A fully 360-degree salu(ro)tation and a Happy Easter, Xbox to all who celebrate on this fine non-secular (but definitely not non-circular) annual event. Of course, there's nothing too festive about our regular exploration of the Xbox 360 library, one brief three-hundred-and-sixty-minute playthrough at a time, but you have to work the seasonal theme in there somewhere. Maybe I could've gone with an oval/circle motif instead? Well, I guess I'll put that idea off until we're back here again next year.

So yes, welcome to the fourteenth one of these now. If you're just joining us, the idea behind this feature is that I realized that I'd run out of space in both the area beneath the TV for the 360 console as well as room on the shelf for all the new Xbox One games I... haven't been buying (because I just get the occasional free month of Game Pass via Bing-Bux instead). Now that it's time to officially retire Microsoft's '00s-conquering magnum opus I've been trucking through all the backlog I've let build up for the thing. On top of that, we also have the many 360 games available on Game Pass too, provided it's one of the months when it's active (hence why none of the random choices have been Game Pass games so far, in case you were wondering or maybe forgot my original explanation all the way back in Episode 1).

There was a time when Microsoft was the market leader for video games, and that impressive legacy is what we celebrate today as the current future of Microsoft console gaming looks ever bleaker. Remembering the glory days with rose-tinted glasses: the imperative of anyone over 30 years old. Welcome to old.

Speaking of old, it's been a few weeks so you'll probably want (if not need) a refresher on the rules:

• Every month I choose one Xbox 360 game I've been meaning to check in on before I finally leave that generation in the dust, and a random choice from the games I've been very pointedly ignoring up until now. I swear there's stuff in the random pool I want to play too, but I'll be darned if the random chooser app is going to let me anywhere near them.
• Since we're all about coming full circle here, so to speak, each 360 game will be played for exactly 360 minutes. That's six hours straight, as I'm sure you all know by now.
• With each game I'll discuss their history, how well they've held up, and the likelihood of Nintendo adding them to the Switch Online library. Gotta admit, that last one's a pretty remote chance.
• Our final, ironclad rule is that we're prohibited from playing anything that's already in the Switch Online library or announced to be added. Fortunately, that's pretty much every 360 game off the hook.

For past episodes and the full rankings, make sure to check the links at the end. I can't make a table of links here right now. The table button is broken. *Cough*

Star Ocean: The Last Hope (Pre-Select)

• tri-Ace / Square Enix
• 2009-02-19 (JP), 2009-02-23 (NA), 2009-06-05 (EU)

History: Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the fourth game in tri-Ace's Star Ocean RPG franchise and the first to grace the Xbox 360 platform. The series famously juxtaposes science-fiction and fantasy, often by having characters from a Star Trek-like federation of planets get marooned on a primitive world stuck in a medieval-level technological era with the usual (for fantasy, not for our universe) mix of adventurers, magic, and monsters. The franchise's real-time combat frequently employs a "battle trophies" system that rewards players for difficult maneuvers, tactical play, or general milestones with each of the playable characters, thereby organically incentivizing those players to approach the combat system from multiple angles, and The Last Hope is no exception. The Last Hope debuted on 360, receiving an enhanced PS3 port the following year and a next-gen remaster for Steam and PS4 in 2017. You'll probably remember tri-Ace from when we covered Infinite Undiscovery back in Episode 5, but as a reminder: they were a group of developers that were part of the group that worked on Wolf Team's Tales of Phantasia and after that left to create their own studio to continue producing similar action-RPGs with a whole bunch of technical systems to learn. Their most famous output are the Star Ocean series and the Valkyrie Profile series, though they've been known to do the occasional one-off as well.

I bounced off Star Ocean: Till the End of Time so hard I think it had a knock-on effect for its sequels, to the extent that even though I've been sitting on this Limited Collector's Edition copy of The Last Hope (cute name for Star Ocean: Episode IV, you guys, real cute) for what feels like a decade I've yet to crack the seal on it. I'm happy for the opportunity to finally devalue it as a MIB collector's item though: as I outlined back in the very first episode of 360 in 360 half my plan for this feature was to finally settle some hashes with my 360 backlog before I moved on to greener plastics (that is to say, cases holding newer Xbox games). As for Star Ocean, I've always liked tri-Ace even if its output was firmly in the B-game equivalent tier for JRPGs—they were one of the few Japanese companies to do right by the Xbox 360 (along with Mistwalker) despite the system's dire performance in their homeland—but their big flagship series and I have never really seen eye-to-eye. I missed the first (as did we all until the localized remakes started showing up), bought a really scratched-up copy of the second that I barely made any progress in, had that aforementioned whale of a time with the third if said whale was a vengeful and obtuse Moby Dick, and... yeah, I know there are fifth and sixth ones out now but I'm not sure I have the stones to ever buy them. Maybe The Last Hope—which has a lower rating than Till the End of Time on Metacritic—will be the one to finally make this franchise tick for me. Stranger things have happened at sea (of stars (wait, that's the other one)).

90 Minutes In

This first ninety-minute block just breezed right on by as the game slowly introduced its setting, its characters, and its combat system. The first of those was presented as a historical movie of how Earth almost bit it after a disastrous World War III rendered most of the planet unlivable due to nuclear winter and radiation and how mankind's remnants pulled themselves together, invented a form of faster-than-light travel (which, we'd later find out, was the dumb way of doing it), and took to the stars to find a new home and a new future for our dumbass, self-destructive species. This involved creating the peaceful world government Greater United Nations (evidently the last one sucked if it allowed WW3 to happen) (I also appreciate that the world's foremost institution built for world peace has the acronym G.U.N.) and the Mankind's Evolving Geopolitically Universal Science and Technology Administration (or ME GUSTA! for short, exclamation mark optional) for all its humanity future-proofing needs. We play as a member of an expeditionary force sent to check out the distant planet of Aeos, identified as a possible habitable colony world. What could possibly go wrong?

So then we have the characters, who have been—without exception—annoying anime archetypes so far. No worries, I know what I signed up for. There's the protagonist Edge Maverick (...) who's sort of like Luke Skywalker mixed with Tidus and as equally whiny and cocky as both. There's the childhood friend and requisite love interest Reimi Saionji, who exists to scold the protagonist every chance she gets (tsun rise, tsun set). And... that's about it for playable characters as of present. There's also Crowe, our way cooler mentor type who vanishes during the prologue and will probably show up way later either dead or a villain or something, and a tiny squeaky anime woman called Welch who looks to be the one to talk to whenever I want to craft something. Crafting, by the way, is something the game is likely to drop on us very soon given all these recipes and components I keep finding. I've just recalled how involved the crafting was in SO3, so that's... something for which I guess I'll have to brace myself.

Just to briefly touch on the combat system, which the game took its time to tutorialize step-by-step almost as soon as I could move. As with other SO games it mostly plays like Tales—the devs did work on Tales of Phantasia after all, and I assume the two companies continued to pass each other notes once both franchises went 3D—in that there's some situational awareness involved as you pick out targets and try to avoid too much aggro (or letting your other team members such as, hypothetically, a tiny teenage girl with a bow gain more aggro than they can deal with). One novel feature is the parry-like "blindside": the idea is to hold down the dodge button, normally used by tapping both it and a direction to hop around, and then release it just as the enemy attacks—by doing that you can whizz around behind them and get in a few guaranteed crits on their behind. Some tougher enemies have a "blindside-counter" though, so unless the timing's perfect you'll just get punished for blindsides instead. Another issue is that you can only blindside your currently targeted enemy and others can still attack you while you're sitting there defenseless poised for a blindside opportunity to happen, so it works best when enemies are dispersed elsewhere or you only have the boss to worry about. No doubt in my mind that the combat will gain in complexity as the game progresses.

Oh right, I forgot to mention the current plot: Our ship the Calnus and the other ships that were sent out to explore Aeos all got caught in some sort of subspace mishap and crashlanded on the planet instead, and the one furthest from us suddenly just had their comms go offline. They're probably fine. We (that is, Edge and Reimi) have just set off to investigate. So far, the game is... fine. Entirely agreeable. I think this is the breather mission before they start introducing waves of overwhelming RPG feature nonsense that I'll have to weather as best as I am able. For now, I guess I'll just keep mashing these giant space bugs. Don't these guys know I'm from Buenos Aires and I say kill them all?

180 Minutes In

This 90 minute segment was pure combat and exploration, having put aside most of the story stuff for the time being, and it ended just before what I believe is our first boss fight—I found something that looked like a save point (yep, those are still here) except it didn't let me save but instead recovered all my HP and MP (yep, save points don't do that). It's been smooth enough sailing now that I've embraced the blindside and can quickly dispatch most enemies in a single combo, and I've learned quite a few other things about the combat... or more accurately, I remembered the combat tutorial at the beginning the game and what it was trying to teach me as I impatiently hurried through its lessons.

More integral than I first realized was the bonus board. The bonus board is a honeycomb-like gauge on the right side of the screen that fills with gems as you perform certain feats, each sticking around in subsequent battles until either the player rests at an inn or the board gets broken (which happens whenever the playable character takes a critical hit, so for the board's sake if not just your own it's best to stay defensive). Blue gems are created whenever you finish an enemy off with a critical hit—all blindside attacks are automatic criticals, so these gems are the easiest to earn—and award 10% bonus XP per gem. Pink gems are formed if you defeat an enemy with skills alone (a tiny amount of HP/MP recovery), yellow ones for defeating two enemies in one attack (bonus money), and green ones for surviving ambushes. Ambushes, rather than having the enemy get the drop on you (which are instead "surprise attacks"), are when you're close to multiple enemy groups and have to fight them one after the other: on top of the green gems, which adds to the Party SP pool, you also get a hefty XP bonus. SP, incidentally, is what you spend to level up your characters' skills—both combat and non-combat, the latter including things like harvesting resource points or crafting—so having a big pool of it that anyone can use is very handy for getting certain useful skills promoted quickly. Anyway, I've been rocking a 120-140% XP boost for most of this segment, and the subsequent level boost has made survival quite a bit easier after a few rocky bumps at the start there.

A few other observations:

• My HP recovery options are extremely limited. Besides this boss fountain thing and the bunk on the ship we crashlanded on, there's no way to fully heal the party. I've been using the finite healing items I occasionally gather from resource points and monster drops, neither of which show up often. After I got my protag killed early on (archer girl was still alive, fortunately) I had the choice of legging it back to the ship or using a very precious revivial item. The eternal battle rages on between my indolence and my parsimony (and the winner gets to take on my vainglorious propensity for loquacious vocabulary choices).
• The horizontal camera movement is flipped. At least... it feels like it is. I wonder if I'm going a little crazy sometimes.
• Whenever you complete a battle, there's sometimes an info screen if you acquired new battle trophies (more on those in a sec) or encountered a new monster and had its data added to the bestiary. In fights when neither of these alerts happen, which is most of them, the game hangs on an empty screen until you press the confirm button. It's kinda sloppy?
• You get a real small amount of XP and SP whenever you open a chest or harvest a resource point. S'cute. Maybe it'll be a better earner later in the game.
• Unlike Star Ocean 3, you don't have to hug the contours of the current area to earn 100% map completion and a free item. Maps are just automatically filled instead. Did map technology regress between SO4 and SO3 (the former being set several hundred years before the latter)? Either way, my OCD gets to take a break.
• Battle trophies are like an in-game achievement system that was also around in earlier SO games. Like I said above they tend to be for combat milestones and weird little accomplishments, like doing 55 damage exactly with one attack. There's an actual Xbox achievement for every 10% of them you earn including one for 100%. Just to clarify things here, there's 100 battle trophies per character and 900 overall. Gotta get to grindin' if I want that 1000 Gamerscore, I guess...

270 Minutes In

Mostly an exposition drop this past hour and change. Shortly before taking on the boss on a beach area close to where the other spaceship had crashed we were introduced to our third party member: an elfin fencer named Faize, who arrived on a very fancy floating spaceship shuttle. Faize, it turns out, is part of the Eldarian race (oh shit, the Eldar! Hide your Slaanesh totems!): an extraterrestrial species that had previously made contact with Earth after our initial warp drive testing some ten years before the game began, very similar to the circumstances behind humanity's first contact with the Vulcans in Star Trek (funny, that). The three of us then pummeled the goofy sea slug creature that had emerged from the wreckage of the ship we were looking into. This was an interesting fight because the boss's weakpoint appeared on its side. That meant frontal attacks were out but so were my blindsides, which attack from the rear. Instead, the idea was to draw aggro with one character and then use another to flank and focus attacks on that weak point while the boss was distracted, switching again when the aggro target changed.

After a quick powerwalk back to the crash site of our own ship (sadly, no fast travel yet) we discovered the Eldarians had built a huge-ass base right next to it. Despite being some "just add water" pre-fab thing the place had a whole bunch of facilities we never had access to previously, of particular note being a shopping area where I could finally buy some damn curatives (and they were super cheap, so I stocked up), a new bow for archer girl, and some skillbooks for the team. The three party members received passive skills that allowed for more monster drops—each character getting one for a specific enemy type—as well as a first aid skillbook that occasionally healed that character after they received damage. Should keep the front-liners healthy, and some enemies do so little damage now that I could probably sit there and let the skill proc enough times to heal me back up to full since the heals works on a % of my total. Of course, I could still get critted during that process, which means losing my delicious bonus board. Hm.

Anyway, a story-mandated rest and a few fetch side-quests later, I'm about ready to embark on the next stage of the story. What I'd really like is to recruit a character that can mine the relevant resource points: I keep walking past those glowy walls, wondering what kind of amazing ores I'm missing out on. The hooks are definitely in, I'm sad to report.

360 Minutes In

Turns out the next thing we have to do on this bug planet is... leave it. In the newly repaired Calnus, no less, which the Eldarians packed with advanced technology on our behalf (curious as to what their angle might be; no such thing as a free lunch). The captain of the Calnus is staying behind to run the exploration base on Aeos, essentially our sole beacon of civilization out here, choosing to drop his old job in the lap of the first underqualified schmuck to enter his field of vision. After Edge becomes the new captain, and the crew is streamlined to just Reimi and Faize (I'm sure that's plenty to run an interstellar starship), we're tasked with heading to the next planet capable of supporting life. One called Lemuris, which has an atmosphere near identical to Earth's before we ruined it. Only issue with claiming this place for mankind (or Eldarkind) is that it's already got a whole bunch of people living on it. Hey, didn't stop American settlers I guess.

And so begins the next arc of the game on the planet Lemuris. Aeos had a humid, hot climate—the game refers to it being similar to the Jurassic period on Earth, though with more bugs than dinosaurs—but Lemuris looks to be fairly cool and temperate. Apropos, given the first town we walk into, Triom, resembles a medieval European village. Naturally, we're hailed as gods as soon as we arrive (someone spotted our spaceship, which we parked about 200 yards outside of town because we're professionals) and we meet the elder (not Eldar) of the village, only to be interrupted by our fourth party member: a monotone gremlin of a pre-schooler calling itself Lymle. She's naturally a genius mage, hilariously outshining our resident magic-user Faize immediately, and the party of four set off to find a cure for this "bacculus" petrification illness that's been slowly killing off the villagers. Like the greyscale of Game of Thrones, only more comically rocky. Beyond that, I had time to do the usual when exploring a primitive world—check the shops for all the superior weaponry and armor they're carrying—and bought the "Parapsychology" and "Elusion" skills ("more shit dropped from undead monsters" and "easier escaping", respectively) for our new party member before my time with this game was finally up.

Our journeys across the star ocean now come to a (possibly temporary, depending on how I feel later) end. I've much to say about my feelings on the game but I'll save it for the usual post-playthrough summation. Honestly, though, for what feels like six hours of not a whole lot happening that time really did just whizz by. The ominous time-consuming power of long-form RPGs at work.

How Well Has It Aged?: Not As Well As The Other "[Something] Hope", But Well Enough. I dunno, I actually quite liked what I've played of this so far. The combat system's enjoyable enough with that blindside mechanic and the enormous boons granted by the bonus board (provided I don't let it shatter every other fight) and even if the characters can be kinda oofa-doofa in that special tri-Ace way the story and universebuilding have that classic sci-fi drive of exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new life and all that jazz. Anime Mass Effect, perhaps, albeit with a fraction of the emotional intelligence given we're still dealing with children in the lead as per usual. I know this whole invention/crafting system is going to kick my ass once I finally give it some attention and there's probably some degree of the same tiresome BS that eventually had me bail on Till the End of Time, which almost the entire internet seems to agree is the better game, but maybe I'll slum it with "We Have Phantasy Star at Home" for a while longer yet. (The mere half-hour I've spent with Lymle is really making me reconsider that, though...)

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Uhh, zero. Why do I keep including this section?

Achievements Earned: 1 out of 50. That was for that first boss. Look, this game has a lot of game still left in it, you know? There's about ten more story achievements, nine for the endings (there's one per character seems like), and the rest are for sheer grinding by the look of things. Oh, and it expects you to beat the game three times total: Galaxy (normal) to unlock Universal (hard), Universal to unlock Chaos (very hard), and then beat it on Chaos. And, lest we forget, there's the 900 battle trophies too. Hats off to anyone insane enough to get the full 1000 for this one.

Grabbed by the Ghoulies (Random)

• Rare / Microsoft Game Studios
• 2003-10-21 (NA), 2003-11-21 (EU), 2004-04-29 (JP)

History: Grabbed by the Ghoulies is an action-brawler game and the first that British developers Rare developed exclusively for Microsoft after they were acquired by same. Originally, Rare had intended the game to be released on GameCube but modified their plans after the buyout. It concerns the teen scaredycat Cooper who enters a mysterious spooky mansion with his cynical girlfriend Amber after they get caught in a storm. The owner of the place, Baron Von Ghoul, is insulted by their banter and decides to kidnap Amber for funsies and Cooper must fight his way through the place's monster infestation to rescue her before they can escape together.

Now, you might recall back in Episode 11 of 360 in 360—now forever ingloriously known as "The Fuzion Frenzy Fiazco"—that we created a concession for original Xbox games if, and only if, they were backwards compatible with the Xbox 360 (and ideally the Xbox One as well, since that's what I'm playing on). That means ol' Tugged on the Testicles here, or whatever it's called, became eligible for the random choice process if that capricious app ever felt like hopping back a generation. Like many N64 diehards (ooh, I should do some kind of feature with that console next), I was a huge Rare fan and was excited to discover how many more 3D platforming nonpareils would emerge on Microsoft systems after the latter purchased the former outright. What optimistic, deluded fools we were. Even so, I'm for sure morbidly curious enough to see how this game turned out after avoiding it for so long. Maybe there's something to it, and maybe that something has managed to hold up after 20 years? I guess I never did shake that naivety.

90 Minutes In

Oh boy, six hours of this, huh? Not for the first time does this feature seem a little overbearing with its time requirements (Episode 2 being a particularly dire example that had me rethink the "random choice" pool). Well, I honestly can't say GbtG has been too bad so far, just a bit repetitive. The idea of the gameplay loop is to travel room to room in pursuit of a specific goal, usually completing some type of combat challenge in each. These challenges might involve eliminating all enemies, just the enemies of a certain type, finding a key in one of the breakable environmental objects, finding a key on one of the equally breakable enemies, or something more distinct and perhaps based around the room's theme. Right after entering the scary mansion, I was given the lockpicks by Barry a fight tutorial by the butler, Crivens, but the game's entire combat engine can be mostly summed up with "use the second analog stick to attack in that direction" and "pick up objects to do more damage". You know, standard brawler game stuff. Most normal punches and kicks do minor damage but a combo or an item might knock an enemy down, leaving them open for elbow drops and other more damaging attacks once they're prone. Our cowardly protagonist Cooper is a big fan of hitting people when they're down it seems, or maybe he just makes an exception for weird gross monsters.

Progress-wise, I'm a good chunk of the way through Chapter 2. Chapter 1 had me track down Amber, who was moving from area to area despite being tied to a chair, and upon finally reaching her in the basement she was transformed into an ugly green creature (reusing some story beats from the end of the first Banjo-Kazooie) and our new mission for Chapter 2 was to assist the cook, one of the few friendly NPCs here, to create a potion to change her back. On top of that, I've also been noticing other tied-up teenagers around the place: I can't do anything with them yet, since I need a special key, but I'm guessing I'll be going through all these rooms again in a later chapter. To be clear, there's no non-linear aspect like there is in Luigi's Mansion (though even that was limited) but rather you're tasked with taking a very specific pre-determined route to reach every major story-critical location. My one collectathon oasis is a series of books found in each room—including rooms you've previously visited—that unlock special challenges in a different part of the main menu. They tend to be out in the open more often than not, but sometimes you have to break open some furniture or kill a certain ghouly before you can find them. (I checked; you can always use a level select system to go back to where you may have missed one, so that's some pressure off if I mess up and leave too quickly. I'm keeping my eyes peeled regardless; I want to pretend I'm playing a classic Rare game, after all.)

I'm... not entirely sure how much content this game has. If I do end up completing it before dinging the final timer here, I suppose those bonus challenges could keep me busy instead.

180 Minutes In

Still in Chapter 2, though it feels like we're pretty much done with this arc since I've already recovered all the ingredients and used the potion on Amber—it didn't work, as you can see above—so after I escape here I'll probably get another potion-crafting fetch quest that'll take me all over the mansion grounds again. Still, though, the game's been tossing new challenges at me everywhere we go: I recently encountered the first instances where I wasn't allowed to get hit, where I wasn't allowed to destroy any part of the level (the monsters could still do it for me, though), and one where I wasn't allowed to defeat the same type of enemy twice in a row. For as simple as the gameplay is, at least Rare found a bunch of different ways to frame objectives around it.

Some other features I didn't mention last time:

• There's a map of the mansion! It's not super helpful without any notations (or indeed necessary since the whole game is linear, as stated) but I'm still glad enough to have it. Gives me some vague idea what's coming up, you know? All I have to do to summon it is to hit the... white button? Oh right, I forgot that was a whole thing. Fortunately, better Xbox controllers are available and that black/white nonsense has been shunted over to the collar buttons. (Now, collar buttons I can wrap my head around.)
• Almost every time you enter a new room, the antagonist readjusts your health. This can often be bad, like if it's reduced to single figures, but on the whole the system is handy because it won't let you limp through areas if you've just taken a beating and the value it adjusts to is always something theoretically survivable with the current challenge. No randomly dropping me to 5HP when there's a big combat challenge coming up; more likely that'll be one where I'm meant to sneak around and avoid enemies.
• There's a "Super Scary Spook" jumpscare system where you have to quickly input a QTE before it drains your health. Some are inescapable, like traps put around exits, but others might involve bumping into a ghost: you have a brief window to escape the AoE of the spook effect to avoid dealing with the QTE. Can't be a horror game without jumpscares, right?
• Some areas begin with a first-person mode perspective. It's usually just to set up a new room as Cooper looks around nervously, but you'll sometimes go through a whole room in this mode just because the game felt like being cute with its atmosphere.
• In addition to the usual furniture items you can swing around, you'll have stretches of the game where an NPC gives you a weapon to use. These weapons tend to have infinite durability and a ranged mode that has a bit of a cooldown aspect to stop you spamming it. The weapons are then taken away a few rooms later, but they definitely make the game easier while you have them.
• Soup cans! Just like in The 7th Guest, these things are ubiquitous and tend to confer temporary benefits (or maluses) for the current room. Some soups also restore a set amount of health or can instantly complete the current challenge for you. The negative ones do the usual troll stuff like reverse your controls or slow you down. The worst ones are those that sap your health to 1HP; I've often had to retake a room because of them.
• Death (in the sense that you get KO'd, not the grim reaper) is only a minor setback, as it just resets the current room. It's occasionally unavoidable. Or maybe it just feels that way.
• Death (the grim reaper, not in the sense that you get KO'd) will appear whenever you fail a challenge and slowly loom towards you with its finger of instant-death pointed at you. Sometimes that's a cue to get the heck out of there. However, Death's hands are rated E for Everyone so it's also a useful means of quickly finishing off tougher enemies too. Sort of like using the Spelunky "hurry up" ghost to your own advantage.

Anyway, we're fifty "scenes" into the game now—at least, according to how many books I've found—so I strongly suspect we're going to hit the full 100 before it's over: I still have to save Amber (again) and then all those other kids I've seen tied up. If that's the case, I'm on the right pace to complete the game just as I run out of time here; I suspect I'll just miss it though, especially if these challenges continue to get longer/harder.

270 Minutes In

I wasn't quite correct with my guess: rather than escape my mutated girlfriend I just had to beat her up a little (typical Saturday night for us) and the cook came through with the actual cure, having messed up the first time. We were thankfully spared another unnecessary fetch quest that had us jogging to the far corners of the mansion. Instead, with Amber now back to her normal feisty '90s heroine self, I had to go see Crivens to find out how to save everyone else trapped in here. After rescuing him from a room of winged imps—the extra challenge here was to only use weapons to defeat the enemies, which can be tough when they're all breakable and will eventually run out—he let us know we had to solve some sort of musical riddle to reach the boss, the clues for which were... scattered around the far corners of the mansion.

As also predicted, the game is getting magnitudes more unpleasant as it continues to rise in difficulty. I'm at 69 books now (nice), well behind the projected 75 for a game completion pace, so unlike in 360 in 360 Episodes 4 and 7 it seems unlikely I'll be running into that thorny issue of completing the game well before the timer finishes. Probably for the best; we all remember how awkward it was to fill that time staring at those game over screens while talking about the weather. The last room had me spawn at 15HP—barely anything—and then filled the room with skeletons and royal mummies (they can curse; it works like Doom in Final Fantasy in that it gives me a separate timer that kills me if I don't get rid of it, either by defeating the mummy or escaping) and had me survive all that for 90 seconds. Finding the book, as is often the case now, was the hardest part: I had to bust open a vault that also dropped a ton of malus potions that I could barely avoid walking over. Nothing like getting a death curse timer shorter than the timer that lets me leave, all the while my hit points dwindle to single figures as I'm stun-locked by skellies because I dropped my guard after my controls got reversed. The sort of uniquely delightful experience only this game can (or has chosen to) deliver.

Anyhoo, I have one piece of this mystical riddle doodad and am now getting close to the second. Still seeing locked up brats everywhere I go, so I imagine it'll be quite the journey passing back through all these places with the right keys.

360 Minutes In

Alas, or hooray, but I didn't quite make it to the end of Grabbed By the Ghoulies. I'm at 84 books so if my theory is correct the end is almost in sight, but man is the game pulling out all the stops. Difficulty hikes include: getting more of the big hitters on a regular basis, including enemies like the mummies or vampires that are immune to almost everything; the QTEs now require ten-button strings in as many seconds; most of the new rooms are somehow the size of an entire floor so it takes longer to repeat them if I should die; there's frequently a second surprise challenge once you get close to the exit door in case you thought you were home and dry; and if the good Baron deigns to let me have more than 10HP for any room, where most enemies do that much per attack, it's a banner year. Much of this difficulty seems artificially pumped up but in fairness the game has been diligent in teaching me its tricks and shortcuts.

Some examples of what I mean: A particular scene had QTEs every five yards and an enemy with 80HP which could drop QTE scares on you at will or else turn invincible for a few seconds as it charged at you, and you start with 5HP for this area. Not great. However, with enough searching around you'd find a soup to counter every issue: one that automatically does the QTEs for you, one that gives you plus 10HP (not much, but at least you're out of one-hit kill territory), and one that lets you one-shot enemies instead which means a much easier fight against that burly ghouly. Another scene had me search for a key in the environment—it's in one of several scientific experiment tanks, the rest of which drop exploding worms on you—and another key on an enemy, except the enemy in this case is an invincible vampire. The third part of the challenge contained the solution: don't kill any skeletons, which spawn from some of the cages littered around this lab area. To defeat the vampire you have to purposefully lose the challenge by killing a skelly, summon Death, and then position the vampire between Death and yourself so it'll kill the vampire instead. You also have to do all this while avoiding four of those rampaging 80HP enemies I mentioned.

In many cases at this stage of the game, it's a matter of exploring all the options you have available by avoiding enemies for the time being and breaking open the environment to see what soups you can employ: you'll probably die a few times with those enemies ass-slapping you when your back is turned but the added recon can really transform what seemed to be an insurmountable challenge into just a deeply annoying one.

Regardless, our time in Baron von Ghoul's House of Horrors draws to an end and so too does our Halloween vacation in March (or is it April now...?). Time to stop tossing furniture around the room for a moment—I'll leave it to all y'all's imagination whether if I'm referring to in-game or an IRL heated gamer moment—and look at how this game has held up as objectively as I am able.

How Well Has It Aged?: About As Well As Those Zombies. I keep wanting to bring up Luigi's Mansion, in part because there's obvious structural and stylistic comparisons to be made, but more in how the two games both kinda represented what was possible for their respective (and competing) consoles by creating a short, spooky action-adventure game close to the system's launch that could ably serve as a tech demo. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that one game was made in response to the other. Of the two, GbtG has held up the least well because there's just not a whole lot to it. It does its best to keep throwing new ideas at you, but the combat and exploration are both hopelessly simple if not always particularly easy to deal with. It doesn't look too bad at least, and has a typically fun Grant Kirkhope soundtrack sharpened by so many spooky Banjo-Kazooie and DK64 haunted mansion levels, but it feels rudimentary and limited in a way its N64 predecessors did not (or if they were, it was more excusable given their era). Still, though, it was kind of amusing to see so many barfy ghost pirates and skeletons when you consider what Rare's doing these days.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Still zero. Though maybe some other Rare games could get on there? Maybe? Rare? Nintendo? Microsoft? ...Bueller?

Achievements Earned: N/A. If only I was playing the Rare Replay version...

And that's going to be a wrap for this edition of 360 in 360. As I always say, I'll continue to have the patience to make these so long as you all have the patience to read them. A spreadsheet of previous episodes and the overall ranking list so far can be found via this totally normal link.

All that's left is to remind everyone to tune in next week for a new episode of 2600 in 2600, where I'll be playing Atari's Combat for over 43 hours straight.

You got me.. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I was like, how am I just finding out about this series on episode 14? Why have I not been painstakingly reading all these to see if this stranger agrees with my 360 game rankings.. and then the pieces started to fall together..

Kudos

I appreciate the April Fool's joke but do not appreciate the hate train against Grabbed by the Ghoulies, which did NOTHING to you (including not even being an Xbox 360 game!)

Is Grabbed by the Ghoulies a great game? No. It's kind of unfair to compare it to Luigi's Mansion, which has been re-evaluted to being one of the best Gamecube games ever and was a lynchpin of the system's launch, while GbtG was a B-game for Xbox (albeit by a legendary development team.)

Grabbed by the Ghoulies still looks fantastic, with graphics that have really held up, and has a uniqune control scheme and a fun atmosphere. The controls work well, especially for the time it was released, and it has plenty of content for the style of game it is. It's a solid game that's aged mostly in the sexism of some of its humor.

The whole "Rare never made anything good after they left Nintendo" thing just isn't true. Grabbed by the Ghoulies isn't much worse than Starfox Adventures, and of course Viva Pinata (an actual 360 game) was excellent. Yes, there were significant missteps with Kameo and especially Perfect Dark Zero, and the whole Kinect era was a waste, but Nuts & Bolts is at least interesting, Sea of Thieves is a legitimate hit, and darn it Grabbed by the Ghoulies is a solid 7.5 out of 10 that's one of the better light-hearted Halloween games you can get through in a few medium length sessions!

@bigsocrates: Am I getting counter-fooled? Is there an Uno reverse card in play? We're talking about a game where, after you defeat the final boss, there's a timed sequence to rescue all the prisoners you've been spotting and you only get one chance (because, and I quote, the key stops working after thirteen minutes or it blows up or something) and if you fail this sequence then the game ends anyway (after it calls you a loser) and you can't repeat it.

It's like at some point I forgot that Rare also invented Battletoads. They're all psychos.

@mento: I mean that's just a massive troll at the end of a game where it's not like there's a big focus on story. It's very stupid and kind of mean but also a little funny.

And as you note it's extremely in keeping with the best/worst traditions of British game design.

There are lots of games that give you bad endings based on extremely arbitrary criteria that are revered. Are you familiar with the Silent Hill franchise? Where you can get bad endings for doing/not doing things the game never even comes close to communicating? At least Grabbed By the Ghoulies gives you a clear directive and...umm...arguably incentivizes replaying it? If you're the right kind of psycho. And it fits in what is ultimately kind of a cheekily mean-spirited game.

But I don't think the stupid end invalidates the rest of the game (basically ever) and what's there is flawed but also frequently fun, incredibly good looking/sounding for the time, and also utterly unique. There's no other game, especially from the era, that tries to do what Grabbed by the Ghoulies attempts in the way it combines its control scheme (unusual but not unique) with its very arcadey structure and pretty creative challenges.

Is it Rare's best game? No. That's probably Banjo or Bond or Perfect Dark with a decent frame rate (which exists in official form on...The Xbox 360) or maybe Diddy Kong Racing.

Is it Rare's best game for Microsoft? No. That's VP or Sea of Thieves.

But it's this unique, mostly fun though often frustrating game with great aesthetics and a lot to offer that gets lumped in with Perfect Dark Zero and held up as part of Rare's Microsoft decline phase and I'm tired of it!

I feel like the ultimate version of this bit would be the One in 1: You play one minute of Xbox One games. You would probably get quite good at describing main menus, splash screens, and load screens.

My knowledge of Grabbed By The Ghoulies is mostly that Rare themselves continually dunk on the game and even go as far as to fill dumpsters full of copies of the game in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. I've never played the game but having seen how Rare treat it, I can't say I've gone out of my way to actually try it.

@ben_h: "One in One" would've certainly been a lot easier on my sleep schedule, I'll say that much.

Ghoulies is fine. It just put me through the wringer so I'm happy to also dunk on it.

@ben_h:Rare pokes fun of itself a lot in Nuts and Bolts. It even makes fun of the main characters as out of shape. And Grabbed by the Ghoulies was inarguably a commercial flop (and kind of a critical flop by Rare's standards) so it makes sense for the game to be made fun of there.

But even one Jeff Gerstmann rated it a somewhat respectable 6.5 out of 10, which is only 1 point lower than I would rate it. And Jeff is not one to pull punches on games he thinks are total garbo, and GbtG is not really his kind of game to begin with.

I'm not out here claiming it's a lost masterpiece or anything, but it's not some notoriously awful misfire like Redfall or whatever, and it does have its charms, especially around Halloween.

Great goof, and you always commit to the bit!

I wouldn't say I'm part of the Ghoul Defence Force, but I did actually play a bit of it last year and was struck by how well I felt it held up, aesthetically. The combat, while simple, did flow decently and felt alright. Though obviously I was not sufficently Clutched by the Cojones since I did not finish it, and I'm sure I would have noped out later anyway, when it got as frustrating and repetetive as you describe.

I assume X in 10 is next up.

I have nothing to say about this pseudo Grabbed by the Ghoulies apologism. Where was this when the game first launched?

That said, I always get a kick whenever I see Star Ocean: The Last Hope comes up because, as I covered on the site a while ago, that game started Tri-Ace's trend of pretending as if the big plot twist in Star Ocean III did not happen and to do that, no game would take place after the events of 3 for decades.

I'm real late to this, sorry. Great write-up! That last line killed me. Would read a blog on your adventures with the Atari systems!