Basil Plays Games

 Game: Fuzion Frenzy. Originally released for the Original Xbox on 11/15/2001. Developed by Blitz Games. Published by Microsoft Game Studios. Box includes: game disc and 28 page, full color instruction manual. Introduction: One of the most famous games for the Nintendo 64 was the Mario Party Trilogy. Nintendo paved the way for single screen multiplayer with their 4 player mingames anthology/board game bonanza. Microsoft wanted in on that action and gave us their version of that formula, with a futuristic hip hop/punk, just past the end of the 90s EXTREME kind of vibe. Story: There really isn't a story in this game. The setting is sometime in the future and each of the playable characters is like a sci/fi punk decked out version of edgy lifestyle people such as hip hop DJs and skateboarders. The game's instruction manual does give some character background/ motivation but that all is pretty meaningless in the context of the game itself. Visuals: Fuzion Frenzy is presented in

Game: Halo: Combat Evolved. Originally released for the Original Xbox on 11/15/2001. Developed by Bungie. Published by Microsoft Game Studios. Box includes: game disc and 30 page, full color instruction manual. Introduction: Halo was one of the American Launch titles for the original Xbox, released on November 15, 2001. Halo would go on to be the biggest selling game for the original Xbox and is widely considered both one of the best launch games of all time AND the game that single handedly brought XBOX into people's houses.  Halo was also the game that helped standardized the dual joystick approach to playing first person shooter games on consoles. Before Halo, most FPS games were released for PC as they could take advantage of the more powerful hardware as well the keyboard and mouse setup being more well-suited for the genre than the standard game pad. There were plenty of fps games for consoles before Halo but almost all of them have been rendered unplayable by today's sta