OG Xbox Game Reviews

A bunch of OG Xbox review notes, mostly taken after one or two hours of play. You can probably tell that a minimal amount of effort has been expended. My impressions are very shallow and based on minimal contact with each game. As much as anything this is my attempt to document some details and thoughts on as many games as I can get my hands on.

007 Agent under fire: An old school shooter with gadgets. Like No One Lives Forever, except not as good. Very dated but it ran smoothly and the shooting was brisk.

Aeon Flux: Lots of cut scenes. LOTS of cut scenes. Very zoomed out and stylistic, flashy lights, reflections, weird camera angles. It's basically a 3D platformer and would probably appeal to people who like that sort of thing.

Alias: Like a cut-rate Hitman without the killing (maybe?). I didn't play enough to find out, it was booooring and I never watched the show. Game seemed to assume I was an Alias fan, so nothing was explained.

Aliens vs Predator: Extinction: Looks like fun. It's an RTS, but in the squad management mould - no base building or unit building. I'll play this again. - https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/aliens-versus-predator-extinction-review/1900-6072952/

Arx Fatalis: A great old RPG from around 2002/2003 that plays like an elder scrolls game. I've played it a bit on PC but never got that far. Runs well and looks pretty good, though of course everything is a little clunkier with a controller. Defn play again, though it might prompt me to finally run through it on the PC if the UI annoys me too much. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/arx-fatalis-review/1900-6083711/

Battle Engine Aquila: A game about piloting a transformable mech. You either stomp around shooting things, or fly around shooting things. The tutorial was fun. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/battle-engine-aquila-review/1900-2909822/

Blazing Angels: If you like WW2 planes and shooting things down, this seems like it's a cool game. Played the intro mission and enjoyed it. Looked decent, ran well - annoying American voice overs. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/blazing-angels-squadrons-of-wwii-review/1900-6146935/

Black Stone: I couldn't find a working review link for this one, that's how good it was. A slow, clunky, janky gauntlet dark legacy clone. The best I can offer is this metacritic page, which flatters it. https://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox/black-stone-magic-steel

Burnout 2: Drive. Crash. Explode. Re-spawn. A racing game.

Close Combat First to Fight: Bog standard old-school squad based FPS. Apparently the co-op is split screen and a bit of fun, but no chance to test that yet. Run down streets, run into buildings, shoot muslim soldier caricatures. It was...mediocre. I'd give co-op a try.

Dynasty Warriors 5: A terrible fighting game. You, plus an army of nobodies, versus hundreds of meat shields. So bleh. I played something similar on the Xbox One a while ago and this is a worse version of what, ten or more years later, was also a bland game. Maybe it gets better if you put some time into it, but the reviews I skimmed online did not support this hypothesis.

Fallout - Brotherhood of steel: An Action RPG using the Dark Alliance engine. Supports 2 players max I think. Definitely more adult than Dark Alliance. Worth playing co-op.

Baldurs Gate - Dark Alliance: Action RPG. Co-op for 2 ppl, hack and slash with spells and stuff. Loot things, level up...WARNING: Jumping puzzles.

Demon Stone: A Forgotten Realms action RPG featuring the voice of Patrick Stewart and an emsemble fo characters to play. Combat is against multiple enemies at once with lots of things happening around you. Simplistic so far but looks to have a lot of skills/perks to gain while levelling. Fun.

Full Spectrum Warrior: A squad based cover shooter, Has co-op.

Land of the Dead: An FPS based on the movie of the same name. You're a farmer at home alone when a zombie outbreak hits. Seems to focus more on running away and solving simple puzzles (find the key, cut the chain etc) than trying to kill zombies, though I still killed quite a few. Enjoyed what I played. My wife sat with me, dispensing suggestions both helpful and unhelpful. Also a lot of "LOOK OUT" and "I told you so."

Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis: A park building and dinosaur breeding game. My son loved it for 2 days then never talked about it again.

Iron Phoenix: A martial arts fighting game that appears to only support online or system link games. I think it is all about arena battles against multiple enemies. Offline play is just you vs a bunch of AI. The moves are the usual jumping, chi based powers, kicks and punches. There are multiple characters to choose from but I got bored before learning or caring how they differed. Weapons could be picked up and used and the moves were interesting, but ultimately it's just a series of chaotic arena fights and the main draw from the original release - multiplayer - is no longer viable.

25 to Life: A 90s gangster style 3rd person shooter. The gameplay didn't suck balls, but it was nothing new. Run to a spot, use cover, shoot at cops. Run to cover, etc. I hate the whole late 90s/early 2000s cop-killer gangster thing, so this one was duly deleted. (you might protest and say, but what about GTA San Andreas, you loved that! Actually, no, that's the one I hated. Like, REAAAAAALLY hated.)

4x4 Evolution 2: A bland racing game that may have been interesting 15 years ago, but is now just a footnote in history. Very little of interest here for the modern gamer. It runs well, smooth and without any over weird behaviours, controls are precise. Looks like shit and the nature of the vehicles - off-road things of various types - do not lend themselves to beauty in the first place. All the usual basic racing modes plus split screen.

Advent Rising: An action adventure game in 3rd person. Sci-fi, first contact deal, some good guy aliens appear and warn you that the bad guy aliens will be here in a few weeks - then the bad guy aliens drop in an hour later and fuck everything up. It looked pretty crap visually and stuttered a lot in complex scenes, but it was obviously trying hard for the time to be something cool and unique. The shooting and punching was okay and the story is by Orson Scott Card. Looking back it felt like a proto-Mass Effect. To be played again I think, there was a lot of potential in the mechanics I saw and the story was engaging enough.

Airforce Delta Storm: An arcade "flight sim" from the late 90s (around 99, maybe even 2000) that was ported to Xbox. Flying a jet of some kind you select hotspots on a map and fly a mission at that location. When back at base you can unlock new jets and munitions. I dominated with the base jet, destroying all air threats, tanks, trucks and even navy vessels with ease, so I assume these new jets are needed for future threats. There appears to be only the two weapons, missiles that lock on to both air and ground targets equally well, and a cannon that is about as useful as you would expect. Once or twice I used it on a ground target. You don't resupply munitions until you return to base. Runs fine, plays ok. Was probably a bit of fun 20 years ago.

Alter Echo: A scifi third person hack and slash featuring psychic powers and manipulable matter. You stab, you jump, you use the powers of your mind to do things. Initial thoughts:


America's Army: A fun, squad based, FPS with an emphasis on 'realism' and using real world tactics. Or so I assume, I'm not in the army. I enjoyed the training missions and though the skill system could potentially extend interest and playability by allowing for character customisation. Initial thoughts: This was fun, by far the best put together of the squad based shooters I have played so far. I forgot it was such a huge genre back in the early 2000s.

American Chopper 1 and 2: A game about bikers going around doing motorcycle things. Based on a television show I think. Pure horseshit. Initial thoughts: Fuck off.

Apex: A game based around building up a fictitious car company that is focused on racing. The driving and customisation are basic and bog standard. There was absolutely no lee-way on corners (hitting a raised curb on an apex almost stops you dead). Even though I hit everything imaginable and drove off the road a lot I still came third, so, it was fairly forgiving. Game runs fine but looks bollocks and blocky. Apex is a dressed up arcade racer defined only by the ability to build up your car brand and race them against real world car makes. Initial thoughts: Bored. Nothing I haven't played 100x before.

Aquaman - Battle for Atlantis: Awful garbage

Arctic Thunder: A snowmobile racing game of all things. Looked shit when I was selecting options and setting up the race, then it hung. Probably the best of all possible outcomes. Initial thoughts: Terribad.

Original Xbox: Project Resurrection - Part 3

Life has been busy lately. Between training twice a week, Saturday mornings being taken up with an MMA session plus footy training down at the oval, various social engagements, and some big name games taking up my downtime (Battletech, Arma 3, Outer Worlds) - I am strapped for time to sit and write, and I don't have easy target subjects to write about. As an apology for being away, here's a pic of the world's awesomest icecream.

I meant the Unicorn, but the Sanga is equally great)

Back to business. Last week, the final part for my Xbox rebuild arrived. This post is both an anticlimax and a triumph due to the ease with which it all came together. Perhaps this is because I spent so much time researching and preparing, perhaps it's experience, but there were no glitches in the final build, no major obstacles to overcome, no big surprises (other than good ones). Apart from an 80 pin IDE cable that folded the opposite way to the original (proving a pain in the ass to origami into the box), I encountered zero technical impediments.

In summary, to get this off the ground I needed the following:

• New hard drive - I purchased a Western Digital Blue 500GB SATA drive (Ebay)
• An 80 pin IDE cable (Ebay)
• An IDE to SATA adapter (Amazon)
• A blank DVD-R disc
• Hexen 2018 tools burned to a DVD

The hard drive was easy (and cheap), as was the cable. In terms of uncertainty, the adapter was a complete unknown both in ability to fulfill the requirements, and the level of quality control. This thing is handmade somewhere in mainland china and looked flimsy even in the Amazon pics. You know what though, it worked first time - though I can't yet comment on its long term ability to keep working.

You know what took forever to find though? Blank DVDs. When was the last time you went out and purchased some? Who the hell sells them anymore? Sure as hell isn't my local supermarket. All I wanted was one disc (plus a backup or two in case it didn't work properly first time), but I couldn't even find that. I went further afield, to the local shopping centre (mall for you o/s readers), but the best I could find after a LOT of walking were spindles of FIFTY discs for $40AU. So, uh, no thanks. After almost an hour on the road and in various shops I wasn't about to turn around and give up. A quick search online told me Officeworks might have them. Now, Officeworks and I have a fractured relationship after Laptop-gate 2018 (another story, another time), but I was desperate. As usual, Officeworks had no staff rostered on, and/or they were all hanging around the photo machines pretending to twiddle knobs and pore over colour settings. However, what they did  have were boxes of 10 DVD-R discs at a reasonable price. After some lining up (by myself I might add, it's not like I was waiting for other people to be served), I was on the way home.

See below for actual footage of me securing these

The build went (as mentioned), well. First I removed the DVD and caddy, then I plugged in the new IDE cable. After some fancy cable folding I got the DVD caddy and drive back in place and plugged it in. The HDD was a little trickier due to the IDE cable, but I figured it out after a couple of careful tests. First the drive was screwed into its housing, then I carefully threaded the power cable into the little conduit on the side. When that was in place I plugged the adapter into the HDD, completed my IDE origami project, and got the two cables plugged in. I'm not proud of the way it turned out, but it seems to work.

Oh, I also snapped the front bit off of the DVD drive, but it should glue back on. Right?

Whoop a-day - that's not supposed to be there

The final hurdle was partitioning and formatting the drive then installing the dashboard again. I thought this was going to suck, because I remember it sucking 15 years ago. I was wrong, seems that not only has technology advanced in the intervening years, the world of old school Xbox modding has too. I grabbed a copy of Hexen 2018 (found in the usual places, just search for it), burned it to one of the hen's-teeth-like DVDs (using no special software, just the iso burner built into Windows 10), and popped it into the Xbox DVD drive. It worked. Rather than write an essay, I'll simply embed the video I watched. 

That was it really. To get the games on the drive you'll need to connect your Xbox to the local network with a cable, configure the network settings, and use an FTP program (I use Filezilla) to copy the files over. If you have trouble with copy operations failing, make sure the FTP program is only making a single connection at a time. The OG Xbox cannot handle multiple connections and many errors will occur. Create a folder called Games on the F drive (and G drive is you made both partitions), then simply copy your game folders into those. You need a folder for each game and in the root of each game folder is the xbe file and all supporting files, you cannot nest a root game folder inside another game folder (ie F:\Games\Game A\Game A\<files here>).

Finished! (well, almost, I'll leave the cover off for a few days just in case)

Ok, that's all for this update, and pretty much for the project. I might post some game reviews (or summaries at least), it depends on time. My ONLY regret is not hunting down a cheap 2TB and installing that. Perhaps in part 4...

Disclaimer: You need a chipped/modded Xbox to do it this way. If you have a softmodded Xbox you'll either need to softmod it again or clone your old drive to the new one. I don't know how to do those things.

Original Xbox: Project Resurrection - Part 2

And I'm back with a second installment of "When I found my xbox at the back of a shelf in my shed and decided to try it out". You may remember, back in part one, when I booted it up and...well hey, why not read it for yourself HERE.

Done? Okay cool. So after the great disappointment which was:

I wouldn't let it go, I had to make this thing work and I didn't want to wait a few weeks until the converter arrived. Everything else works fine and I have some games ready to copy to a hard drive, I just had to work something out in the interim. From a little research I learned an SSD wasn't necessarily a great idea due to bandwidth considerations and that sticking with a spinning disk was both cheaper and more practical. I looked around online I was confident I could get my hands on a spinning SATA disk super cheap (refurbished). For now, being the impatient person I am, I decided it was time to pull it apart and check things out.

First, unplug that bastard and pop it open. I hadn't taken this apart in a decade and, given the sudden death of the HDD, I didn't know what to expect. Screws out, case off, and everything looked pristine, just how I left it. What else to do now but dismantle. Why? Why not! Out with the internals, out with the hard drive and DVD! I took that thing to pieces and then, job done, I cabled everything back together (though I didn't put it back in the case).

 

This is where the magic happened. I booted it back up, as much in hope than in anticipation of having fixed anything, and it was alive. Alive! Of course the first thing I did was back up any files I already had on there, delete them to make room, and then copy across a handful of my games to test.

Obviously, this was a resounding success

So why was it working now, HDD dangling in the wind, pants around its metaphorical ankles? I really don't know, but I can play Arx Fatalis so I don't care.

Looks way better in real life

For the past week then I've been ordering parts, researching options, backing up games, and getting my hands on new ones. I'm going to install a 500GB SATA drive and fill it with everything I have, and everything I get my hands on in the meantime. My ultimate goal is to have every Xbox game I'm even remotely interested in on a machine set up in my lounge room. I already have a laptop and router configured that I can use to swap games around so, for now, I can chop and change between about 20-25 games and compile a list of the best couch co-op options for a retro night. Who knows, perhaps I'll even post a micro review or two.

More to come when the parts arrive.

Original XBox - Project Resurrection

One of the great thing about having worked with computers for longer than I can remember is owning a lot of old hardware. One of the sad things is looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, and realising how many great things I sold or gave away. On the great side is everything of note I've owned since around 2001. All the consoles and handhelds and phones and various bits of technology worth keeping (including the titular Xbox, which I'll get to in a second).

On the sad side lie my Commodore 64, Amiga 500, and the first PC I ever owned. I wish I still had them but they were given away, sold or scrapped for parts long long ago. Most likely they lie at the bottom of a landfill somewhere.

On the weekend I came across my old Xbox while looking for something totally unrelated and decided to resurrect it. The idea was to back up some of my old games to the hard drive and run them from there - many many years back I had this box chipped and installed a much larger hard drive from which I ran XBMC and an Amiga emulator. Everything went well to begin with, I browsed through media I hadn't watched for over a decade, I played Hunter on the Amiga emulator. Everything was looking cool. Until just now.

After a considerable amount of planning and set up (I needed cables, a router, a laptop) I could FTP back into my Xbox again. It was quite the nostalgia trip, I hadn't done this for...I have no no idea how long. I guess I was in my 30s, if not my late 20s! I had a back-up of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance still knocking about so I started copying it and went back to my day job. About 5 minutes later, I heard it. The sound of death.

Click. Silence. Click.

Over and over.

The hard drive stepper was dying. Some frantic scrambling and I had the core files for Evolution and XMBC backed up. Phew. Next I started backing up the other content but it was laborious, I would copy a couple of hundred meg then the HDD would go back to clicking so I'd shut down and wait a few minutes then kick it off again. Eventually though...

So yeah. It died. Thing is, it all happened between starting the article a few hours ago and right now, when the red ring of death showed up. What a disappointment. On the upside I found a bunch of RAM while searching for stuff to use with this XBox project, and some of it fit my game server. At least I had some kind of win.

Where to next? I just ordered an IDE->SATA converter from Amazon which, according to the internet, works with my original Xbox. There are a few old SATA drives lying around the house, SSD and spinning, and I managed to back-up the most important files before the drive failed. I have a way forward. Project postponed until the converter arrives.