The game’s story is a bit wonky in a Metal Gear sort of way, and it gets even crazier and weirder than the brief bit I just mentioned, but overall I really enjoyed it. As with all mad science experiments in video games, everything goes horribly wrong, and now you have to fight your way to the truth while facing soldiers, T’lan warriors, and the mysterious Solus who seems to be the reason for all of this chaos. Throughout the game you come to find out that Japanese scientists have discovered an ancient alien race known as the T’Lan and that a substance gathered from them, called T’Langen, was injected into test subjects in order to grant them super human abilities…and you were one of those subjects. Just before they execute you, though, you are rescued by Alex Hendrickson, who says she is someone from your past. After a brief tutorial of the game’s cinematic first person controls, you are fed a poisoned cheeseburger and are nearly killed by soldiers who have begun to storm the facility. In Breakdown, you play as Derrick Cole, an ex-soldier who wakes up in an experimental lab with no memory of his past. It was exclusive to the original Xbox and was actually one of the last games developed and published by them before their merger with Bandai. Breakdown is a first person action adventure game from Namco. I love this game, but I recognize its greatness is not universal. Because, when it comes to Breakdown, it is 100% my opinion. I know I said that everything in this list is heavily weighted by critical reception, yet here we begin with a big yellow square that stands out like a sore thumb. Although this is a personal list, it is heavily weighted on critical reception, which is why the Metacritic score is shared with each entry.
A bold statement, I know, and so to back up that argument, allow me to present to you what I believe to be the Top Twenty Original Xbox Exclusives.Ī quick note before jumping in, my only rules I had in making this list was to choose only one game from a franchise (with one very obvious and worthy exception) and I am also considering any game that launched on PC as well to be an exclusive, along with any game that came out first on Xbox. I would argue that the best exclusive games from the original Xbox could go toe to toe with the best exclusive games of any console in the 9th generation. This is a feat that is pretty outstanding on its own, but it is given even more gravitas given that this was Microsoft’s first ever console (these scores are included with each game’s header for reference).
In fact, there were more 90+ rated games on Metacrtic released for the original Xbox during its short four years than the first four years of the PS4 and Xbox One COMBINED (this is not counting re-releases of past gen games). However, the Xbox was able to pack an incredible punch considering its short four year lifespan and how new Microsoft was to the gaming industry. So it goes without saying that, when most people look back at that generation’s games, the number one thing that comes to mind is just how great the PS2’s library was, and those records rightfully speak for themselves.
In fact, with a whopping 4489 games published, the PS2 is also the console, historically, with the most games ever (by a factor of nearly 2X!). With those insane sales came a lot of games. The sales king was the PlayStation 2, a console that would go on to be the best selling console of all time. They did face some tough competition, though. The risky decision to include a broadband internet port, despite a small percentage of homes having broadband at the time, gave birth to Xbox Live, forever changing how we play games. The inclusion of a hard drive pushed console games technically further than they had been before and allowed for the first ever digital App Store with Xbox Live Arcade, predating even the iPhone App Store. Microsoft made bold, costly moves that grew the gaming space in a large way. This would be the first time in a long time that a major corporation would make a significant investment in the space, and, to this day, it has been one of the last. Perhaps its biggest addition to gaming, though, was Microsoft’s introduction to the console gaming market. It’s where a lot of today’s major franchises were established, where online console gaming gained prominence, and where digital game distribution spawned, to name a few. The sixth generation of consoles was one of the most pivotal generations of all when it comes to where gaming is today.