As others have done on the site I felt the urge to tell a small personal story with my memories of the Xbox 360 now that its servers have shut down.
For me my Xbox journey started on 2007 when Halo 3 was released. Growing up I was a huge Nintendo kid (mostly still am) and played a lot of the typical classics, meanwhile my big brother was the Playstation kid (mostly still is) and played all of those classics. Through us both being big fans of two different consoles we got to experience the classics of both sides. The one thing we both had though was a PC.
As some of you may know the very first Halo combat evolved was also released on PC alongside the original Xbox console, and this is when both me and my brother really got into Halo. We played through the story, loved it, played multiplayer in Lan parties and just had a blast. Once Halo 2 came out we went over to a friends house who owned it and the first Xbox, played through the campaign in couch co op and got mad over the cliffhanger ending (ok more accurately I got mad over it).
When Halo 3 came out I was going through that phase as a teenager where you wanted to also try out cool things and Nintendo was fully into its Wii family phase so it alone wasn't enough for me who was craving action. 360 was aiming for the teenage demographic with graphic violence, crude humor, guns everywhere! It got me hooked with the marketing.
Halo 3 was a game I replayed way too many times to count with both friends and my brother, it was also my first real experience with multiplayer games through online with friends. As years passed on the other note able games that fully engrossed me (particularly because I could play them with my bro) was Gears of war and Borderlands 1. Gears of war in particular was one of the best couch co op action games you could ask for to play with friends and I have many fond memories of chain sawing my friends and enemies alike in it.
360 was also my first introduction to the concept of "Indie games" and what it meant to play smaller scale games that were still as good (if not better) than triple A games. Before this I had never played intentionally anything indie intentionally, as a teen I had a hard time wrapping head around what was the difference between indie and Triple A which was also a new concept at the time. The first Indie game I got into that was Castle crashers. It was a great beat em up experience with up to 4 friends and had just the right amount of crude humor (and a lot of poop jokes) alongside simple but fun gameplay to last you an entire campaigns worth of shenanigans.
There is one last note able game I want to to talk about that went under the radar named: "Comic jumper: the adventures of Captain Smiley."
Comic jumper is a run and gun action game made by twisted pixel (known for Splosion man) with a heavy emphasis on humor and action to keep you entertained for a few hours. I was really getting into my comic/manga phase around 2010 when the game came out, the look and humor appealed to me as teen and got me introduced to several styles of comics. It sadly really wasn't popular and has become mostly a forgotten game.
The 360 was the first and probably the last time I took Xbox as a brand seriously, it was a console that really pushed itself into the console market and proved that western studios could also make consoles and big hit games with quality similar to Nintendo and Sony. 360 had a lot of my first experiences as a gamer and got me to appreciate other types of games that I didn't normally get the chance to play as a Nintendo kid. It is sad to see that the 360's services are shutting down but hopefully one day Microsoft will look at it again and understand why it was such a beloved console and why it succeeded so well!
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