I've got a vacation coming up (next week, in fact), and do you know what I'm going to be doing apart from spending quality time with my lady and hanging out with my family? I'm planning on going achievement hunting on my 360 and mining all of the titles that I've neglected while trying to keep up with the latest big game.
See, in our relentless pursuit of the hottest videogame news and the overwhelming desire to provide the most thorough and accurate previews and reviews, I find that there is little time for retrospection. So, over the next week, I want to look back through my huge library of Xbox 360 games and actually play through some of them (as opposed to just getting a taste of those that I'm not directly responsible for reviewing).
Unfortunately (or, in reality, fortunately), there are tons of games just coming over the horizon that I want to play as well. Of course, The Orange Box is at the top of the list, and while you could get away with calling Portal short, there's no way you could blow through the entire cadre of games offered in The Orange Box in a day, so I'll have my work cut out for me.
The point that I'm trying to make (in an admittedly roundabout way) is that hardcore gamers such as ourselves simply cannot do any better than the Xbox 360 right now. There are too many excellent games available for the console for any gamer to begin to approach from a completist's perspective. Who could ask for a better position to be in than that?
Add to that the staggering number of soon-to-be hits coming out in the next two months and you've got yourself a time sink that rivals even the critically acclaimed World of Warcraft. If you are a recent Xbot initiate (as I'm sure many of you "I'll buy it when Halo 3 comes out" gamers are), then you've definitely got a lot of joyous catching up to do.
For the last couple of years, the holy grail of game design has been the search for the WoW-killer. I'm thinking that we may have been looking for the wrong thing in trying to find a single title that could unseat the reigning king. Perhaps the true enemy of World of Warcraft is the Xbox 360's library taken as a whole. I certainly noticed a drop-off in raid participation from members of my guild when BioShock was released and the bulk of my fellow guildmates have actually quit playing WoW so that they can go and play their Xbox 360s. I know that sounds crazy considering that BioShock was also released on PC so the natural progression would seem to be that people would just play BioShock on their PCs, but my personal experience indicates something very different.
WoW doesn't require a lot of crazy system specs, so I've noticed that my friends that play WoW can't play most of the high-powered juggernauts coming to the PC (I'm staring directly at you, Crysis). I'm seeing this as a revisiting of what made consoles so popular to begin with: no DOS (er, Windows), no installation, no pesky memory management... you just put the game in and the thing plays. With the 360's graphical capabilities nearly on par with a PC of average power, there's a lot to be said for the simplicity of the experience.
So, for those of you new to the tantalizing world of Xbox 360 ownership, I'd like to give you a hearty welcome. Maybe you just bought your 360 to play Halo 3, but I think you'll find that there is a treasure trove of fun stuff hidden in its back catalog. As a service to you newcomers, I'll make an attempt in the next edition of My So-Called Live to cover some of the greats beyond Just Cause. Just make me one promise: you won't wrack up any gross consumer debt in order to buy them. See? That mention of "Maxed Out" turned out to be relevant after all... albeit a bit tenuously, I know.
