Originally featured as a minigame in Project Gotham, this 80s-style twin-stick shooter was rebuilt as a standalone digital-only release, attracting a huge new fanbase. Fast, frenetic and super stylish, with lovely vector visuals, it was the game that first showed the potential of Xbox Live Arcade. A time-sink of epic proportions The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (screenshot from the 2025 remake) Tens of millions of hours must have been spent in this foundational text of open-world role-playing games - one of the first video games where you really could go where you wanted and do pretty much as you pleased. Riding around Cyrodiil on horseback, taking in its gleaming city and backwater towns, it was so easy to get drawn into unexpected shenanigans that closing the story's threatening hell-gates became a distant second priority. The most addictive version of the classic card game Uno on Xbox 360 Look - don't @ us - Uno was one of most important Xbox 360 games.

At the Xbox Games Showcase this June, Microsoft debuted a trailer for the eighth game in the violent, grandiose and unexpectedly maudlin Gears of War series: a prequel. The sight of series heroes Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago as younger men is "an emotional homecoming like no other", as Microsoft's Xbox blog put it. But the real tug at the heartstrings comes with the first notes of a slow, instrumental rendition of Tears for Fears' Mad World. "As a 41-year-old man, that piano got me tearing up," wrote one YouTube commenter. It's a throwback to the original, iconic Gears of War trailer from 2006, in which a lonesome Fenix picks through his ruined world to Gary Jules' plaintive cover of the same song.

Cliff Bleszinski was lead designer on the popular video game Gears of War, and also worked on other classic titles such as Unreal and Fortnite. His new memoir Control Freak describes his rise from Nintendo fanboy to rock star game designer. "It's 300 pages of my life story, starting when I was a pimply faced teenager who didn't really have any friends or even a girlfriend," Bleszinski says in Episode 531 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I didn't really like the world in which I lived, so I decided to pursue a career in the video game industry, in which I could not only manipulate the worlds that I played--in the games that I played--but also create those worlds myself." Control Freak is a surprisingly candid look into the life of a game designer, detailing Bleszinski's many mistakes and insecurities.

When I was a kid, I was only allowed to play video games on Fridays and Saturdays – an attempt by my parents to keep my gaming passion under control. For the rest of the week, I was happy doing other things and reading my Nintendo magazines, but come Friday evening, I was ready to pick up a controller. I would stock up on Haribo and fizzy juice on the way home from school in preparation for an evening in front of the TV. My parents, presumably grateful for a few hours of peace, would throw a Pizza Hut delivery through the door of the spare room where our games consoles lived and leave my brother and I to it. We would sit and play Zelda or Diddy Kong Racing or another parent-approved, non-violent obsession of the day until we were commanded to go to bed.

Zöe Curnoe, a senior producer at video game developer The Coalition, lets out a long sigh. We've just reminded her about a tweet from Cliff Bleszinski, the former lead designer on the Gears of War franchise, which she has worked on for several years. Gears 5, the latest title in the Gears of War series, has a female protagonist for the first time. "Not gonna lie," wrote Bleszinski. "Seeing a woman on the cover of a Gears game makes me happy. I was told for decades'games with female leads don't sell.'"

A series of missteps put Microsoft in second place before the Xbox One even came out. While it's likely to remain there until the next generation begins, there are a lot of people out there who have never experienced what the console has to offer. With the Xbox One X having a clear advantage over Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro when it comes to gaming on a 4K TV, there's never been a better time to jump in. While not all the games on this list are Xbox exclusives, every game is at least better on Xbox than PlayStation, provided you're playing on a One X. Studio MDHR's Cuphead is as beautiful as it is challenging -- and it's very beautiful. Half bullet-hell shooter, half platformer, half classic boss rush... wait that's too many halves.

The Electronics Entertainment Expo, or E3 for short, is the world's biggest video game trade show and is hosted every year to give industry watchers a look at what's on the horizon. As direct competitors in the console platform and software publishing spaces courting largely similar demographics, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Sony (NYSE:SNE) are often compared to each other. This article originally appeared in the Motley Fool. Putting on the best E3 conference isn't always a harbinger of overall success, but what's spotlighted at the trade show and how it's presented sometimes have a significant impact on the progression of the industry and each company's respective performance. So, who had the better show?

Eight years ago, those were some of the examples of games I called out for contributing to a serious case of video game industry sequelitis, leading to a lack of originality across all the different game platforms. And what did I see at E3 2018? Fallout 76 goes online in a new twist. Clearly, originality is still not in fashion. It's appropriate, then, to go back to how I explained this problem back in 2010: It's overly simplistic to blame a conceptual lack of originality for the deficit of new ideas, stories and characters.

The E3 Expo is in full swing, and if Bethesda's Fallout 76 reveal got you excited (and if not, go re-watch the trailer below) then you should head over to Amazon right now. The online retailer is offering physical copy pre-orders of Fallout 76 for $48 right now, $12 off the standard $60 price for new games. That's good for 20 percent off, but there's a catch: You need to be a Prime member to take advantage of it. The new Fallout 76, which doesn't roll out until November 14, is taking an unusual approach compared to previous iterations in Bethesda's post-nuclear wasteland. In this game you inhabit the Fallout world with other players with whom you can either team up or hunt down PvP-style.

Fortnite, a free-to-play shooter by Epic Games (Gears of War), has taken over the world. That may sound like exaggeration, but I couldn't overstate the popularity of Fortnite if I tried. It is massively played, and even more massively watched--on Twitch, 66 million hours of Fortnite have been watched in the past two weeks, with about 200,000 viewers tuning in at any given time. It is also, somehow, massively complicated. Fortnite started off as something less than a success.