The Microsoft Xbox 360: The Definitive Review
Allard, Allard, where for art thou Allard?
I’ve said previously that the PlayStation 2 has the unique distinction of straddling the 20th and 21st century in terms of celebrating, curating and defining the contemporary videogame culture. A gloriously transitional machine, the PlayStation 2 nonetheless couldn’t quite catch the galloping waves of a broader, networked and connected landscape that the PC was developing. Despite some contingent investments in the future, the PlayStation 2 hardware was perhaps a bit too non-committal to the signposted possibilities of the late 90s.1 These would solidify into essential certainties within a decade, and as such, the PlayStation 2 didn’t wait for its stablemate successor to pass the baton in defining the videogaming zeitgeist. Instead, that baton was triumphantly wrenched away by a console that arrived with an uncanny confidence in what the new century’s definition of a modern gaming platform should be. That was the Xbox 360.
It’s funny to consider what the 360 offered out of the box, on launch day, that we now take for granted as the fundamental features of a modern machine. It’s funnier still to consider that was twenty fucking years ago and the 360’s featureset was so perfectly defined that almost nothing has changed in the two decades since. When you consider the difference between 1985 and 2005, it’s hard to not come to the stark realisation that what we may call ‘maturity’ might also be thought of as ‘stagnation’, but that’s a different argument for a different day. Being in a more celebratory mood, I’m happier to think of the Xbox 360 as being astonishingly correct, perhaps in a similar way that the Commodore Amiga was in defining the boundaries of the 16-bit, disk-based mode. Yet the 360 was so much braver in asserting its present as a specification that’ll reign for decades. It wasn’t just in the obvious, in the online integrations of multiplayer, persistent and transferable player profiles at the dashboard level, or its complimentary and ever-available online shop. It was in the leaps forward in the user experience. I still remember the night of December 2nd, 2005, and seeing Project Gotham Racing 3 in the flesh. Mesmerising as that was, it was the ability to turn the 360’s power off from the wireless controller that gave us the warmest cheer. The massive uplift in graphical quality was amazing, of course, but it was expected. This quality of life improvement, this fantastic evolution from the Wavebird and shonky third-party wireless controllers to a new default was part of the real juice of the 360’s modernity. There’s a forehead-slapping obviousness to its utility, and it underpinned a sense that the machine had been properly thought through. The 360 was a maturation of the modern videogame console, but also of Microsoft’s Xbox concept.
The OG Xbox always carried the weight of compromise and inarticulate branding on its shoulders. Being quite literally a PC in a rectangular box, its shape has a utilitarian obliqueness that makes it look more like an adolescent toy than some high-end consumer electronic appliance. You could maybe argue that that the Gamecube is more toylike still, but that purposely ignores the sophisticated styling that the Gamecube curiously enjoyed all to itself. It is toy-like, sure, but those lines, panels and ports are far too well-proportioned to be a mere child’s plaything. The Xbox on the other hand is an absolute brute, with its almost laughably gauche incorporation of a giant ‘X’ in the case’s shape taking design literalism way too far. The green circle that bears the console’s name looks particularly cheap and garish. The original ‘Duke’ controllers are bafflingly huge and bear a different circle with different colours for branding. But then, it’s a naïve debut for a company not renowned for making physical products at all, let alone compete with consumer electronics legends like Sony. Given that background, the Xbox 360’s launch form was a revelation.2 A slim, elegant tower in a creamy white, the 360 looked dazzlingly modern, with the alpine colourway of green and white for much of the 360’s branding offering a leap into the Fruitiger Aero era.3
Better still was the evolution in controllers. From the comedic Duke to the 360, the development via the much-welcomed stopgap S-controller lead to a pad that for the first time, felt better and somehow more solid than the PlayStation 2’s Dual Shock. I always felt there was something too light and brittle about the Gamecube controller, and something fundamentally weird about the Dreamcast’s that left the PlayStation 2 as the de-facto ruler. But the 360 changed that overnight, and set the template that today feels like it’s almost the norm. The PlayStation 3’s SixAxis felt cheap, hollow and lightweight in comparison. Even the PlayStation 5’s DualSense seems to be merging with that 360 idea, despite trying to cling to the legacy grammar of the Dual Shock. And Sony’s controllers are perhaps a Porsche 911-like exercise in spending 30 years trying to correct a mistake. The 360 controller, on the other hand, was so perfect that it barely changed over successive generations. Like the console itself, somehow Microsoft had simply got it right.4
If there’s a sociological insight to be drawn from 21st century videogame corporate culture, it’s one of explosive success followed by hubristic collapse. Nobody escaped it - Sony’s allowance of Kuturagi’s excesses led to a late, bulky and expensive PlayStation 3. Nintendo’s confidence in a bubble for casual gaming on specialist hardware leads to the WiiU, and Microsoft’s trust in Don Mattrick (lol) leads to the Xbox One. It’s the spectacular implosion of the core Xbox ideal from a bright, connected-gamer future to an omnivorous digital content revenue hub that stings the most, as the collapse can be pinpointed on that single Mattrick-lead presentation in May 2013. As much as ‘Giant Enemy Crab’ undermined Sony’s ideological position as king of the gaming roost, Mattrick’s celebratory landgrab for territories the audience had no real interest in, at the expense of gaming itself, was baffling. Combined with the always-on, phoning-home enforcement of digital rights preventing the sharing of game discs, Microsoft’s mask had slipped, greed was fully exposed and 12 years of gamer goodwill was poisoned overnight. With an open goal and a supremely easy shot to land, a somewhat humbled Sony took the opportunity for a cheap PR win that, yes, did hit the weak spot for massive damage.
This stings hardest because of how great the Xbox 360 was. Outside the racing titles I adored like the Forzas and Project Gothams 3 and 4, I didn’t care that much about the platform exclusives but as my format for third party brilliance in the 360/PS3 era, the machine brought me stupendous amounts of joy. From early proofs of the new horizons this generation afforded in Test Drive Unlimited and Dead Rising, through to my run of Bethesda open worlders from Oblivion to Skyrim (with both Fallout 3 and New Vegas included), the Xbox 360 completely succeeded in keeping me happy. It was here that I played Dishonored and Resonance of Fate. 50 Cent - Blood on the Sand and the brilliant, criminally under-appreciated Saint’s Row 2. But it was also the cult fringes where the 360 seemed to follow the PlayStation 2’s lead with a joyous run of Musou titles and, by the end, even a lovely suite of Cave shooters. That’s not to mention weird shit like Capcom’s forgotten space shooter, Project Sylpheed or the Bujingai replacement El Shaddai - Ascension of the Metatron. I didn’t get a PlayStation 3 until the launch of Gran Turismo 5 in 2010, meaning I’d spent a straight four years as a solo Xbox 360 player and even after that, it remained just as strong a contender for my gaming time. My later memories of the X360 as a workhorse for Afterburner Climax and Forza Horizon 2 still linger. After many years of hardcore grinding with Musou titles, my last grind was, quixotically, the lovely Tenchu Z. Luckily, my fond memories of the 360 weren’t sullied by slogging on as an Xbox One owner. I was purely PlayStation 4 for that entire generation, and I don’t feel like I missed that much. The saddest thing about it, perhaps, is how Xbox 360 showed that under the right approach and attitude, Microsoft could make great hardware into a great platform. Quite how the giant managed to fuck it up twice in a row afterwards is definitely a lesson in corporate mismanagement, so perhaps the 360’s star shines a little brighter because of it. Like the Dreamcast, it feels like lost glory, a legendary hero for which the owner didn’t fully appreciate the riches it hosted. In Microsoft’s case, the real tragedy is that it’s not only the corporation that paid the price for its sins thereafter.
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The PlayStation 2’s broadband adaptor and HDD caddy being optional kinda underlines this point of Sony speculating about the future but not fully committing to it. The original Xbox, however, went all-in and in doing so, cemented foundations that allowed the 360 to really capitalise and set new foundational standards for what a 21st Century videogame console is.
I would like to go on the record that all the subsequent redesigns of the Xbox 360 look fucking shit in comparison to the cleanliness and considered curves of the original launch model.
The fact that Xbox’s return to black and dark grey colourways coincided with a nosedive in fortune should probably be noted.
I want to dedicate a weighty footnote to an elephant in the room: the hardware itself. I don’t think it’s wholly the 360’s team’s fault that ATI fucked up the GPU to such an extent that by some estimates, the 360 ran a 54% failure rate. I lost my launch machine to Ninja Gaiden 2, but I knew other people who’d claim three or four losses of the launch model. I guess you could say someone at Microsoft fucked it by getting ATI to reduce costs so much the solder was shit or whatever, but the hardware frailties didn’t cast any stains on my enjoyment and love of the platform.