There’s not much that gets me to turn on my Xbox 360 these days. A new Halo game is usually a guaranteed buy, but I find myself wanting to play newer video games less and less for some reason. I’m also usually pretty excited about new consoles, but this year I haven’t even gotten excited about the Xbox One or the Playstation 4.

However, Disney Infinity caught my eye a long time ago. The combination of a video game and cool little collectible figures as well as the ability to mix Disney characters from different properties sounded like a lot of fun, despite the high price tag. It’s obvious that Disney wanted a slice of the Skylanders billion dollars a year business model, but they created a game that is a lot of fun and (in my opinion) has a ton of potential.

Taking advantage of some launch-week sales and deals, I snagged the Xbox 360 Starter Kit as well as a few extra figures and gave the game a spin. Usually I leave game reviews to the experts, like my buddies over at Horrible Night, but I’m sure a lot of you are wondering if this game is any good, and hopefully I can help you out. Now, on to the game.
Read More

Apples to Apples has come pretty far since it first got published in 1999. It’s currently the (give or take) third best selling board game on Amazon, and you can’t go to a department store without seeing the red boxes overflowing from the shelves, especially around the holidays. Well, the Apples to Apples empire just grew even larger, because now you can buy it on Xbox Live Arcade, and it’s a pretty nice digital version of the game.
Read More

I vividly remember when I first encountered Halo way back in 2001. I was working with a bunch of serious gamers at the time. A couple of them picked up the new Xbox on the morning it launched on Nov. 15.

One of the guys bought the new console and a few of the initial games before coming into work. I went into his office to check out his haul. He showed off two the games he considered to be the best, NFL Fever and Project Gotham Racing. He’d bought a third game on a whim. It was Halo. “It’s supposed to be pretty good,” he said giving his justification for the purchase. Looking back, that was the understatement of the decade.

In the months that followed, my coworkers and I convened at lunch to play a little on the Xbox. Halo quickly became the lunchtime favorite. Not the campaign with the sci-fi storyline but the multiplayer which pitted player versus player. Our lunch sessions would sometimes spill over to after work. Other friends would often stop by to join in the fun.
Read More

In this limited edition, extra-long episode of Bubble Pipe Theater secretly spliced together from two separate recording sessions, Tim, Rob, and Tommy talk about the Netflix streaming/DVD split, the PS3 game from Studio Ghibli, Adventure Time toys, Nintendo, Bad and Good Batman news, Scott Pilgrim, and Rob’s experiments playing Dungeons and Dragons on Google+.

This was an amazing year to have either an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, the reason for combining these two top 5 lists was because so many of the games that came out were available for both systems simultaneously. For judging this list: Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 games were judged based on their exclusivity at the time of the release, any game released on both the 360 and PS3 are judged in a separate list: “the top 5 multi-console releases” which are judged at the bottom of this post.

Top 5 Xbox 360 Games of 2010

Read More