Good games for the original Xbox

[Tweed]

Gauntlet: Dark Legacy is good alone and great with friends. Like others have said Hunter: The Reckoning and Redeemer are excellent too.

Games with Sega in the title (there's a good racing title, can't remember the name,

If you're thinking of Sega GT it's not that good, but it was free along with Jet Set Radio Future when they made the smaller Xbox. Best thing to be said for Sega GT is the cars themselves, otherwise there's no visual damage of any kind and float arcade controls that are much worse than PGR.

 

[Don Peste]

Here's a convenient list of exclusives: https://www.mobygames.com/group/15663/console-generation-exclusives-xbox/

And I remember very good lists here for several consoles, but it turns out they didn't have Xbox (and now they also removed all of them): https://web.archive.org/web/20230608050632/https://www.gematsu.com/exclusives/xbox-360

 

[Ash]

Oh, I forgot the legend Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. that and Ninja Gaiden 1 were the only exclusives I found of value. But it can't be that bad; I do need to explore the library a little more. How is OG xbox emulation these days anyway?

In my opinion Riddick: Escape Butcher Bay is yet another completely overrated game. It has a lot of style, very much so, but fuck all substance (of gameplay). Like 99% of 2000s era FPS, it'll put you to sleep if you have any modicum of standards.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

The problem with Halo 1 though is that the levels are massive and the enemy count is quite low, so often you find yourself trudging through empty areas. Also the indoor maps can become terribly repetitive as it's the same set of rooms and corridors pasted over and over again.

I guess but I wouldn't say it's a showstopper by any means.

 

[toughasnails]

I'll add my voice for Galleon, it's p underrated. The game got shat on mainly for its visuals - it started development as an early Dreamcast title way back in 90s, then went thru a DNF-like development hell. And by the time it actually came out, when Xbox was well into its lifetime, one could easily see its Dreamcast origins. But the game itself is p fun and ambitious even. Basically, it's bunch of OG Tomb Raider devs attempting to make a successor that would (back in the day) produce the same wow effect.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Gauntlet: Dark Legacy is good alone and great with friends. Like others have said Hunter: The Reckoning and Redeemer are excellent too.

Games with Sega in the title (there's a good racing title, can't remember the name,

If you're thinking of Sega GT it's not that good, but it was free along with Jet Set Radio Future when they made the smaller Xbox. Best thing to be said for Sega GT is the cars themselves, otherwise there's no visual damage of any kind and float arcade controls that are much worse than PGR.

I had fun with it, it's definitely not as good as PGR, but that was a fantastic game. I only now remembered there was a sequel for the OG Xbox, I'm not sure which one I played. All my console stuff is at my parent's house.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

 

[Bad Sector]

How is OG xbox emulation these days anyway?

xemu is the best emulator, but it is far from perfect. Some stuff work ok, but it has many graphical glitches with many games either being unplayable (like the Riddick game) or having various object rendering issues (mainly due to improper depth buffer emulation), to playing ok but having minor glitches (e.g. Deus Ex Invisible War has half of a yellow border always visible on screen and shadows do not work correct after some distance from the camera in both DXIW and Thief 3, several games have "off by one" errors due to mismatch in how NV30 handles the pixel center vs how it is handled in modern hardware, etc), though some render fine (like the Buffy game mentioned above). Since the emulator translates graphics calls to OpenGL, graphics run faster but depending on your CPU, the CPU side might be emulated at a slower speed than on real hardware - not a big deal in most games, but some games may have race conditions that just happen to not be triggered in the original hardware but be triggered in the emulator because of the speed differences.

Though IMO the biggest issue the emulator has right now isn't in the graphics but with the audio, the xbox has a dedicated audio processing unit (yes, they called it APU before AMD took that term for their CPUs with iGPUs :-P) that can do audio mixing of several channels with various audio effects and AFAIK DirectSound used it directly, meaning any game that used DirectSound for its audio functionality used that chip. However xemu's emulation of the chip is very bad and audio is very often played back at wrong volume and sometimes broken, sounds repeat when they shouldn't, etc. Some games did their own audio mixing though and those games work fine as the audio chip is only used for simple waveform playback.

At this point xemu is fine for checking out a game (or checking out your game if you do homebrew :-P) but you should really be using the real hardware for most games (and if you do homebrew, you must use the real hardware because xemu is both very forgiving and doesn't emulate the hardware perfectly).

 

[bussinrounds]

Rallisport Challenge 2

Genma Onimusha

The Punisher with the patch to remove the censorship (interrogations suck on k&m)