The Games
Note: The vast majority of the cover arts displayed here were found in printable resolutions at CoverGalaxy.com.
MechAssault
Developed by Day 1 Studios / Published by Microsoft
I’d loved the MechWarrior games on the PC (well, the Activision titles anyway) and while this certainly wasn’t that, running around environments in a 120-ton mech and crushing buildings as you walked, Rampage-style, was a whole load of fun. I made the decision to purchase this as my inaugural Xbox Live game because I was a broke college kid and I thought more posters at TeamXbox were going to be into it. Well, that didn’t really materialize, but I did have a lot of fun nuking cities and waiting for my energy weapons to cool off before launching another volley.
Midtown Madness 3
Developed by DICE / Published by Microsoft
I really wanted a fun car game to play against other people. My family and I had played the first two Midtown Madness games over our PC network, but there’s only so much enjoyment you can get from playing competitive multiplayer against the same two people. Original developer Angel Software was replaced by DICE – which, long before they were developed by EA and turned into the ‘Battlefield group’, used to deliver a variety of games to Microsoft – who introduced a quirky single-player campaign and some amazing graphics. Your job was to perform a variety of tasks while traffic ran at full tilt through Paris and Washington DC. Multiplayer was a blast with a variety of vehicles until players found some easy exploits in the level design. The game was colorful, vehicles had incredible, dynamic destruction, and the cities were both well fleshed out. So remember I mentioned Angel Studios? Well, they ended up becoming Rockstar San Diego and produced the Midnight Club series, the second of which released opposite Midtown Madness 3, quashing it in sales by a large margin in a somewhat ironic twist.
Project Gotham Racing 2
Developed by Bizarre Creations / Published by Microsoft
I have sung praises for PGR2 for years and it will forever live as the best Xbox Live title I’ve ever played. Taking a bunch of exotic cars and racing them through gorgeous recreations of a bunch of cities was a fantastic rush, but what really sold me on the multiplayer here instead of the other racing games available at the time? Two things. One, a group of friends that I played with regularly (including our very own Johnny), often late into the night. Second, a ranking system that didn’t take itself seriously. To advance up the master leaderboard, you just needed to accumulate Kudos, which could be accomplished in every single race. PGR3 would reverse this years later when the fun races didn’t count toward any advancement and the ranked races were full of jerks who would quit as soon as they spun out. No other experience compared to the fun I had with this game and aside from my time with World of Warcraft, PGR2 has had the distinction of having the most hours I’ve ever logged online.
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3
Developed by Red Storm / Published by Ubisoft
I mentioned before that I don’t play well competitively, but when a tactical shooter like this appeared with an engrossing cooperative mode for up to four players, I was more than down for it. The game’s slower pace was a welcome relief from more frantic shooters like Halo 2 and encouraged genuine cooperation. The single-player was a jumbled mess of tangentially-related missions (as is the Tom Clancy curse) with advertised voice commands that never worked that well, or took three times longer to put in motion than simply pressing the buttons. Unfortunately, playing for two weeks straight burned me out on the game and in a pre-DLC era, you were waiting for a whole new, shiny $50 disc to get new missions. Bored, I concocted a bizarre mode in which players gathered in the conference room of a level, tossed down a mess of smoke grenades and flash bangs, then began shooting each other on cue; last man standing won. That was fun for precisely one moment.
Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge
Developed by Fasa Studio / Published by Microsoft
Long before Uncharted, this arcade-ish flying game was soaking up the Indiana Jones adventure feel. In much the same way that MechAssault simplified mech combat for quick online gaming, Crimson Skies did the same for flight games and was easily the most fun of the games that did make the Xbox Live roster. You didn’t need to know what an Immelman turn was, you just needed to click your sticks in a simple, particular fashion and the plane did the hard work. The campaign was cute enough with a professor friend vanishing and something about mysterious artifacts (and bizarre on-foot sections, as I recall), but the multiplayer was where the guts were at. Taking an alternate-universe, 40s-era prop flyer and sailing through sandy canyons or down the dense streets of Chicago while peppering your opponents with machine gun fire was a thrill.
> Continue on to Part 4 – The Best and The Worst
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