Ex-XBOX

28 Jul 2026

I’ve decided to say goodbye to my XBOX 360. It doesn’t take up much space but it does have controllers, power cable, massive power brick, video cables and it’s not getting played much any more. The feeling that’s been stopping me getting rid of it earlier has been one of nostalgia: I’ve spent many hours playing some excellent games on it, and sharing them mostly with family. I decided that by writing about them I’d create a lasting record: something I can come back to. And knowing that I’ve got this means I can revisit the games, even if I can’t actually play them any more. As an aside, the console itself is getting more and more cranky about the fact that the cloud services it connects to are deprecated or disappearing.

Games I loved

Braid

A game that messes with the rules by reinventing the rules. It has a backstory that is evidently deep and meaningful, and despite never understand what the heck it was about, or what it had to do with jumping over little poo clouds with legs, this is one of my all-time favourite games. Unlike - say - a FIFA, in which John Motson (or modern equivalent) talks you through the myriad special moves and tactical swipes, Braid is just a jumpy-jumpy platformer on the surface. Move, climb, jump. It doesn’t even have any shooting. No instructions are provided: you just work out what rules are in play by experimentation. Oh yeah, and you can control time. Hold down a button to reverse it. So you can’t die, right, because it works after you die. Then you realise it’s actually a puzzle game and different objects and behaviours affect time in different ways. In some levels, your movement can reverse or advance the movement of enemies. In others, glowing objects are unaffected by time control so by reversing time after moving them you can unlock doors etc.

Farming Simulator 15

This one is kind of the opposite of Braid in the sense that the fun is mastering all the controls. Whilst it has a career mode, we just played it - quite often but not always with overexcited children involved - and mucked around. Harvesting crops and then squirting them into a trailer before driving off in the tractor, or manoeuvring a freshly-felled trunk onto a pile with a crane.

FIFA 12

Thinking about FIFA now just makes me nostalgic for the Liverpool teams of years ago. Not that they were particularly good at the time of this release of FIFA. I might be wrong but I think this was one in which they reintroduced players' ability to control post-goal celebrations, which is a whole new level of fun in a 2-player match. I remember in some much earlier FIFA game being able to run away from the ref while he tried to admonish you with a yellow/red card. Controlling a celebration had the same feel to it.

Fruit Ninja

This one made my list because the Kinect controller was a new innovation. It worked quite well. Fruit Ninja is the only game that I’ve ever seen cause an injury when my brother leapt into a light fitting and cracked his head while trying to swipe a kiwi triple score (or something).

Geometry Wars

A great demo of what the XBOX 360 was capable of and an assault on the senses. Two minutes (depending on game mode) of frantic thrashing music, neon explosions, millions of points, continuous shooting.

Goat Simulator

Just a great idea. An open world game where you could lick things to swing them round and round, butt things to smash them up and generally engage in all sorts of fairground/traffic-related/antigravity shenanigans.

Limbo

Best played with the lights out and the sound turned up. The different ways you could die in this one were great. Truly atmospheric and no menus or complicated controls; limited jumpy-jumpy-ness. Just a great puzzler that delivered surprises at exactly the right rate.

Peggle

The OTT craziness of this game makes me think of Geometry Wars or Trials HD. Mostly just a sort of asynchronous pinball with cartoon fun and the best feeling when you completed a level: Beethoven Ode To Joy would blast out plus rainbows and fireworks filled the screen. Nice to play as a group taking it in turns to have a go, because each turn was just the right length (games where you can fail too quickly are problematic for youngsters)

PGR

I quite like games where you can admire the graphics but also go round and round/over and over something until you get it near perfect. Although it had race mode and you could compete with other cars or other players, my fave mode was similar to Trials HD in that you could repeat a course aiming for a Bronze / Silver / Gold classification. Writing this makes me remember RVF Honda on the old Atari and Tetbury GP course where I one day rode a whole lap in top gear without decelerating at all, nailing every corner and recording not just a lap record but the fastest lap record it was possible to record.

Portal 2

Played this two player split screen while Sarah was pregnant and Iris was on the way. I never actually got beyond the first few levels of the one-player mode, but we did loads of the two player version. I love games where two players have to cooperate and this one has crazy physics and loads of “if you go there and press that button, I can drop out of a portal and move that block” interactions. Plus a well judged sardonic narrator voice in between levels. It’s hard to describe how well designed the puzzles and scenarios are in this game. An all-time fave.

Skyrim

Open world games with sumptuous graphics are kinda the thing I could only have dreamt of growing up lapping Tetbury GP on RVF Honda or shooting walruses with arrows in New Zealand Story. Shelled out for this triple A blockbuster right when it came out and mostly just enjoyed roaming around, stealing horses, hunting and exploring troll-filled caves. I did defeat a few dragons (maybe?). I always find games of this genre have too much crafting, item upgrading, essentially spending time navigating menus. This leaves me bored. It happened with the Legend of Zelda games when Iris and Finn got them on Switch.

Trials HD

I probably lost the most sleep to this highly addictive just-one-more-go side scrolling ragdoll racing simulator. Whack on some loud guitar music, rev yer engine and forget about loading screens. Race, repeat until perfection. Then redefine perfection and race again.

Zoo Tycoon

Too many menus for me, but also you get to feed giraffes and squirt bears with a hosepipe. Iris and Finn loved it. At best it reminded me of happy times playing Sim City, or Theme Park (was it Rollercoaster Tycoon?) with the added bonus of some handbrake turns in the buggy while customers jump out of the way.

Halo

Thinking more about it, I definitely lost more sleep to Halo than to Trials HD. I think I got this on the original Xbox right after finishing finals. I didn’t dare buy it until the exams were out of the way. Then spent many a night blasting little bobbly spiky aliens with round-edged plasma fire and crashing around in the shooty buggy. I knew I’d played too much when I woke up and still saw the diagonal crosshairs superimposed on my vision.

Tags: gaming, personal