I love a good release title, and PGR 3 might just be the best of the bunch. Of course, to PGR fans this was absolutely no surprise, the previous two entries were both excellent too. But if you compare this with other early release racers on the console, it's really quite impressive. The game uses a Kudos system, which gives you points for finishing races with style. Racking up Kudos is difficult but fun. The most notable thing though about this game is the locations. The races take place in 4 major city hubs, London, Tokyo, Manhatten and Las Vegas, as well as the famous Nurburgring. These locataions look excellent and give the game a great atmosphere. Racing down the narrow streets of London in the twighlight or an early morning cruise down the Vegas strip, each race feels totally different, all the tracks are a joy to race on. The cars themselves handle well, as they straddle the line between the arcade and simulation racing. You quickly find that taking a corner too fast or smashing into an opponent will leave you at the back of the pack, and its difficult to catch up without some skills. However, you don't need to worry about changing the suspension or buying a new engine for your car. It's simple and it works well. The variety of the races is great too. There are standard races, one on ones, elimination races, hot laps, Kudos challenges, the list goes on. Additionally, each race has 5 different difficulties for you to attempt. There are a few things which could be improved. The career is a little short and a few more locations would be nice. Yet, its hard to not be impressed by this one, especially as we approach it's 20th birthday. A must play.

Fuck the whip. If you have played this you will know what I mean. Call of Juarez is a very interesting and quite unique FPS with a Western setting. Originally released for the PC in 2006, we got a 360 release in 2007 and if you can handle a bit of jank it holds up pretty well. The story is really nice. You play as Ray, a former preacher, hunting Billy (some random kid IDK), who has been accused of killing his parents. You also Billy running away from Ray (Your Uncle) and trying to find out who really killed your parents. The way the story untangles as you alternate between the characters is surprisingly good and will keep you interested for sure. The setting is also very nice and you can tell the developers put a lot of effort into making you feel like you are in the wild west. Jumping between gold mining towns and lush forests, with a nice selection of weapons and even some fist fighting. It also has a concentration gauge, allowing you to slow down time to blast enemies. Best of all, at the end of some levels you have a one on one pistol duels, just like in the movies, excellent. Consensus is that Ray's levels are more fun. He can lob dynamite and use twin pistols. Billy on the other hand has a bow and a whip. The whip is really the downfall of the game. I would argue that the reason Billy's levels are worse is because of the use of the whip. There are a few platforming sections in the game where you need to use the whip to jump over gaps or traverse rocks and it just kinda doesn't work very well. In addition to that, there are a couple of sections where the game isn't super clear on what you need to do next, but nowadays there are loads of video guides online, so you should be fine. This is not a perfect game, it's janky as hell, sometimes unfair and often confusing. Yet, I can't help but appreciate COJ for trying to do something a bit different and succeeding. In 2023 the datedness of this thing only adds to it's charm, an interesting addition for any collection.

Nowadays, when people think about great racing games of this era, they think of forza, PGR, Dirt, Gran Turismo. The race driver series, the sucessor to the TOCA series, gets somehow forgotten. Racedriver Grid is the first in this series, and while it's not the best raceing game on the system, it's one of my favourites. Starting with the negatives, it's not a game full of different game modes, infact it feels a little sparse and you are basically left with 3 modes, campaign, single race and online mode. The campgain is quite confusing at first also. You start off doing random events for other teams taking part in a variety of different types of races, then suddenly you have your own team, it's not explained very well and there's little story and no training to get you up to speed. Despite these flaws, the racing itself is excellent. Your enjoyment of racing games probably largely depends on how well it aligns with your preference of Sim to Arcade style, and Grid rides this perfect balance of very difficult and competative arcade racing, which is helped by the excellent AI. Every race feels like a challenge, but not impossible, and the inclusion of rubber banding means that you are never laps ahead on you own like in some simulation racers. The races are fun and competative from start to finish. That's not to say it's fully arcade, you will need to use your break wisely and there is an excellent damage system which can mess up your stearing if you take too much damage, but you won't need to tweek your car too much each race. The campaign also features a huge variety of racing styles to keep you entertained. I really enjoyed the drifting events akin to Dirt 3, and the one on one races were really intense. For me it's some of the best racing to be had on the console, and I highly reccomend it if you enjoy hard but fun racing, of course this style is not for everyone.

A very solid racer which still holds up to this day. While more catered to sim racing fans, what's great about forza 2 is that the assists are fully customizable, meaning you can cater the difficulty of the drive as you gradually get better. This really encourages you to gradually reduce the driving assists on the game and test out manual transmission even if you start off as a beginner. Aside from this the game has excellent graphics, handles well and includes a nice selection of vehicles. The track selection is also great and the real life track selection will appeal to racing fans. Super casual racing fans may find this all a little boring, but its hard to deny Forza 2 is one of the best racers on the console.

Retro game collections seem so easy. Pick a bunch of good games, add some nice extras or unlockables, done. While some other collections on the console fail to deliver, the genesis collection is a really good effort. The game boasts 47 excellent games from the one of the greatest consoles of all time (and altered beast). You have all the big name classics like sonic, streets of rage, golden axe and some less well known gems such as dynamite headdy and my personal favourite: gain ground. On top of all this, they thrown in some great extras. There is a nice ranking system, so you can remember which games you like and rank altered beast 1 star. There are some great challenges which are tied in with the acheivements, and also unlock some interviews, new games and nice atrwork. While it's not really an important part of the 360's history, it still fun to play, and I am a sucker for these collections.

If you are looking for the most impressive game on the console, this is it. Honestly it’s a wonder they got this to run on the 360, it’s a behemoth of a game, something which is even more evident from the 4 disks you see when you open up the case. After a few clangers such as brink and hunted, bethesda pulled their finger out and published the excelled dishonored and then this, a reboot of the wolfenstein series. The series had been basically forgotten about by this point, and while the 2009 remake was decent, it was nothing special. Most importantly, it didn't really feel like a wolfenstein game. With this 2014 release, we have an action packed shooter which has that same level of excitement that made the series what it is. An excellent variety of weapons and enemies, plus some wonderful progression and in game challenges, it never gets boring. The story also makes this a must play. The game throws you into an alternate future where the Nazis has won the war. Playing as BJ Blankowitz, the nazi killing machine, you meet a variety of interesting characters and attempt to change history for the better. Overall its a great package and runs surprisingly smoothly, a great very late addition to the library.

The first game I played on the 360 and still one of the best. Making a sequel to the original 2 fallout games on console was always going to be a challenge, transitioning from isometric RPG to a first person rpg shooter hybrid while still creating a weird but believable wasteland surely couldnt work. But my god it does. Using the same engine as the excellent Oblivion, Besthesda created a wonderful world to explore, full of interesting events, characters and some easter eggs. The first sequence of missions is one of my favourites in video game history. Waking up as a member of a vault, an underground community where humans moved to hide from the atom bomb, you start the game as a bady crawling around your room.The game holds your hand as you explore life in a vault and get used to the controls and wonderful progression system, before disaster strikes and you are thrust out of the vault into the iradiated wasteland. The balance of the interesting weapons and combat of FPS games mixed with the dialouge, quests and interesting progression system of an RPG works extremely well, and keeps you wanting to play just 10 mins minutes. It's not a perfect game. The main storyline is pretty bland compared to some of the sidequests and it suffers from a bunch of bugs and crashes. Fortunately, playing on the series X with backwards compatibility solves half of these problems. It's a bit of a tossup between this and Fallout new vegas to me, and perhaps its horrible DLC (not all of it) let it down, but it really is a must own game.

The first game I played on the 360 and still one of the best. Making a sequel to the original 2 fallout games on console was always going to be a challenge, transitioning from isometric RPG to a first person rpg shooter hybrid while still creating a weird but believable wasteland surely couldnt work. But my god it does. Using the same engine as the excellent Oblivion, Besthesda created a wonderful world to explore, full of interesting events, characters and some easter eggs. The first sequence of missions is one of my favourites in video game history. Waking up as a member of a vault, an underground community where humans moved to hide from the atom bomb, you start the game as a bady crawling around your room.The game holds your hand as you explore life in a vault and get used to the controls and wonderful progression system, before disaster strikes and you are thrust out of the vault into the iradiated wasteland. The balance of the interesting weapons and combat of FPS games mixed with the dialouge, quests and interesting progression system of an RPG works extremely well, and keeps you wanting to play just 10 mins minutes. It's not a perfect game. The main storyline is pretty bland compared to some of the sidequests and it suffers from a bunch of bugs and crashes. Fortunately, playing on the series X with backwards compatibility solves half of these problems. It's a bit of a tossup between this and Fallout new vegas to me, and perhaps its horrible DLC (not all of it) let it down, but it really is a must own game.

Over the past 10 years, people have began to re-evaluate this game, and rightly so. There's the famous story about programmers of the game getting a bonus if it got a metacritic score of 85 or above, however it ended up with 84. To me this is wild. A score less than Soul Caliber 4 and Far Cry 2. Playing it in 2023 I fell in love with it yet again, and for me it's one of the best games on the console. For the unitiated, this is a first person role playing game mixed with an FPS. The game utilises the VATS system, which stops time and lets you target enemies, making it a lot more accessible to those who struggle with shooting on consoles. It plays very similarly to the fallout 3, walk around the incredible environment, complete quests given out by the people you meet, explore the unknown, shoot, stab, explode enemies. The gameplay is fun and varied and the world is just so fun to explore. You can walk around for hours meeting interesting people and weird funny situations. Where this game really excels, especially compared to fallout 3, is the story and dialogue. Fallout 3's main story line was very simple and to be honest a bit bland. New Vegas's on the other hand is a rollercoaster of excitement, filled with wacky characters and different routes you can take. The dialouge show improvement too. You care about the story behind side quests and actually want to know what is going on instead of blindly following waypoints. Who doesn't enjoy helping irradiated zombies leave earth to live in the stars? All of this harks back to the (imo) best fallout games, fallout 1 and 2. For that reason, New Vegas is better than 3 and one of the best games on the console period.