Best Xbox 360 Moments

Throughout our gaming lives there are pivotal moments: those stop and grin and call your friend moments, those oh, $%#@ moments, and those moments of quiet satisfaction after a lengthy stretch of productive hours.

With Xbox 360™, those moments shine with a next-gen polish, and though this new generation is but a mere babe, the periods of bliss have been plentiful. Here, then, are a few standouts that have awed me, scared me, let me smile at another's wonder, or just plain made me glad to be a gamer.

Meet the Lunch Lady
My love for other launch titles not withstanding, I have developed an unhealthy dedication to the morbidly fascinating Condemned: Criminal Origins™. I have pounded my way through the game proper, and done so having never fired a bullet. I have scoured the grit and grime for every last bird and scrap of metal I could find (I still have more than a few to go).

Crazed derelicts from Condemned.

While the experience as a whole has been memorable, no moment can beat that showdown with the Lunch Lady at the abandoned school. The blubbery beast wielding a cleaver in a gore-covered apron in a bloody kitchen, screaming incoherently as she attempts to methodically dismember you, is a moment not easily forgotten.

Worst in Class
Though Condemned gets my overall vote for single-player experience, my hundreds of hours spent in versus matches in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell® Pandora Tomorrow™ has instilled in me a deep commitment to hardcore competition.

Bar none, my best online experience on Xbox 360 so far was taking a few Hot Shot-ranked players in Project Gotham Racing® 3 to task (I was ranked as a Rookie at the time). What's more, I managed to dominate in one of the worst-rated cars in the class. Victory itself would have been fine, but the choice aggravated epithets that my opponents flung near and far gave the win that extra sweet flavor.

They wish they were this close.

Instant Injury
It pains me to admit it, but I do occasionally take joy in the misfortune of others, so when an opponent in an unranked game of Madden NFL 06 begin to deride my beloved Seahawks, I found solace in his ensuing setback.

He was playing the Atlanta Falcons, and, true to form, he brought Vick out on a naked bootleg. Foreseeing such a tactic, I had called a QB Spy defense. He made a cut, but I laid the Hit Stick thunder down with Lofa Tatupu, and immediately following was a zoom in on the stadium's big screen announcing an injury. Vick was knocked out of the game.

Bejeweled Marathon
Though I didn't tag it as something remarkable at the time, my very first sit-down with Bejeweled 2 lasted nearly an hour before I ran out of moves. I've dedicated countless hours since to the jewel-rotating madness, and have yet to exceed my initial time or high score.

Awed by X3
Owning an Xbox 360 has elicited several self-invitations to my apartment, and when one friend came to visit, I took them through the traditional Xbox 360 tour. I booted up a few games, showed them a movie, let them try their hand at Zuma and Bankshot Billiards 2™ on Xbox Live Arcade, and finally hit up a few items in the Marketplace.

My friend's reactions had been pretty overwhelmingly positive to that point, but after seeing the X-Men 3 trailer in 720 progressive scan, he was utterly sold. You just never know what's going to excite someone about new technology.

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy!

Media Connect Bliss
I was chatting up another friend of mine on the phone the other day when he mentioned that he was ripping music to his Xbox 360 Hard Drive. After a few shocked exclamations, I asked him why he wasn't just streaming music from his PC so he could save room for downloadable content.

Evidently this functionality had slipped his mind, and after a half hour or so of pretty simple troubleshooting, he was set up and ready to roll. Perhaps it's my customer service background, but hearing the smile over the phone when everything was working perfectly gave me great satisfaction.

Crushed Magruder
Few gaming memories compete with the joy felt when finally completing a game, and when I shot down the final stick of dynamite to cause the avalanche of rock that spelled Magruder's demise in GUN™, my joy was great indeed. Beating a good game is one thing, but beating one with a stellar story and an ending that offers real closure is something else entirely.

More and more memorable moments lie ahead during the Xbox 360 lifespan, but there's something exceedingly exciting about those first few great moments at the birth of the console. I can't wait to see what lies ahead, but I don't think I'll be forgetting any of these moments any time soon.

Article by Ryan Treit