Any value-conscious Xbox 360 gamer should consider these five fantastic titles available at budget prices. Our list offers great games for fans of shooters, RPGs, music games, and racing games alike.
A gaming system is a significant investment. Once you’ve saved enough to cover the cost of the system itself, you are forced to contend with expenses like additional controllers, headsets, subscription fees, component cables, and so on. How, then, is the gamer on a budget expected to be able to actually buy decent games to play on their shiny new system? New games usually run somewhere around 60 bucks, leaving even the most monetarily well-endowed gamers with only enough leftover cash to purchase one or two.
Fortunately, with both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 life cycles in full swing, there are quite a few excellent older games that can be purchased for less than 20 dollars. A value-conscious gamer could purchase one or two new games with his hard-earned money, or take my advice and purchase all five of these great games, and probably save cash in the process.
Battlefield: Bad Company
The Battlefield series has long been a staple of PC action games but has only recently come into its own in the console market. Battlefield: Bad Company is an excellent multiplayer game with a fully-realized single-player component.
Players join the ranks of Bad Company, a single squad tasked with making a difference in a much larger conflict. In Bad Company, players are able to commandeer and pilot any vehicle on the battlefield, from tanks and jeeps to helicopters and patrol boats.
Environments and buildings are fully destructible, meaning there is no one set way to accomplish any mission objective. Just because there’s only one road into an enemy base doesn’t mean you can’t simply blow an enormous hole in a side wall and take them by surprise.
Multiplayer is also definitely one of the game’s strengths, and I strongly recommend it for anyone who plans on subscribing to Xbox Live.
Burnout Paradise
I’ve never been a huge fan of racing games but Burnout Paradise changed my entire perception of the genre. Taking place in a massive, open city, Paradise is the pinnacle of the Burnout series.
Winning races is not just about getting to the finish line before everyone else; for the more aggressive gamer (like myself), there are other ways of ensuring victory. Ramming your opponents into a guard rail or oncoming traffic is an equally effective strategy. In fact, the game rewards you for such actions by providing you with much-needed boost energy.
However, racing is not all Paradise has to offer. There are multiple event types, including Road Rage (take out a set number of opponents), Stunt Run (rack up massive points by stringing together long runs of death-defying stunts), and Showtime (create the most massive pileup possible). Players are also encouraged to explore the city to find secret shortcuts and billboards to smash through.
Multiplayer in Paradise City is amazing, and players can drop in and out of online play with a single button press.
Frequent free and for-purchase content upgrades to the game make Burnout Paradise a worthwhile long term investment.