Best Xbox 360 Games

01

Ninja Gaiden II

Limbless enemies drag themselves across the floor on their chins to bite the player. Ninja Gaiden II's 2008 combat generates severed-limb piles no other game has matched. The genre called it ultraviolence; reviewers called it art.

02

Spec Ops: The Line

Halfway through a military shooter, the player learns the white phosphorus airstrike they just executed killed 47 civilians in a refugee camp — and the game made them do it. No other ending is available.

03

BioShock

Rapture was built on Ayn Rand's Objectivism — pure individual reason, no government, no God. By the time the player arrives, its citizens are injecting gene-splicing drugs and eating each other. The ideology ate itself first.

04

Viva Piñata

Microsoft's rated-E garden game lets piñatas reproduce, eat each other's eggs, and drive rival species to permanent in-game extinction — all with candy gore. It was marketed exclusively at children.

05

Eternal Sonata

The entire world of this 2007 JRPG is the fever dream Frédéric Chopin experienced while dying of tuberculosis in 1849. Every dungeon boss is a real Chopin composition. He narrates his own hallucinated death.

06

Xbox 360

One in two Xbox 360 consoles failed. Microsoft knew by 2006, said nothing until 2007, then paid $1.15 billion to fix it — the largest warranty action in consumer electronics history at the time.

07

Fallout 3

Megaton, a settlement of innocent NPCs, can be detonated with a nuclear bomb the player plants in its center. The explosion has a custom orchestral score. The quest giver hands you a penthouse overlooking the crater.

08

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

In 'Death from Above,' the player inhabits a soldier already struck by a nuclear blast, dragging themselves across rubble, unable to stand. No HUD. No objective marker. The level ends when the character dies — and it always ends that way.

09

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

On Oblivion's 2006 launch day, a modder released a nude patch that worked perfectly — because Bethesda had shipped the fully modeled naked body meshes on the disc, just hidden under underwear textures.

10

Braid (video game)

Braid's final level reverses time to reveal the princess the player has been chasing is not a captive — she is running from the player. The epilogue text identifies her as the atomic bomb. Jonathan Blow hid this in 2008.