Xbox 360

great fun at the time, it was the peak of the era of the social internet and this was a console built around the social experience
in retrospect it was the console that introduced like 75% of all jewish shit we have in gaming now: paid online, microtransactions, season passes, ads on your dashboard, digital licensing of games on a console. The list can go on
i wasn't even going to mention the borderline criminal failure rate that saw me go through 4 of the things. How they got away with that is baffling

Including a headset in the box with every 360 single handedly created the greatest online experience of all time

kino
I was always playing Oblivion and LoTR BFMEII early on in the 360 life cycle

Blades era 360 was pretty good

Literally every game with online features came with Xbox Live Vouchers

You're not barred from claiming more than one trial for xbox live

Games still had LAN options (and the OS wasn't updated to check if your ping was out of "acceptable ranges" for LAN and immediately reject connections) so if you wanted to you could use LAN tunneling to play online with your friends and not have to pay for LIVE you could

Actually good UI instead of the cancer everything uses these days to make room for a fuckload of ads

Also, while it goes without saying that microsoft deserves shit for being fags, the level of faggotry they achieved by the end of the 360's lifespan is disgusting

This. It was amazing.
I feel your pain, but I trawled 2nd hand online markets and found one cheap.
It's a shame what's happened to xbox ever since. They just gave up during xbone and have continued to not try.
Also RROD was a constant threat that could strike at any time. That bit sucked.
It was a great time for couch multiplayer. Halo 3 and Reach you could play up to 3 players as guests and one main account to play online, so you'd have the majority of one team on Halo every match.
Those were really really good times.
As good as online multiplayer has gotten, there was something so great about sitting around the same TV in splitscreen vs a bunch of randoms online late into the night.
Even just shit like splitscreen minecraft was fun, even with how godawful janky it was on 360.
It was a great era for multiplayer.
The accessibility for everything on PC now though, is unmatched. It just loses the couch multiplayer feel where going over to your buddies to hang out was the whole trip. Maybe it's just that I've gotten older, but when I play online, it always ends with people going "oh I gotta go, I'm doing x tonight".

It was cool and everything but PS3 won that generation in the end. I was an idort though so it was kind of like whatever, I just had everything.

Oh fuck I nearly forgot the kino experience of open voice lobbies before every game of halo or cod. Shit was perfect adn they took it away from us.

the level of faggotry they achieved by the end of the 360's lifespan is disgusting

Didn't they end up putting ads on the menu at some point?

Define which menu, because I know for sure on the home menus, but I think? They had ads in your overlay too, and would cache them.

Alot of people don't remember but there wasn't a party chat system during the original launch days of Xbox, it was either private chat or message boxing. If you wanted to talk to groups of friends, you'd have to find a game and enter a lobby, then you'd have to set the privacy of the lobby so friends you didn't want to join couldn't just join at will. The audio quality was so awful, it's genuinely striking how few people remember the poor quality mix era, it was like always being on the phone. And the headset? It was a one sided earpiece that didn't play any in game audio, only voice audio. And I met some of my closest friends to this day back on halo and cod.

They had ads in your overlay too

Surely you jest. I stopped playing xbox around 2009 when I got a PC and that just sounds loony as all hell.

Halo 3, CoD 4, and Gears of War 2 were the main three games. I do feel bad for anons who never experienced Gears of War, and not even just the multiplayer. Horde mode/campaign co-op with friends on insane was so fucking fun. Gears is one of those games that you can't really cheese. You and your friends HAVE to kill all the enemies to progress so the fights are fucking brutal but not blatantly unfair so it made for a unique co-op experience where you can't just zoom through the levels skipping hard parts.

insane Horde mode

find a "base" to use on the map

all four of us in cover fighting for our lives not daring to peek for too long

occasionally getting out of cover to get some ammo and try to make it back by spamming roll to dodge everything without dying as the others cover you

No other game has done a horde mode that felt as good

it was great until it broke down and you had to convince your parents to buy another one
and then another one
and finally another one

I don't remember for sure, but I'm FAIRLY sure they had ads in the overlay.

I paid extra for the Best Buy warranty so when my first one red ringed I walked in and walked out with a replacement, then bought another warranty. When that one red ringed I did it again. On the third one they told me Best Buy no longer replacing them under warranty but sending them to be fixed so I didn't buy the warranty, but by that time MS had their own replacement/repair system so when that one shit the bed I sent it to them, and never had a problem with the one they sent back. Went through three in just a little over two years.

I'm not sure if any console has done something like the Xbox 360 Arcade. It was basically a store on the dashboard that had games developed by indie devs, but bigger devs also used it to upload small projects. I hope all those devs made it on Steam, because pretty much all the games were good.

it's been 15 years since Gears 3 Hordemode 2.0 came out

me and the squad spending the last days og Gears 2 grinding out achievements to get ready for the new Hordemode

it was everything we wanted and more

I remember staying up way later than I should've because I had finally gotten my own TV and I stole the Xbox at night, ended up getting some cool ass gun skins on that one. Fuck me, the campaign, my heart can't take this nostalgia. Games uses to be so much more.

player on the opposing team desperately trying to respond to your l33t insults gets cut off mid sentence because the match starts

mfw

crazy. i had my launch 360 for 10 years, and then i went through 3 other different models in a couple years. my current one is one of the last they released i think, some angular black one.

mfw creating TF2 lobbies with sv_cheats 1 and setting low gravity, spawning in props, etc

My friends mom gave me head when I played the original Halo when it came out for the original Xbox (black and green).

Actually good UI instead of the cancer everything uses these days to make room for a fuckload of ads

While the last UI update was an ad-filled cancerfest, NXE's first update was the GOAT. The guide menu had fast and easy access to everything and included the party system instead of just 1-to-1 chat.
I got a ps3 like a year before ps4 dropped and I legit don't know what you're talking about. I played the uncharteds, tlou, ico and shadow of the colossus and then dropped the system. What games did it have that made it so worthwhile? All the multiplats played better on 360 and the exclusives library was dismal.

NXE sucks and blades was better.

Matchmaking was full of hackers

I don't miss it.

NTA, but I'm pretty confident that the guide menu in 360 era never had ads in it.
The dashboard eventually got those cancerous massive ads, that was fucking awful, but I think the guide menu remained ad-free.

GOD DAMN KINO. The banter was just so good.
I remember one halo lobby where some guy was just hummng incredibly loudly into his mic and the entire lobby who had mics attached started to do the same at different tones.
It was just a wall of overprocessed sound until it all went silent at the loading screen.
Good times.

it felt alright. i liked trying the free indie game demos and playing online in SF4 and Sonic All Stars.

it took years before they started adding avatars and ads but so far it wasnt as invasive like the xbox one era

Blades were laggier than NXE.
You've got rose tinted glasses.

Pretty good. Despite it being the dudebro shootin game console it had a pretty nice selection of exclusive jrpgs for little me to enjoy. Tales of Vesperia co-op with your bros was something else.

I have an xbox with blades on it (non-modded) and it doesn't lag. You just had a defective console.

It was bad, because I got to watch in real time a lot of the games and series I loved get clogged up in trend-chasing sludge.

I meant while in-game, hitting guide and bringing up the guide menu blade was slower than NXE's guide menu. I'm pretty sure you also got a lot more access to everything than the guide blade.
Idk it's been a very long time since I've used the guide menu.

I remember this one black kid I knew who sold cocaine got it as soon as it came out
the first one he bought had a fucked up disc drive and scratched the fuck out if the game he put in. After returning it the second one got the red ring of death after a few weeks. Good shit.

that never happened

Ok just watched some vids of the blades and NXE and looks like the guide menu is about the same speed on both, takes about half a sec - 1 sec to populate with stuff.
You're right and I'm retarded.

We're talking aesthetic and functionality.

Blades could never run better because that's not allowed >:(

Nonsense

The TRUE 360 experience

Buy 360.

360 gives you RROD.

Dude you should of bought the Elite version! It's better made.

Buy Elite version.

Gets RROD.

Dude the Falcon edition is actually better built and they've improved it now.

All versions are RROD givers because their piss poorly designed and made.

Now the 360 consoles are ruining disks because if you so much as fart next to them the disk tray throws the disk causing it to scratch.

MS get taken to court over the 360 because they wont admit theres a problem.

Lose court case and are told to fix peoples broken consoles.

Release 360 slim.

360 followed by super slim.

Both are absolute shit with worse parts than the falcon or elite.

CPU heatsink is partly made of plastic and reports of them melting flood in.

Dire airflow because it's just a $1 fan doing intake with no exhaust.

Buy the fan add-on for the back.

These somehow brick the console faster.

HHD drives turn out to be repurposed laptop drives.

Read online to try and fix rrod.

1 method involves putting a damp towel over the console but fucking idiots were putting wet towels over them whilst on.

Another method involved putting the console in the oven to melt the soldering abit.

Having to PAY twice for your internet for online features.

You basically bought a 360 and KNEW you were on borrowed time because of how shit they were built.

Yeah but with all that being said playing custom games with the boys and Blades was pretty cool