Why PS3 is better than the Wii and 360 by Chad Warden

I surprisingly played a small range of games, when compared to the amount of games available for the Xbox 360 both in physical and digital form with the Xbox Live Arcade. I mostly played online first-person shooters like TF2 and Left 4 Dead 2 (Valve produced the best games on the planet). Some other good games I played were Minecraft, Halo and Skate 3. GTA V does not even need to be mentioned - probably the only game with a story I actually enjoyed.

It really felt like the gaming industry really knew what gamers wanted. The games from this era were awesome. Microtransactions were not as widespread as they are now, there wasn't any preaching about how you should think and most importantly, games were fun. The industry simply did what would make them the most money and that was to make good games.

In addition to videogames from big publishers, indie games were starting to get popular on Xbox Live Arcade. One notable example is Castle Crashers created by people from Newgrounds. There would also be crappy indie games like Don't B Nervous Talking 2 Girls, a game which tries to teach you how to socialize with females, that have a hilarious premise and are so badly made it almost seems like it was done on purpose.

I notice that a lot of games I like have a quickplay system, where you can randomly end up playing in a match or mission with random players on Xbox Live. This was an amazing way to meet new people and just play the game without worrying about a player's skill level. In fact, Xbox Live itself was awesome. The social networking aspect of Xbox Live was fun - it was surprisingly anarchic. The amount of raging kids you'd find on Xbox Live was unlike any other place and also the guys who would try to pick up girls on Xbox Live were fairly active. It was a fun place to be.

This was a golden era for trolling. With the sheer amount of kids and angry teenagers on Xbox Live, trolling would be inevitable. Toxicity was rampant on Xbox Live. Even more so with the voice message system on Xbox Live, allowing you to use your mic to send messages. Enough needs to be said - this would result in a goldmine full of laughs.

Because there were a lot of horny teenagers on Xbox Live, catfishing was another entertaining way to troll people. Booters (people who would DDoS others on Xbox Live) were another form of lulz as using a VPN would dwarf their aggressive and tough guy attitudes - forever embarassing them on the internet.

The Xbox 360 was easily hacked - either by hotswapping with burned discs or hardmodding the actual components to allow you to run unsigned code. There's even a new softmod now called Bad Update. Especially on TF2, whenever a modder would host a server, it felt like entering a new exciting game instead of having to play the boring old game with the same mechanics over and over again. It was a refreshing taste of freedom - not being limited to the rules of the game and being able to create your own custom rules and experiences.

I got myself an RGH (Reset Glitch Hack) Xbox 360 pretty recently to mess around with the console version of TF2 and being based on the source engine, you can do a lot with it. Having a modded Xbox 360 is mandatory with the marketplace closing down and physical copies soaring up in price. You are able to get games for free, modify them and customize your Xbox however you want. You can even run Linux on it! (To download free games I would recommend the preservation site Myrient).

Thanks to region-locking being unlocked on RGH consoles, I am able to play Japanese games like Mamoru-kun wa Norowarete Shimatta or DoDonPachi that I would have never been able to play before.

A lot of ports to the Xbox 360 have been abandoned. This is especially true of the Valve titles yet glitching is still one of the most fun things to do. Rules were made to be broken and unintentionally exploiting them is just yet another thing you can do to keep having fun despite not recieving updates for years. The most fun type of glitch is getting out of the map or an area you are not supposed to go to.

The Xbox 360/PS3 era was probably the last generation where buying physical copies of games was normal and widespread. I still have some games on disc that I can insert into my Xbox and play straight away. Of course, you could always buy games from the marketplace but it's easier to just buy a disc as you would rarely have to actually install the game (except big games like GTA V).

Additionally, it was actually really easy to dump games through the Xbox 360 dashboard. You can just move your already installed Xbox 360 games or XBLA games from your Hard Drive to your USB stick through settings or if you have a disc, make sure to disable launching the game on disc through settings then you can install directly onto the USB stick. You will then be able to use an emulator like Xenia to launch these games.

The dashboard changed a lot during the life of the Xbox 360. At release, it was a colorful and immersive dashboard similar to the original Xbox dashboard. It then changed to an aero-style dashboard similar to the UI of Windows 7 called the NXE dash. The final dashboard was the Metro dashboard, mimicking the ugly and minimalist UI of the Windows 8 metro design.

What made the metro dashboard even worse, is that ads would be featured directly on the dashboard, even after paying for Xbox Live. They even condensed it after the marketplace shut down making it look even more uglier with the amount of unused space. Well, atleast there aren't any ads anymore.

This was really common in the Xbox 360 era and is the most fun way to play with friends. It's unfortunate that a lot of modern games don't have this functionality anymore. It just isn't the same playing games online over a call than in real life on a big screen. The only problem with split-screen is that FPS would drop significantly as the game would essentially have to render more than one instance on the same console. The way Castle Crashers handles local multiplayer is more efficient, where it's just one instance of the game being rendered but the players all see each other. It really depends what kind of game you're playing. I would take the performance hit if it means being able to play with my friends locally.

- Left 4 Dead 2

- All Halo Games

- Terraria

- Minecraft

- Rayman Origins/Legends

- Call of Duty

- Dungeon Defenders