The Last Day of Xbox 360

The Xbox 360 store is shutting down for good on July 29th. So this feels like the perfect opportunity to take a look at what it's like to use the 360 in 2024, download and buy some games that are heavily discounted before the store shuts down, and just talk a little bit about the legacy of the Xbox 360. In my opinion, by far the best Xbox of all time. Now, if you're unfamiliar, this was a quick sequel to the original Xbox. Microsoft famously lost piles of money selling that original Xbox, and so they were heavily incentivized to bring out the successor. And boy, oh boy, did they. The 360 launched a year before both the PS3 and the Wii, and it brought HD gaming to the masses. We had HDMI that came a little bit later, but you had the ability to do 720, even 1080. And the thing was, this had a lot of things going for it. This was really the generation where online gaming actually took over. Now, yes, Xbox Live did exist on the original Xbox. You also could do some online gaming, like their Dreamcast, the PS2. But it wasn't until the Xbox 360 that online gaming as we know it today was really solidified in the console space. I will say, though, the original 360 was heavily flawed when it came to the Red Rain of Death. These consoles, especially the first year or two of production, they failed at an astronomical rate. And it really kind of dented the momentum. And Microsoft lost, again, piles of money extending people's warranties and offering replacements. I had one of these original Xbox 360s, and it red-ringed. It's been a month. And when I take it to fix it, they just did the towel trick. And I took it back again, and they did the towel trick again. And then I gave up, and I was really sad. So I think it's safe to say that the 360 had a little bit of an up-and-down life cycle at the beginning. Fast forward to 2010, and we got ourselves the Xbox 360 Slim. Now, this is a pretty major upgrade. Now, it did lose a couple of things from the original Xbox. So you no longer had the ability to easily swap out the hard drives. As well as the original 360 had what I would say is a very cool sort of gimmick, where you had replaceable face plates. The main advantages with the Slim were the fact that it had Wi-Fi built in. So the problem is all of these original white Xboxes, they did not have Wi-Fi. You had to buy, I think it was like a $100 Wi-Fi dongle, which even by the time 2005, 6, 7, 8 rolled around, was a very major flaw. While you still could have some issues with them, they were far, far less prone to failure than especially the early 360s. And they also improved things by making sure that HDMI was standard. You had yourself the Kinect port, which was a huge, huge deal for the Xbox 360. It was sort of Microsoft's answer to the Wii. By the time the Xbox 360e came out, well, it was the end of the generation, because this came out in 2013 at the exact same press conference as they announced the Xbox One. Now, the 360e was pretty much just a slightly cheaper version of the Slim. So it was a little bit more of a straightforward design. It lost a couple of things, such as the component output. But the main thing was, they were able to sell this thing for dirt cheap. And this was at a time, mind you, where the competition was the Xbox One, which had mandatory Kinect, and it was a $500 console. So a lot of people actually did still buy 360s well into the Xbox One life cycle. And they also bought PS4s, and Wii Uses. So look for Xboxes online, and see what it's like to not only use the store right before they shut it down, but also to see how well the 360 holds up today. Because unlike a lot of older consoles, a lot of these games are actually very easily able to be played on newer Xboxes. And in some cases, you can run it on like a One X or Series X at much higher resolutions than this guy ever could. So is it even worth it to mourn the loss of our buddy, the Xbox 360? Well, let's go fire it up, shall we? All righty, let's log in to Xbox Live. This is the dude that I made in 2009. Yes, I've owned an Xbox for over a decade and only have 11,000 gamers. So let me quickly explain what's actually happening on July 29th. The game store, as well as the marketplace with like the movies and TVs and stuff, all of this will be shut down. So you will still be able to download games that you've already previously purchased. You'll also still be able to play online with Xbox Live. I will say a big reason why you may want to actually buy a game is that first of all, they're really cheap. So a ton of Xbox 360 games are massively discounted before they shut the store down. But also, as the store gets shut down, what you're gonna find is that a lot of physical games are probably gonna start going up in value. Not all of them, but if you look at something like the 3DS when they shut that down, a lot of those games immediately elevated because there's no easier way to get them. Let's look through the games that we can purchase for the Xbox 360. So let's do Dead Island Riptide. So this is 74 cents. Also, do you remember when a whole ass game was only three gigabytes? Now I'm gonna buy a bunch of games, but I'm gonna download them off camera, mostly because I don't wanna be here all day. So let's see. Resident Evil Revelations. I remember playing this on the 3DS actually. $1.99, there we go. Lego Star Wars The Force Awakens. $4.99? Yeah, we'll play that. I'm doing this video partially as just a fun, you know, excuse to go back through memory lane. But honestly, if you still have a 360, it is actually really worth it to dust it off and to buy some of these old games while you can. What's handball? Like the sport? Yeah, the European sport. Handball? Oh my God. Black Ops 3. I'm gonna bet that this one's not discounted. Anyone wanna take a bet that this one's not discounted? Yep, $50, I knew it. WRC? Oh, Rally. Sure. It's cheap. Three bucks? Yeah. Far Cry 4. All right. Far Cry 4 is actually decent. $5.99, that's not bad. Ooh, ooh, $20. All right, can I share something with the gang? I used to have a side channel where I did a Let's Play of a few different games, including Far Cry 2. If you know what's up, you can find it. It's still up. It's still live. This actually gives me an option to play on Xbox One. Wait, what does that mean? What does it do when I hit Xbox One? It probably loads it on the Xbox One. Oh, it actually tells you the games that work on Xbox One. Oh, that's kind of cool. This game was so far ahead this time. I'm getting excited. Let's see what games are most popular. Mirror's Edge! Let's go! $15. It was $15 like three years after it came out. Yeah. $4 for Skyrim. I knew it. Wow. Well, it's Bethesda. It's the worst version of Skyrim. Shadow of Mordor. I cannot believe Shadow of Mordor shipped on the 360. That was such a legit game. What's it like to use Internet Explorer? Does Internet Explorer actually work at all? It's binging it with Internet Explorer. Oh my god, it's working! It's a little broken looking. I don't know how to spell mercenaries. M-E-R-C-E-N-A. Mercanacanese? What? Wait, after all that, now I need to update my console? What? But we checked for an update. It didn't even... Well, I like how it didn't ask if I wanted to update. It just started updating. It's like, hey, you need an update and I'm downloading it right now. So how about this? Let me gather together a selection of these high quality titles, entertainment, and fun delightful activities. And let's give the 360 a final rip before it all comes falling down. And so with our bountiful harvest of games downloaded to the 360, let's start out with Far Cry 2. So Far Cry 2 is a very different game than the later Far Cries. I think Far Cry 3 is when they started getting weird and wacky. Far Cry 2 is actually like a pretty like sober kind of game. Not to spoil it, the end is like not good. So Far Cry 2 did a lot of things. It had an actual fire system where like the grass and whatnot could be sort of caught on fire. And there's an entire map editor. So I'm gonna go ahead and start with the Wilderness Generator. Look how cool this is! Isn't this just like neat? Oh, I fell down that erosion. I don't know, I eroded too hard. But I still think this game looks good. This game still looks really good. We drink beer. We drink beer! Just boys letting off steam. Don't worry about it. It's totally fine. You know, I did that all the time when I was a kid. Just lighting. Arson? Yeah, a little casual arson. Never hurt anybody. Well, you know. Real, real tart. Is there a door around here somewhere? I will say the framerate's a lot choppier than I remember it being. Ah, framerate, no! Oh god! Before I ruin my memories of Far Cry 2. What a lovely game that I've got here that you can actually buy on PC. I think still it runs a lot better. But ah, well, this looks great! Let's play WRC 5. Now this is one of those very late Xbox 360 games that came out, I believe in 2015. So this is a couple years into the Xbox One's life cycle. This looks alright. I will say some other late Xbox 360 games probably looked a little bit better. I always think about like the first Forza Horizon. And even I think Forza Horizon 2 actually landed on the 360. Ouch! Oh, we got this! We got it! Oh, we don't got it! We don't! Did I just like about to run into people and it just reset? I agree. Ouch! Don't turn off my Xbox 360. Next up we have Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor. Now this is a game that I didn't even realize was on the 360. When you came to the late Xbox 360 life cycle, a lot of games started to struggle. Because while this was very powerful for 2005, by the time 2013 rolled around, the 512 megabytes of RAM that was split between the CPU and the GPU was very restrictive. I think about games like GTA 5, which needed you to install one disc to the hard drive and use the other disc to play off of just because you needed the bandwidth to try to stream enough assets in. Is this server even doing anything right now? Look, I have no idea. There's no progress bar. There's nothing. Maybe it's because the disc version is complete but the download is not? So we've been here for almost 30 minutes and yet we have the exact same downloading data screen. So I guess this is just sort of a downside to the fact that while you can download the games all you want, unless you actually know that they work, there may be, inevitably in this case, an actual whole half of the game that didn't download. So I'm loading from my save game wherever I left that off some number of years ago. Hey! We're there! We finally did it! Let's see where I left off. Oh, I'm just gonna like roll the credits or something? What the? What was that? Didn't do anything. Was that like the very last frame of the cutscene at the end of the game or something? Wait, hold on. Dude, something's wrong with this save file, I think. Oh yeah, look. Waiting to respawn, airing that save and it crashes. This reminds me of the old school days watching like R.B. and the Chief. Playing Halo 3 is actually not a good game to demo on the 360. It's always nice to experience everything exactly the way it was, with the original hardware and whatnot. But Halo 3 has not only been updated in the Master Chief collection, but if you play this exact copy of Halo 3 on an Xbox One X or Series X, it will do the full like 4k upscale which looks phenomenal. Now we can't talk about the 360 without talking about Kinect, which is one of the main... It heard me. Kinect, stop listening. Using the K is one of the things that you cannot do on more modern hardware. Now technically the Xbox One did have Kinect, but I don't think that it was compatible. And also Kinect for the 360 was a little bit more of a different experience. Stop listening! So you can see it sort of is able to build a skeleton for me. The gun stringer instead of the gun slinger. Hilarious. Got him! You know I'll say that Kinect games do feel like one of the main reasons why you would want to buy these things and have them loaded up on an actual original Xbox 360. Like this Kinect will not plug into a newer Xbox. So it is one of the things where if there are these experiences like Kinect-able that you never got to enjoy, well this is your way to do it. So while it's great to play the original hardware, the question is, is this really the end of the line for the Xbox 360? Because don't forget the vast majority of non-Kinect games that were designed for the 360 will run on the Xbox One and the Series X. So my question is, before the store closes, obviously we were able to buy some stuff on the actual 360, but can we buy and download new games from an Xbox Series S? X? 1X? 1S? VCR? I mean Xbox One? So let's see what happens if we want to play 360 games and importantly try to buy new 360 games on an Xbox Series S. The main reason I use the S is because of course it has no disk drive. If you have a Xbox One or Xbox Series X with the disk drive, you can just take your old 360 disks and put them in. But I'm curious to see how well this handles it because let's be real, digital is the future of Xbox and well pretty much everything else. So this is kind of the way we're going to be preserving games in the future. Oh yeah, Far Cry 2. Yes, so it is definitely showing most of the games. Now I will say not 100% of the games that are designed for 360 work on newer Xboxes. I would say the majority, the vast majority, but you will find a few that don't. Yeah, so like this is Shadow of Mordor, but if I open up, this is an Xbox One version. Let's see if we can buy some games for the 360 and make sure they're the same price and they all just kind of come across. Because theoretically they will, but I'm actually not totally sure. So here is a game that is designed for 360. This is the 360 version and I have a couple options. Now this is one of the games that's included, Game Pass doesn't really count, but you can see that I do have the option to purchase it. So that still works. You can buy a certified refurbished Xbox Series S from your Xbox. Subscribe to the channel for Austin buying Xboxes using Xboxes. Wait, are you trying to tell me that none of the Xbox 360 Need for Speed games are available? The only Need for Speed games I'm seeing are more modern ones that are designed for like Xbox One or Series X. I know that Need for Speed Undercover for 360 is on sale right now, but it's not letting me buy it on the Series S. Cars 3 right now is on sale for like $4 on the 360, but because I'm on a Series S, it's trying to download the Xbox One version, which is $40. I actually legitimately thought, maybe naively, that almost all Xbox 360 games would just still show up in the store on the newer Xboxes. But you actually may legitimately need to pull out your old Xbox, get it all online, download everything, and save it on your actual drive because you don't know how long these things are gonna be around for. It's admirable for Microsoft to have kept the Xbox 360 store online for 19 years. And to be fair, the Xbox Live experience is not shutting down yet. It's clearly gonna have a day in which they're gonna have to turn those servers off. Specifically, if you wanna buy any Xbox 360 games, do it now. And ideally, do it on the original hardware because a lot of the games do not show up the same way on newer consoles. And while you can still get some via like backwards compatibility, and of course, nothing should ever stop your discs from working, hopefully, you found this enlightening and a great reason to dig through your closet and bust out your good old Xbox 360. Much like the Xbox 360, I was better in 2009, but well, the nursing home comes for us all.