I had a really good time with Xbox 360, or 3tricksy as I like to call it, this week. This is what I got to in my journey through all my 360 games.

2013 is really the start Console Generation 8, but to me it's still Gen 7 because the Xbox One and PS4 came out late in that year, and I didn't get either one until maybe a year later. Yes the Wii-U was out in 2012, the 3DS and PS Vita in 2011, but it really felt like Gen 8 fully to me in 2014. So this is the last year I'll review until I get past all the Gen 7 systems in my retro journey this year.

I'm getting closer to the end of my 360 games now, but it may be a few more weeks still before I move on to PS3 or Wii. I really can't wait to start those. 

The first thing that comes to mind is changing my Xbox gamertag. I got one in 2004 when Xbox Live Arcade dropped but a mini-game on an Official Xbox Magazine demo disc was giving me trouble in '07, and I thought a new gamertag would solve it. Well, it did solve it, but I lost touch with my old gamertag over time, and now it's probably been deactivated along with the few games I bought under it. It'll be 20 years on my current gamertag next year. It could've been 23 years if I'd stuck with my original one.

I ripped through a lot of stuff this week, being impatient to get through it all, the slightest annoyance sending me to the next game in my collection. But, I had a lot of good experiences anyway. I'll break these 360 games into two categories, physical and digital only (or, Xbox Live Arcade as it used to be called). 

'cause it feels so good. Stuff I played a lot in the 7th generation of consoles, 2005-2013ish. 

I got through a lot combining the end of last week's and all of this week's gaming. I'm clearly not going for complete runs. I just play to revisit and go as far as I stay interested. Here's the lot on Xbox 360:

These are games that are still stuck in my memory today. Many highly rated games are good, and I've been revisiting them, but these are the ones that come to mind first when I think of 360. 

I'm on vacation this week for the most part. LJ and I went to Washington D.C. to visit the Smithsonian Zoo and Museum of the American Indian (also, accidently - 'cause we parked beneath it - the Bible Museum and saw the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit), but I manged to squeeze in some gaming on a few days here and there and last week, which I couldn't report on 'cause Pixlbit was down. 

I kinda can't wait to do this sort of overview for DS games when I get there in a few weeks. 

A launch sequence ensues, Thunderbirds style. 

I went over the Metacritic list of best DS games and made my own list with comments. There's certainly many more great games I didn't mention for various reasons. 

I only had one day to game this week and it was more mopping up in Lego Star Wars The Skywalker Saga. 

Der der. What ho! Nonsense. Here goes. Stuff I bought and played down below. 

These are my picks from the 5th page of Metacritic's Best-of-All-Time list for 2007-2009. 

I can't resist starting a list of media to check out for April focusing on the years 1990-1994. This is roughly console Generation 4. My only rule for gaming is to stick to the consoles that came out those years regardless when the games actually were released. That means Game Boy, SNES, and Genesis. I'm largely ignoring Turbografx-16 and Neo Geo for the moment because I don't have those systems. I also made a short list of PC, board/card and arcade games I might have time to play. Here goes. 

2010 was certainly the year of the Wii even though it came out in '06. The top four spots for world wide sales are Wii games with Wii Sports being number 1. Microsoft and Sony tried to imitate Nintendo's success by putting out motion control devices this year with Kinect and Move respectively. Niether did much for thier respective systems. I started blogging this year at 1UP.com. Here are some stuff I played that I would replay and some stuff I missed I'd like to play. 

I remember this year mostly for the being disappointed with the World of Warcaft MMO. I wanted another another strategy WoW. But there was also the release of the DS, which got me back into handheld gaming, and cueing up for my first midnight release for Halo 2. The rest of the world was buying GTA: San Andreas and Pokemon FireRed/Leaf Green, numbers 1 and 2 in sales respectively. Half-Life 2 was a notable winner on Metacritic. Here's some stuff I played and want to play. 

80s retro gaming is the topic today. Here's what I played last week (or earlier this week) on various collections I have.

I checked this out when it was new on Game Pass. The match-3 like segment shown reminded me strongly of a game I love called Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes, a game by Capybara that came out for DS in 2009 and then Xbox Live Arcade in 2011. So I had to play it, and soon I was hooked. 

I made a list of what I played in 2010. Here they are in chronological order. 

Mark and I knocked another board game off the list by playing Backgammon. Then I played my new Genesis games and finally got back to my XSX games. 

Finished the second movie's worth of Lego Lord of the Rings the other day. There's an interesting mechanic where you can quickly switch to another set of characters in a totally different location. For instance from Frodo and Sam in Mordor to Aragorn and Legolas in Helms Deep.