The Top 24 Xbox 360 Games (#24 – #16)

Welcome all to another edition of The 8 Ball! This week, I’m going to start a series of columns breaking down some of the Xbox 360’s best games. I’ve seen other publications and people do these types of lists, so I wanted to throw my hat into the ring as well. This is the first part, counting down from 24 to 16.

I do have an honorary 25th game I picked out, but I just briefly mention it and don’t write about it. This is just my list, of games I played on Xbox 360, and while some of these are crossplatform, if not released at the same time on other consoles, I still played the 360 version. Let’s begin: Honorary 25th: Remember Me #24: Costume Quest Double Fine was really pumping out games during the Xbox 360 lifespan.



Brutal Legend, Stacking, Trenched/Iron Brigade, not to mention all their Kinect stuff, they were on a roll. I think their best game from this era, though, was Costume Quest. It’s a RPG that is relatively low stakes, but is just a relaxing game for you to go through.

It has a charm to it that does help adults relive the fun of trick or treating when they were kids. It’s also not an especially long game, only about 6 to 8 hours, which is welcome. Costume Quest 2 tried to recapture some of the magic and while it was a decent game, it didn’t quite hit the mark.

#23: Dead Rising 2 Dead Rising fans have some real rose-tinted glasses about the game. I’m one of the few, correct, people who thinks the franchise got better with every installment. Most of the Dead Rising community thinks the best one is still the original one though, with it’s save system being archaic, the hard limit of the timer, clumsy controls, and HD text, that game is a mess.

Dead Rising 2 went a bit in the “actually making this game fun” direction by giving you combo weapons, a better story, and more open-ended gameplay, so you didn’t have to level your main character by 30 levels before you could even attempt the main story. #22: Deadly Premonition Deadly Premonition hits a particular chord with its fan. It is a very flawed game, don’t get me wrong.

Combat/movement is bad, some of the environments fell out of a PS2 game, and so on. But by God, does the game have heart. It’s also a very memorable game, and has a lot of interconnected systems that give it the appearance that you are in a living, breathing town, with enough townspeople to rival its own origin material, Twin Peaks.

It’s up to you if you want to stick with it, but everyone should at least play Deadly Premonition in their lifetime, to see a really unique game at work. #21: Fable 3 I’ll admit this is a bit of an outlier here. I bounced off hard on both Fable 1 and Fable 2 but Fable 3 was the one to really grab me.

I dislike those first two games because they are too goofy and the combat being poor. It also had those really abrupt time jumps, especially in Fable 2, that were incongruous with the story. Fable 3 largely does away with all the weird Molyneux nonsense and is a much more functional video game.

It does have some garbage at the end, when you are the king, but that can almost be ignored. It’s just a good, traditional, action RPG where you can heavily game the system by turning your clock ahead to give yourself millions in gold. So, it’s just like real life then.

#20: Amped 3 I’ll always maintain that Amped 3 was the best Xbox 360 launch game, if not one of the best launch games for any system, ever. The gameplay is solid, plenty of courses for you to explore, a few different vehicles for you to ride, and plenty of little secrets to uncover. But it’s the story and the way that it is presented, is why this game is still so memorable.

It goes through like 6 or 7 different styles of presentation, from hand puppet to 8-bit video games, to tell you what is going on. Add to that, a really great soundtrack, and this game is still awesome to play. #19: Eternal Sonata One area the Xbox 360 lacked in a bit was when it came to JRPGs.

It did have some, but nothing that really broke out. One of the more minor but still great ones though, was Eternal Sonata. Set against the backdrop of Frederic Chopin’s life and illness, this is a bit of an action-RPG with some interesting mechanics.

There was a light/shade cycle during battles, where your abilities would change if your character was covered or not. You could make tons of money doing a side job of photography, and at least two of the characters you could recruit were entirely game-breaking in some really fun ways. #18: Borderlands Now, I can recognize that Borderlands 2 and 3 are more expansive games.

But, in this specific case, bigger doesn’t always mean better. I still like the first Borderlands game the best because it is the most concise. It’s still kind of long but it doesn’t have endless sidequests for you to do, for almost no reward.

It also, thankfully, doesn’t have the Borderlands “humor” that has infected the later games, full of poop humor, memes, and other such garbage. Borderlands 3 was so bad about this, I had to mute the dialog because the twins were some of the most annoying characters I’ve ever seen in a game. Borderlands is a great framework of a game, one that should have been built on and improved.

Instead, each installment gets lazier and more awful. #17: South Park: The Stick of Truth For a franchise that was almost 20 years old, at that point, it’s amazing South Park never once got a good video game going. The FPS game isn’t “awful”, but garbage like South Park Rally and Chef’s Luv Shack, belong in the sewer with Mr.

Hankey. Thankfully, Obsidian really knocked this out of the park. It captures the essence of the TV show brilliantly, has a ton of Easter eggs for fans of the show, and keeps combat fresh enough for the 20 or so hours it takes most people to play through the game.

It says it all when the sequel, Fractured but Whole kind of looked like Stick of Truth, but certainly didn’t play like it and was a worse experience, overall. #16: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Now, I’ll have another Bethesda game coming up with these columns, so don’t you worry. I think Skyrim is a perfectly “fine” video game.

It looks nice, the quest system is interesting, but man, I don’t like the story at all. It’s also just missing a lot of character that something like Morrowind has, so instead of it being a truly unique game, it just is “Nordic Fantasy RPG” instead. It should still be celebrated and is a damn better game than Oblivion, but it never quite reached the same highs as Morrowind did.

******* For comments, list your own favorite 24-16 Xbox games and why. Next Issue Top 15-8 Xbox 360 Games.