in games before Assassin's Creed. You didn't because at the time, we didn't have the processing power to do that. And that was another thing. I talk about the swan dive, but you hit the nail on the head, man. To see hundreds of people in a city moving around and living their lives, and then these crowds that would form, and your guy literally pushing people out of the way and nudging through them and shouldering, like turning sideways to kind of shoulder through people, that had not been done. We didn't have the power for it. And that kind of showcased the power of the Xbox 360

back in the day as well. Because you didn't see that anywhere else. And instead of like, it wasn't like you just clipped through them. No, no. You would actually nudge them out of the way and it looked real. And that was part of the whole,

getting the assassination done and then disappearing into the crowd and getting away and stuff like that. But yeah, at the time, that was an amazing feat of technology that really enhanced the immersion in that game. Yeah, it felt like a big leap up. Because right now i'm i'm going through the gta remastered games and i can jump into a group of people and i it's it's like very like crude like i'll just bowl people over and they go flying but assassin's creed just felt so like deft and just being able to just like smoothly walk your way through all of these people it was it was a complete blast i was very hit or miss with assassin's creed i think i played one two and then black flag because i love the idea of being on pirate ships oh see i never played black flag and i hear that's really good that's the last one yeah

that's the last one that i did yeah i i haven't played any of the the newer ones since then but yeah that's a great pick i love assassin's creed all right what do you next one on my list when you were talking about starting a great series i thought maybe you were going here i want to pick batman arkham asylum that was almost made my list it was on my honorable mentions okay not on your list so it's a good pick, though. Yeah, I also considered Arkham City, which I think most people prefer. I would even say I would probably prefer to play Arkham City today. But I wanted to go with Arkham Asylum because it was such a fun game. And it was like the first Batman game that actually worked really well it had mark hamill

voicing the joker who's always fantastic doing voice acting and it was such a fun plot the whole beginning of the game and i remember it being like a 10 minute cut scene which is like one of the worst things that you can do to start a game but in this one it was so necessary i know but it was necessary for the plot so what happens is you find out that there was a fire at the normal prison and they've had to move everyone into arkham asylum so arkham asylum is now loaded with all the crazies and all the regular criminals and joker ends up being caught but batman kind of knows he gave himself up. So what's Joker really planning to do? And so you escort him into Arkham Asylum

where he is immediately set free by his henchmen and he basically says, hey, I've planted bombs all around Arkham City and so what you need to do is you're not gonna have any outside help. You need to work your way through the asylum and do what I tell you and you have to fight through all of his henchmen. You get to fight a whole bunch of bosses like Poison Ivy, Bane, Killer Croc, Scarecrow, even Joker himself.

But what I like most of all about this game is it's more like Batman as a detective. The emphasis is on the stealth and the gadgets. It's not about just running around like Rambo and just fighting huge crowds of people. I love the fact that it was a little bit smaller, a little bit more self-contained, and it was just so neat to find a clue. Okay, well now let's turn on this special visor and i can see where this person sent went and we're gonna follow them and now we're gonna you know figure out the next piece

of what we're gonna go do and and i really really liked that it's funny because that arkham asylum is the game that stands out in my mind you know and i did play arkham city but see here's i don't remember arkham city like i do remember Arkham Asylum. And that's the thing. See, I very much remember. The second one had, like, the Riddler and Penguin and Mr. Freeze, and it was a little bit more open world. Yeah, see, but I liked... It's kind of like you said.

I liked the smaller atmosphere. I liked the detective aspect. I remember scanning rooms for the clues and stuff like that i remember the scarecrow fight that was trippy because scarecrow like was making you hallucinate and then he was this like you know 150 foot tall like godzilla looking scarecrow where he was just towering over you you know and it would change the perspective right because the game you were normally in third person view but then on the scacarecrow, it would go to a side-platform view, which was also really neat and trippy. Combat is so much fun. They're super polished. The boss fights are great. I mean, who doesn't love playing as Batman?

It's one of those series where I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that they've played them and didn't like them. Yeah. It's funny because if you read the Wikipedia page for Arkham Asylum, they talk about how it was determined to be, by Guinness World Records, the best batman game but then it was immediately superseded by arkham city like two years later which is kind of funny um one thing that i don't know if i even maybe i knew this back when the game first released but i did read that batman's suit takes gradual damage over the course of the game. So in the end game content, his suit's all scraped up and dented because it's not like he's swapping out.

Yeah, he's not going back to the Batcave and stuff. He's in the asylum. Right. Yeah. That's a neat little touch. I don't remember that at all. But yeah, little things like that really help kind of enhance the overall experience too.

The last thing I'll say about it is i remember whenever you would like hide up in the rafters and you could swing between like gargoyle statues or whatever you would hear the henchmen talk about you yes and so that was part of the funny thing they would like call you out and kind of troll you for running away but then if you would like zip down and like tie someone up and hang them if you for running away but then if you would like zip down and like tie someone up and hang them if they got found by the other henchmen they would like cut them loose and talk about it it had such a cool atmosphere to the game so i i wanted to include arkham asylum in my top five no that's a great choice um all right what you got next okay so this one you and i are not gonna agree on this one oh boy okay dark souls

oh okay okay sure because dark souls released it took the world by storm like there had not i mean i don't know i can't say there hadn't been a game like dark souls because i don't remember if demon souls or whatever came out first my sense of time is not so good i've got a good memory but man if you ask me what happened three days ago versus what happened three weeks ago, I can't tell you. We've lived a lot of life. And as we live more, it's harder to recall these things. Yeah. I'm like, I just know what happened. I don't remember when. But when Dark Souls released, it was a genre-defining game. And I mean, to this day, we talk about Dark Souls-like combat in a plethora of games at this point. Jedi Fallen Order, they talk about,

ooh, Dark Souls-like combat. You've got these games, obviously, you've got Elden Ring, which is Dark Souls. Obviously, that follows that. but it really helped to define this genre of unforgiving combat type games where if you died, it was your fault. And so you never felt like the game was unfair when you were playing it, unless you were fighting Ornstein and small, screw those guys. Okay. That was the most unfair fight ever. But the whole rest of the game was, you know, it was, it was up to you and you know, you had to be patient. You couldn't just button smash. There were tons of games where as long as you were just smashing buttons, you know, just, Oh man, just roll your face and your hands across the controller. And you were doing all

these crazy combos and whipping around everywhere and stuff like that. Don't get me wrong. Those games are fun. I like playing those kind of games. But Dark Souls completely turned things upside down in that regard. And they said, look, you have to be intentional. You have to have pacing. You have to read the opponent. You know, it just it really helped to catapult melee combat, which I really enjoy. And I know you're not a fan,

but I really like that personal aspect of just, I got my sword, I got my shield, and I'm taking you down, buddy, until you hit me and then I die. But then I'm coming back and I'm taking you down. So I played Dark Souls when it came out and I thought that there were things to like about it. I might be

remembering this wrong but don't you kind of keep going back to the same areas like in that castle like you would walk through a courtyard go into a castle and you had to like go back again and again i i seem to remember retreading a lot of old ground and it wasn't just to recover my corpse i remember it feeling like a rather small world. It's not small, but there is some backtracking for sure. You know, the map is actually fairly big.

Yeah. And that's the thing. Like if you pull up a map of dark souls, it's actually fairly big, but there's a lot of going back to different, the, the bonfires because maybe you need to head back now because you've gotten strong enough to take out this enemy that you could not head back now because you've gotten strong enough to take

out this enemy that you could not kill before. Or you got an item that maybe let you do something like that. I mean, these aren't like Metroidvania games where you can't progress otherwise. But there is a lot of going back and forth. And to some people, that is not that fun. I talked about... I think it was Dark Souls 2, where I got so sick of being in that underground area where I was just like, please let me out of here. I'm so sick of these wooden walkways and accidentally rolling off of them and falling to my death. Or a guy jumping out of a tiny little shadowed cubby that I couldn't see that stabs me in the back and now I'm dead and stuff like that.

You know, so yes, there is some repetition. I mean, let's be honest, right? If you, you know, you activate a bonfire,

all of the mobs respawn. So now you got to go back through those mobs. So, but that's part of the game is it's like that risk reward of like, do you want all your health back, you know, and the ability to heal, but now you've got to fight all the trash mobs,

but in dark souls, a trash mob can take you out. Yeah. You know, I mean, there's always risk there. But I, you know, you and I go back to the days of Nintendo and these hard games, these unforgiving games. And for me, Dark Souls touches on that. And I like that.

Now, I don't like games that are hard just to be hard for no reason whatsoever, because eventually they just get frustrating. But where Dark Souls really hits the bullseye is if you die, it's your fault. You did something wrong. Either you didn't block at the right time or you ran too far ahead to where now you're fighting eight mobs at once. And even if they're trash mobs, they're taking you out. Like, you know, you have to be conscious of that too. It just, it really, it was a very unique game at the time. It was a lot of fun. I loved the difficulty level.

The atmosphere was very weird. Like that's the other thing is Dark Souls games feel like Dark Souls games. They're very dull and dry. And it's like, you you almost feel like you're actually in purgatory. There's nothing, nothing that's pleasant in those games at all. No pleasant music, no pleasant characters, no nothing. It's just like they're sad or something. Didn't Dark Souls also have where it was connected online and you would leave notes for other people.

Yeah. But then you never knew if someone was trolling you or not. So they would say like. Secret ahead, roll here. Don't go, don't go this way. Or yeah, roll here. And I always thought that was a neat idea, except for the fact that you can't trust anybody online. So I don't know what good it really does.

But it did. It enhanced. And that's exactly right. Because it kind of gave you like, is this a clue or this a trap do i do i believe this or don't i you know and then everybody would just write praise the sun right that was a big thing praise the sun and it was people rolled with praise the sun for a long time you know i remember that or just yeah inappropriate things written in the world uh the the only real concrete memory i have is cheesing one of the boss fights where i remember i was kind of stuck and i watched a video online and i

remember aggroing a boss booking it to a flight of stairs and then the boss would get stuck and if you stood directly across from them after like two minutes they would try to charge you and then they would just plummet a hundred feet and then die from fall damage so i do remember like getting to the point where i was like okay i'll just cheese bosses because i'm getting bored of the game and yeah i did not finish it but i think i probably got like halfway through dark souls and just fizzled yeah i love the series i've played almost every offshoot you know sekiro boy that game's hard because it's different, right? Dark Souls focuses on dodging and stuff. For Sekiro, you had to parry.

So it was like the more aggressive you were, the better. Whereas Dark Souls, you have to be very defensive and stuff like that too. But love the whole series. I remember playing it on Xbox 360. I remember it blowing my mind and just thinking like, what a cool game to be able to play. Yeah, absolutely. It's a neat neat series i get why people love it it was just slightly too sweaty for me i prefer just a slightly more casual experience but i i hear you all right you ready for my next pitch hit me with

it all right all right i i was trying to decide what music game to go with because I had to pick one. I'm going Rock Band. Rock Band. The first one. It was on my honorable mentions. Through the Fire and Flames by Dragon Force was almost enough for me to pick Guitar Hero 2. I think that was in. What an amazing song.

But instead I'm going. Yeah. Instead I had to go Rock Band because you got not just the guitar, you got the microphone, you got the drum set. Playing the drums in rock band was so much fun. And it was so neat to be able to hear the drum rolls and stuff while you're playing. But the downside is that if you were anyone else, hearing just smacking the drum set was so annoying for everybody else but if you got on the drums it was great so that's like the one everyone yes everyone fought over the drums that's what you wanted but even people who didn't normally

play games just hand them a mic now you're having karaoke night with your family and friends and it was such a blast you'd get four people on there and you could swap people and take turns. We would have parties and we would inevitably end up playing rock band because it was such a good time. The beauty of rock band is it was so accessible to anybody. You could have somebody that doesn't like video games, doesn't play video games, you know, and you're like, hey, you want to play rock band? And they're like, well, I don't know, you know, I'm not really a gamer or whatever. And they're like, dude, all you got to do is sing into this mic

and just follow the line. You know, if it goes up, just go a little higher, you know, go lower. Right, exactly. That's all you got to do. And then they'd be like, well, I can do that. And then, you know, it was so funny to see people, you know, slowly like, oh, oh, oh. And then by the end of it, they're wailing. They're like, they're throwing stuff in there and they're trying to really, really follow that line and stuff like that. You know, the guitar person, if you were on an easy level, anybody can push, you know, green, red, yellow, blue, or whatever the colors were. I don't remember, you know, but you had that entry-level

difficulty to where anybody could feel like they were doing their part. They were playing the game. But man, when you get four friends involved and they're getting into it, before you know it, you literally feel like a rock band. And that was where it really, really shined. Because now you're all working together. It's cooperative. So it's like, come on, Paul, hit that drums, man. This person's singing, and the guy on the guitar is starting to shred a little bit and all that. And it was so much fun. And it wouldn't mean anything if it didn't have good songs. Right. So I went back, and I first looked because I figured Rock Band 2, for whatever reason in my head, I was thinking that must have been the one I played more. The song list is not great. There's like maybe five or six on there where i was like oh yeah yeah like those are bangers but rock band one i cannot believe the

songs that are in this game i mean you've got like are you gonna be my girl blitzkrieg bop black hole sun celebrity skin creep by radio head. That was a great rock city. Don't fear the Reaper. I'm only up to the letter D Josh. That's only the first ABC and D and it, you get so many. I want to sing like five of those songs right now, Paul,

right? And you even have stuff like sabotage by beastie boys. Like these are mega hits paranoid by black Sabbath. I mean, I cannot believe how good. Tom Sawyer by Rush. We all know you love your 80s stuff. You probably love Rush.

I do. Well, I like that song. Yeah. Yeah. And that was the thing because everybody knows those songs. So when you're all working together and everybody knows the song, it's just built in. It's built in accessibility to anybody that wants to hop in and play. And it was so easy to rope people into playing.

Yes. It was just good, wholesome group fun. Like that's all it boiled down to. Yeah. It was done so well. Guitar Hero was great. Rock Band. Talk about innovation by adding the other instruments.

It was fantastic. You know what makes me sad, Paul, is you can go into any Goodwill in the United States and find Rockdown stuff now. Yeah, and none of it will work. No, of course not. It's been beat on. Yes, the drum pedals famously broke all the time, and the strum bar on the guitars would inevitably go bad. How much did that game cost back in the day? I don't remember what it cost to get all that stuff.

Wasn't it like $100 maybe at the time? I don't i think it was like 80 to 100 it was pricey but you got everything you needed to be able to play so even though it was like well beyond what you would normally play for or pay for a video game you got all the stuff you needed so it was like an easy purchase as far as like trying to justify it oh Oh, what a fun series, though. I always loved Rock Band. I miss those days, man. That probably makes us sound old, because I feel like that...

I remember it even feeling a little goofy at the time. And so for any younger listeners, the idea of just pretending that you're in a band probably sounds kind of cringy. But it was just so much fun. I don't know what else to say. It was your friends. I mean, you're playing these fake instruments with your friends and everybody working together to do the song that everybody knew at the time was just a blast, man.

Yep. Good old rock band. So that's... Was that my third pick? Yeah, that was my third. So I'm on my fourth now yes sir okay this i don't know maybe you asked me in the beginning of the show what theme i kind of went with and i'm starting to detect a theme here even though i didn't realize it at the time and that's games that spawned an amazing series you know now this one i don't think was exclusive to Xbox, but Bioshock. Bioshock to me is one of the most memorable gaming series that has been made, to be honest with you. We had one of our listeners that was playing through Bioshock. I forget, he played like one and then two, and he was just like, these games are amazing. And I was like, wait till you get

to Infinite because that's like a mind-blowing one, too. The beauty of Bioshock at the time was that there was not any game like this, number one. Number two, they gave you choice. And not a lot of games were giving you a ton of choice at the time. And with Bioshock, your choice was you could get all of these different abilities. You had to get whatever the injectable stuff was. Atom, I think is what they call it. What was it?

Yeah, Atom. Atom, right? So you could get this stuff called Atom. You could inject it into yourself. If you got enough of it, you could get these really cool powers and stuff like that. They had the really neat shtick in this game where they had the little sisters that were filled with Atom. That was the big thing is like, they were just,

they had tons of Adam inside of them. But they were protected by the big daddies. And these big daddies were these monstrous, like robotic, you know, the cover of the game, right? Yeah.

That's what you're looking at, you know? Yeah. And to get to the little sisters, you had to defeat the big daddies and boy, you didn't want to fight a big daddy, but at the Little Sisters, you had to defeat the Big Daddies. And boy, you didn't want to fight a Big Daddy. But at the same time, man, you really wanted to fight that Big Daddy. Yeah.

And so that added so much to the game. And then if you killed the Big Daddy, now you're faced with this really tough decision. Because you can save the Little Sister, right? You can actually save her. Yeah, that option. Yeah. And she'd have a life. But then you didn't get the Atom. the little sister right you can actually save her you had that option yeah and you know and she'd have a life but then you didn't get the atom or you could sacrifice the little sister

dry out all of the atom that was within her make your character really powerful get this huge boost in your abilities and stuff but you might have just sacrificed a little kid you know and at the time yes the little sisters were a little creepy, like, let's be honest. So sacrificing them maybe wasn't the worst choice sometimes, you know, that kind of stuff. But all of the atmosphere, Rapture was the name, the area that all this took place way down at the bottom of the ocean. There's an amazing twist in the Bioshock series, which if you don't know at this point, there's really not spoilers there, but a great villain that you really hated at the time. Like I said, all of the reveals and stuff like that. The Bioshock series was absolutely incredible. It continued on into Bioshock 2,

which to me is probably the least fun of the entire series. But then you got into Bioshock infinite, which took it up into the clouds, which was a really, really neat aspect because everything else was very claustrophobic and down under the ocean. And then it brought in color. Yes. And then all of it.

And I, I mean, I haven't looked at it, but I remember to this day, Bioshock infinite was one of the most gorgeous video games I've ever seen in my life. And it was just super cool to go from these dark, creepy, claustrophobic tunnels and stuff like that in the bottom of the

ocean to now you're just this super bright, vibrant world that's up in the clouds. Bioshock Infinite has another insane twist ending to it. So that was really cool. And I just remember playing Bioshock on the Xbox 360 and just having my mind be blown and making those tough decisions. I think at one point, my wife was watching me and I was fighting a big daddy and I got the little sister. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to kill this one because I really need that Adam. And my wife was like, what are you doing? And I was like, I need the Adam, baby. I need the Adam. And she's like, the what? She's like, you just killed that little girl.

She's looking at me funny and just, oh, what a groundbreaking series, man. Yeah, that was definitely a fun series. I feel like, I don't know if they were the first to do it, but the whole idea of having weapons combined with like one magical ability but then you had to harvest something and then you could swap out your magic i feel like there were 30 other games exactly like that that just weren't as good as bioshock see so that's a good shock pioneered that now i don't again i don't remember what other games came out at the time but either they pioneered it or they did it way way better than everybody else at the time didn't it have like um interactable environments i seem to remember you could do like electric shock but if the area was wet then you could like hit

everything that was in the water and i don't remember that really existing a whole lot prior to bioshock and it was one of those games where you had multiple ways of approaching like a situation as well. Like you said, you could electrify the water. You could just go shotguns blasting. You could try to lead somebody away. You could set traps like mines and stuff like that. So you could aggro them and then run away and hope that they would run through all of your trap mines and stuff like that. So it also had that advantage of you play kind of how you want at the same time.

Yeah, gotcha. what a great pick yeah bioshocks classic of course all right for my number four i'm going with nico bellic from gta4 okay i had i had to include a gta i was gonna say if paul doesn't throw a gta game in here something's wrong with this episode we i feel like we've only mentioned GTA 4 a handful of times. But one of the reasons I love this so much is that I never owned a PlayStation until the PS4. And the GTA games always were either timed exclusives or it was only available on PlayStation. And I remember on 360, eventually they released like Vice City and GTA 3 and stuff like that. But GTA 4 released simultaneously

on the 360 and the PS3. And so being able to play it at release was such a treat. It was the first time I was able to do that. And GTA 4 added so many new innovations to the series for one a cover system maybe because of how gears of war was doing so good because right now when i'm playing vice city on the remaster it is so goofy to not be able to strafe while aiming and firing a gun it feels so ancient because you can't take cover and i have

to like really awkwardly walk around corners so gta 4 really improved on the combat they used motion capture for animation of characters which is why all the cut scenes look really good and it's the first one that let you call a taxi and you could fast travel anywhere in the game convenience thing what a quality of life improvement because the other ones you were constantly you had to drive five minutes just to get to the next mission well guess what i can pull up my phone call my taxi pay the 30 and i'm immediately there it was so Also, I know that the game took a lot of hits to the chin for allowing you to drink and drive, which I understand is incredibly wrong in real life,

but I'm sorry. Doing it in a video game is so funny. I just remember having Nico get smashed at the bar and try to drive around that city legitimately was impossible, but it was so hilarious just watching you wildly swing i always felt like it was a cautionary tale i don't think it caused anyone to think drinking and driving was cool it showed you exactly how destructive it was but what a fun game i love gta 4 it's my favorite of the whole series. And that was the thing, too, is you had the freedom to kind of do what you want in that regard.

Let's go bowling. Let's go bowling, Josh. I feel like GTA 4 was the big leap in the GTA series that really modernized a lot of the stuff. Now, GTA 5, I feel like they took what they learned from that leap to GTA IV, and they said, how can we enhance that? But I feel like that leap to GTA IV really kind of got that ball rolling. And when they got to GTA V, they had perfected it. But I feel like GTA IV was the entry to that. How can we get all these systems, and how can we give all these choices in in this world and all of this stuff? Like you said, the motion capture. And I feel like they

really, like they, they went from like, you know, one to a hundred very, very quickly. GTA five took it to a million. I'm a little worried, like GTA six, like how much more can they do? Because the jump from, you know, three to four and then four to five was so expansive that it's like, I, my brain can't comprehend how they can make that same leap, you know, from five to six at this point, I really hope they figure it out,

but it's like, you can literally see the magnitude of improvement there, you know, that they went through. So I, you know, I, that's an amazing pick, man. I do remember... No, I don't remember a lot of the earlier GTAs, but GTA 4 was an absolute blast to play.

Oh, yeah. The last thing I'll say about it is this is really the only thing that I've talked about with GTA 4 on a previous episode. It has my all-time favorite mission in a game. It's called Three Leaf Clover. You get to go rob a bank and it is literally modeled straight out of my favorite movie heat when they rob the bank

uh so if you've seen the dark knight the opening heist is also modeled after heat this this became the running joke after 1995 everyone said every bank heist is just trying to rip off heat because heat does it best but running into the bank jumping up on the counter telling people we're here for the bank's money it's not your money you know but then the manager won't give you the key you gotta crack them you do whatever you need to do and then all the cops show up you open the front doors of the bank and you've got five stars and now you're just gunning down you know hundreds of innocent police officers fighting your way through the streets fighting your way through the subway running on foot underground and then having to get away by car i remember it being one of the most

intense and immersive missions ever you felt like you were really robbing a bank. I was going to say, you really felt like you were part of it. Yeah. Yes. You really, really did. And it's like, if you've ever wanted to see what it feels like to be this criminal bank robber, this was a very good way to do that.

Yeah. I mean, there's a reason why in GTA V, they just added a ton of heists online because that's what everyone really wants to do yep so yeah i had to include gta 4 all right well we'll speed this up just a little bit paul i know we're going long like man we've been going long a lot lately but um my last one is this your last it is my last one yep um fable 2 honorable mention for me. Love it.

Great game. Yeah. It's just one of those things where this is... This may not be the end-all be-all of Xbox 360 games, but the Fable series was unique and exclusive to Xbox. And Fable 2 was that they took what they learned from Fable 1. They really improved on a lot of things in Fable 2. I know there's a lot of debate whether Fable or Fable 2 is the better one of the series.

Nobody likes Fable 3. And it's just one of those things where at the time, again, I keep using this term, but it's groundbreaking. Fable was groundbreaking, but Fable 2 really kind of perfected everything in that series. They added a lot of quality of life stuff, choices mattered, that kind of stuff. I remember playing the heck out of Fable. I remember my wife really enjoying watching me play Fable. And it's like one of those things where every now and then a game kind of draws the attention of somebody that's really not a gamer. And I just remember her really appreciating like the choices that I was making. You know, what was I doing? Was I going to help this person? Was I going to harm this person? And she found that to be very interesting

that you could make these choices in this game that would affect the game itself and your character within the game and the freedom that you had to do just about anything that you wanted to do. And I just like the Fable series now, they're making Fable. I think it's confirmed that it's been in development for a while now. So it's like, again, what can they pioneer to make the next Fable amazing? I hope they figure that out because they've got a lot to live up to. But that's one of my memories in playing the Xbox 360 was playing through Fable and Fable 2 and just the memories that go along with that because it was so different at the time.

Yeah, the aspect of immersive storytelling was really neat when they allow you to make choices. And the fact that that would change your character and how you would operate and whether your character was going to be good or evil or a mix of both. It was very neat to be able to have those options, which obviously was pioneered with the first Fable, but became such a staple for The Witcher and Mass effect and dragon age and all these things where your choices impact the world and the fact that people would react to your character yeah you know so if you had horns they'd be scared when they would see you and all that stuff was just so neat what's funny is i don't remember a lot about fable 2 in particular

but i know i played it a ton like in my my head, I played the first one the most. So that one really sticks out. But what a fun series. It's been so long since the last one. I can't help but think that a new entry is going to be good. I hope so. They've had so much time. Yeah, I hope so. That's kind of the neat thing about Fable.

Like you say that if you ask me at this point, like, hey, Josh, you know, tell me what happened in Fable 1 and tell me what happened in Fable 2. I don't think I could pick those out because to me, Fable 1 and 2 just is Fable at the time. I don't remember the specifics. I do remember the two had a lot of quality of life improvements, and it was honed and sharpened to be a better game, in my opinion. But I could not tell you the nuances between the two. But that's kind of the cool thing about Fable is you just remember playing Fable. Because the series in and of itself

was so unique, I guess, that that's kind of how you viewed it. Yeah. And putting that emphasis on storytelling obviously calls out to me because ultimately that's what i love about single-player games is is the story yeah all right what's your last one here paul last one on my list i i i felt like i really needed to include a game from this series because they got absolutely snubbed in our last draft where we drafted best rpgs and somehow nobody drafted a fallout game so i'm bringing in fallout 3 fallout 3 was a great entry so good uh second to new vegas i think yeah i think most people would say they like new vegas most although for me i played new vegas on pc years later. Fallout 3 was the entry

for me. And it served as a great first Fallout game to play because it was a soft reboot. There's like a big time jump between 2 and 3. And Fallout 3 had such a memorable opening. I'm sure you remember all this. The game starts where you're born. And so, all of a sudden, you emerge, you're a baby, and they tell you, okay, well, the machine scanned your genes. They know what you're going to look like as an adult. And then you get the character creation. I thought that was so cool. And then you crawl around your crib as a baby, which is such a funny beginning of a game. But then it fast forwards in time. You get a BB gun from Liam Neeson, your dad.

You get to shoot some radroaches. But that's when you first see the VATS system. Which was amazing, dude. Very groundbreaking, right? And no one really has copied it that I can think of, but that was where it was kind of like they wanted to have turn-based mechanics, but have it just still be like a first-person shooter. So you could pause combat, you could choose a certain number of actions based on how many action points you had, and you could shoot limbs or shoot someone's head or shoot

something on their back that might explode and everything was labeled with a percentage you know what's the likelihood you're gonna hit it and so it's almost probably the closest is like the dead eye mechanic from red dead redemption that's kind of similar except with vats it's much more strategic with the actual numbers um But what a cool game. You know, you escape from the vault because your dad leaves. And I remember you get to escape out of the vault. And you've been living your whole life because of the nuclear fallout. You know, there was some kind of nuclear war years prior, but your dad leaves.

And so you escape the vault. And I remember as soon as the doors open, you get blinded by all the light because you've been living underground. That was a cool moment. It really was. Yeah. So cool. And then it just takes off from there. I'll say this. I really enjoyed the VAT system. Some people didn't like it because it kind of slowed things down a little bit. But that adding that tactical aspect really enhanced the game for me because you had the percentages to hit, right? Like it was, do you aim for the head, but you have a 62% chance to hit it?

Or do you aim for the torso where you have like a 94% chance to hit it? Or shoot them in the leg? Because if you hit them in the leg, now they're crippled. And now you can kite them around. It was that interaction between the choice you made, did it resolve in your favor? And if it did, it changed the fight. Or do I shoot this dude in the arm that's holding the gun, and then the arm goes flying, and now he's disarmed? Stuff like that was so cool. It really, really was.

I've seen some people complain, oh, it slows down the gameplay, and blah he's disarmed. Stuff like that was so cool. It really was. I've seen some people complain that it slows down the gameplay and blah blah blah but to me the VAT system was really really cool. I'm with you. Starting a game as a baby was really neat to kind of say. It really helped you understand the

scale in the long termness of being in the vaults and emerging from the vault and all that. Because if you just throw somebody into a wasteland, that's been done a thousand times, right? But that process of living in this very comfortable, cush vault with everything you'd ever need, with the weird 80s art style or 70s art style or whatever they had in there. Not 80s, I guess. Or actually, I guess it was like 60s maybe. But then going out into this world, being blinded and then just realizing, wait a minute,

there's this entire world out there. And it would. It would kind of like just open up. And then you'd be like, the world is my oyster. I can do anything I want. And I remember being like, which way do I want to go? And it was just so cool to be like, which way do I want to point my feet? Because it's up to me, baby. Well, and you had your Pip-Boy 3000, so you could tune into the radio. But then later in the game,

you meet that DJ and he would talk about you on the radio. I think he called you like the Wanderer or something like that. And the last and, and the last thing I'll say about fallout three, it's the first game I remember playing where you had to heal specific body parts. Oh, you could get crippled and stuff. Yeah. If you got shot in the leg or if you fell,

you could have like a leg injury and you wouldn't sprint and you'd be kind of like limping your way around. And so you'd have to specifically open, open up the system, choose that leg and choose to repair that. And so sometimes you you'd have to specifically open open up the system choose that leg and choose to repair that and so sometimes you would even have to prioritize like what am i gonna fix because i've only got one shot left what am i gonna do right if you got shot that was very cool wasn't your accuracy like super lame at that point because you couldn't aim you're done and stuff it was a lot of really neat systems that worked very, very well together as a whole.

And then they went out and made Fallout 76. So we'll see what they come out with down the road. But Fallout's always a great one. I loved Fallout 3. That's a great choice. That was the first Fallout I played. All right, Paul, let's hit a couple quick honorable mentions. We don't have to dig into them too much. But I had,

I had dead space. That was an amazing game on the three 61. Like to this day, one of the best horror games ever made. I think I, so good. I did have Skyrim on there as well, because that was pretty groundbreaking.

I did have halo three on my short list, even though you'd said, don't put that on there at the beginning of the show. And then GTA five, because I actually did play GTA five on the three 60. you did yeah i did you know and so it was uh like i said i had my 360 forever so you rode that one all the way i really did yeah and so for me gta5 on the 360 was pretty earth-shattering as well what about? You got any honorable mentions on there? Yeah, a couple honorable mentions.

Borderlands 2, I played on 360. Super good. Dishonored. Dishonored was one of those games that I seriously considered. Again, that's one of those games that if you look at has a ton of awards, people talk about as being one of the best games for the time. that if you look at has a ton of awards people talk about as being one of the best games you

know for for the time um i didn't make my list because it's just like i never actually played dishonored 2 okay and deathloop was kind of based on dishonored it soured me just a little bit but dishonored is an amazing game and a great mention yeah it's it's like death loop, but better despite being older. Also call of duty, modern warfare one, two, and three. I never played any of the call of duties.

Oh, they were so much fun. I loved them. I love the campaigns. I love playing online. Those were all great. The last one that I'll mention here, which I think has really grown into a cult classic years later,

LA noir. Never played. Did played ever played it oh see la noir was made by rockstar and everyone was so used to playing gta red dead even bully which was like the pg gta you were still getting into fights and you would use your slingshot la noir there is zero combat but it is like an open world that you drive around but you're just a detective and the neat thing about that is that it was the first game that was like fully motion captured that all the dialogue had perfect mouth animations oh games would sometimes have just like the mouth would only open and close in la noir it was just legitimately this is exactly

what it looks like in real life and you got to just solve really cool murder cases or just criminal activity you would find clues you had to interrogate people you could point out like inconsistencies and press on witnesses and you had to decide like do i press do i hold back do i accuse them of something and if you really want to have a good laugh just go search for la noir funniest scenes because there are scenes where you can accuse people of wild accusations that will just make you die laughing because it's so funny so la noir i think is now kind of a cult classic i own it on switch and on pc but that's a fantastic game as well i've heard people like that game i've i don't think i've even seen gameplay from that that's one of those ones that just somehow just skipped over me you know um but it didn't

have the best word of mouth when it came out because i don't think it's what people expected but later on i think everyone kind of came to appreciate what it offered yep all right yeah that's all i have so yeah so many good games to snub it was a great system that's true i know there's a lot out there that people are probably thinking like well what about this one like what about that one yeah and if you're a first-time listener we have spoken so much about dragon age and mass effect that i just left them off entirely because honestly my list is just going to be you know a couple mass effects a couple dragon ages and maybe an elder scrolls but we thought we'd get maybe just a little bit yeah i try to dig a little bit further so yeah all right well that's all that we have here for this

bonus round episode i know that in the past we teased that we might have been having a draft and tournament that ended up getting pushed back but we are going to have that one here available in two weeks time so the next deep dive episode that will be coming out next monday is going to be on battlefield 2042 which has um had a little bit of a rocky release i would say we're gonna dig in and see if the negative reviews and all of the flack that it's been taking are legitimate or not. Is it fair? Exactly. That's why we do what we do,

is to give you an actual gamer's point of view on stuff, to say, hey, look, is the news for real? Is this really that bad? Or is this still a good game for gamers to check out and play and enjoyable and all that yep i offer myself battlefield paul so battlefield will be the next deep dive and of course on thursday we'll have our half hour episode for this week in gaming and in the meantime come check us out on discord there's a link in the episode description come chat with us totally free service we'd love to have you there and once again just consider you know supporting the show either through patreon at multiplayer squad.com or by subscribing in apple podcasts all right well thanksgiving's over

we got christmas right around the corner hope you guys are having a great holiday season we'll see you on thursday that was a fun one. We'll see everybody.