Metal Jesus and Kinsey take beginning XBOX collectors through the console hardware variants, controllers and recommend some kick-ass games to get your collection started!
What other Original XBOX games would you recommend to the 1st time XBOX collector to play?
More info about XBOX DVD drives: http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=869216#p869216
Games Shown:
SSX 3
Jetset Radio Future
Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge
Halo 1 & 2
Panzer Dragoon Orta
Fable
Outrun 2
Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Time Splitters: Future Perfect
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2
Stubbs the Zombie
BUY the Original XBOX & Games Here!
Video Transcription:
Metal Jesus: Metal Jesus here, and I am back with Kinsey.
Kinsey: Hello, and today we are going to be talking about a buyer’s guide for the original Xbox. So that’s accessories, hardware and some of our favorite games.
Metal Jesus: Let’s take a look. All right so let’s start with the hardware and again this is meant to be sort of a buying guide, in case you’re out at a garage sale, or a pawn shop and you just kind of want to know what to get into if you’ve never actually owned an original Xbox.
Kinsey: And this guy, is the original Xbox.
Metal Jesus: Yes.
Kinsey: It’s one of the first consoles that has an internal hard drive.
Metal Jesus: I believe it was a 10 GB drive, but you had like 8 GBs available to you, but actually it’s funny you just reminded me, is that I was watching a podcast where they were talking, it was the original creators of the Xbox, and one of the really interesting things is that it’s because they put a hard drive in here that games like Halo were even possible.
Kinsey: That’s crazy, yeah.
Metal Jesus: Yeah, because it needed to be able to stream to its hard drive all of its extra data and stuff like that, so, it was definitely a very revolutionary console.
Kinsey: Definitely and it also eliminated the need for memory cards, for the most part.
Metal Jesus: Oh, that’s right. No, that’s true actually. I think I have a memory card but I’ve never used it.
Kinsey: I know people who kept their gamer tag on there so they could take it to their friends house, or move saves or things like that. But even some games on the Xbox are so big and revolutionary that they won’t fit on the memory card anyway.
Metal Jesus: That’s a really good point, so again, when this came out it was competing with say the GameCube, the PlayStation 2, the Dreamcast and all of those needed a memory card, this really doesn’t. I mean, which is pretty awesome. So another thing to know about this is that the DVD drives on this were known to fail in the original couple, sort of, versions of it.
Kinsey: I remember them getting stuck closed, stuck open, stuck everywhere.
Metal Jesus: Yeah, and also not being able to read discs and things like that. So, this one here actually is one of the earlier models, and it’s basically got a Thompson drive, I just happen to know the name of it, because it essentially has a different sort of mold to it. When you open up the drive you can see that it actually is a little bit narrower than some of the other ones, I have some other Xboxs here. But, if you’re out and about and you buy an Xbox and it doesn’t open, it’s probably because you have an older drive. There’s a bunch of stuff to sort of know about the different versions of the Xbox, I’m not an expert on it, but I’ll include links down below so people can kind of go learn about it. What are some other things about it? Well, at the back here…so, tell me about the power.
Kinsey: What’s nice about this is it doesn’t have one of those bulky external power bricks, like, the GameCube or the…
Metal Jesus: The 360.
Kinsey: Or even the 360 which is gigantic, it’s almost the size of this!
Metal Jesus: I know.
Kinsey: But it has more of just a standard cord, it’s really similar to the regular PS2, fat cord.
Metal Jesus: Which is really nice. Again if you’re out and you find one at a garage sale and you don’t have to look for an external power cord, you just pick it up and go and it’s pretty much self contained. The other thing that’s really nice about it is, everyone of them has an Ethernet cable in it, which again at the time was pretty revolutionary, most people, not most people, but a lot of people, especially in rural areas, were still on dial up in 2000, 2001.
Kinsey: I was, I didn’t have no broadband.
Metal Jesus: Oh really? That’s interesting, so, well I think that was pretty common but again Microsoft was looking forward and they were like, “No, eventually everyone will need Ethernet and broadband to play online games.” And so it was very forward thinking, which is pretty awesome.
Kinsey: And it made it so you could hook up a bunch of Xboxs with your friends, I remember doing that, so it was wonderful.
Metal Jesus: And, because this was so powerful, another thing is the video. So the games supported, a lot of them, supported HD out.
Kinsey: Yep. It has a slot for the component cables, or AV, you can use that as well, but there are a couple of games that allow you to do 780 or even 1080i.
Metal Jesus: That’s right. So I have a bunch of them here so, I guess I should say that almost every single Xbox game does, almost all of them, do 480p. Which on a newer HD television looks pretty good, yeah, but there’s some that even support higher than that, and it’s not up-scaling, the games are actually outputting at that resolution, so here’s a couple of the ones that are 720p. And then you also have, Enter the Matrix, is one of the few that actually is outputting to 1080i, which again, back then was pretty advanced. I mean, what I love about the Xbox is that if you are interested in sort of the sixth generation of games, this is an awesome console to get because a lot of these third-party games look the best on this system, it’s pretty awesome.
Kinsey: And, one thing with all the HD games is to be careful, if you put it in and you’re like, “Well that doesn’t look so good.” You actually have to go into the Xbox’s settings on the dashboard and change the default to what your TV can do.
Metal Jesus: Interesting, you know, it’s funny you mention that I also read that there is a button combination that you can do when it’s booting up, to boot the menu itself into 480p, a little bit of a higher resolution. I’ll have to include that in the notes below. But there’s definitely a lot to love about the original Xbox, it’s funny though because it kind of gets a bad rap.
Kinsey: It does. It’s probably because it just didn’t take of in the rest of the world, but we love it here.
Metal Jesus: And also, I mean, let’s be honest, it’s not the most attractive console. Although I don’t really have a problem with it necessarily but it is definitely, kind of like, I don’t know…
Kinsey: It’s just a big black box.
Metal Jesus: The big black box. Now you have a really interesting one here, do you know much about this?
Kinsey: This is the EA Sports Edition, and what’s really cool about Xbox is the 64 has tons of colors, and they’re all really fun, and they are worth a little bit. But Xbox there’s a couple that aren’t as rare, I mean like the Halo one and stuff like that, still awesome. But they also have some crazy rare ones, like this EA Sports, like the Crystal, like the Mountain Dew, so it’s kind of a fun system to collect for, because it has a lot of those almost grail level items.
Metal Jesus: Yeah, that’s true because, when I go out and look, you never find anything other than the black because that just seems like what was made. But there’s definitely some of those, like you mentioned the Mountain Dew one, I mean, it’s a crazy color of green that almost seems like a green screen, you know what I mean? It’s so weird looking. And then you also mention I think there’s a Tony Hawk, where it’s got like the splatter.
Kinsey: It’s really cool. There’s a Hello Kitty one, in Asia, and it’s adorable.
Metal Jesus: Oh, Panzer Dragoon Orta one is super collectible as well.
Kinsey: All right, so now we’re going to go over some of the accessories and starting with the controllers, and, this is the Duke.
Metal Jesus: The big, old Duke. So a lot of people said that it was the Duke, was the thing that kind of kept them out of Japan, or at least one of the things, right? Because it’s so big.
Kinsey: It’s gigantic. And actually when this first came out I got so used to it that when the S type came out I still preferred this one.
Metal Jesus: Yeah, so that’s the original black one and you actually have this one, I feel like I should own this one though because I have the…
Kinsey: No, let’s trade.
Metal Jesus: The matching Xbox. I had no idea this even existed.
Kinsey: Yeah, that’s the translucent green Duke, and you don’t see them at all. They’re expensive now and they’re beautiful.
Metal Jesus: It’s awesome. But it is a really large controller. I actually find it to be very comfortable but I have huge hands, so I just think… One of the weird things about it is you notice this are kind of like, not teardrop but they are oblong essentially, these little buttons here.
Kinsey: They can’t be like Nintendo with them round buttons!
Metal Jesus: Well they eventually went round, right, when they went to the S controller? So, they had so many complaints about the controller that they decided to do, what they called, the S controller. Which is a really nice controller, actually. It’s more compact, they changed a little bit of the buttons here with the start and back, plus they also made these colored didn’t they? No, or I guess they were black and white.
Kinsey: They were just in a different spot.
Metal Jesus: I see. Another nice controller and actually I feel like the 360 controller kind of got based on this a little bit.
Kinsey: Yeah, it’s just like a smoother looking one.
Metal Jesus: Yeah, but it’s definitely a nice controller. Oh, and the other thing we should probably mention too, is one of the really big innovations of the Xbox was the breakaway cable.
Kinsey: The dongle.
Metal Jesus: Is that what it’s called?
Kinsey: That’s what I call it. It’s a dongle, or a tail, whatever you want to say.
Metal Jesus: All I know is that the first time that I actually…I was getting up to go to the door, like somebody rang the doorbell, and I completely ripped it out and it didn’t pull the Xbox off, it actually popped that. I was like, “Brilliant.”
Kinsey: It’s smart, yeah. I’m surprised more haven’t done that.
Metal Jesus: Yeah, it’s true, although I will say that you do have to be careful again when you’re out buying these because sometimes it will be missing. I’ve actually bought several of them, where it’s like “Ah, it doesn’t have the little dongle.”
Kinsey: Yeah, most of the time I feel, well at least with my luck. I’m like, “Yes, oh…”
Metal Jesus: I know. It’s true. Okay, and then we have, what I consider to be one of the best controllers, that is the Logitech wireless controller. This is an amazing controller, so it takes four, no, two batteries, that’s right, what? Oh, you’re being Vana? And this lasts forever, again, what 50, 40 hours, something like that? It’s definitely an awesome controller. One thing to note though is that it does need this part of it, so this little, kind of, adapter thing.
Kinsey: Which, I like this a lot because they put the memory card slots down here, so it makes it so that this can be streamlined, with the exception of if you’re trying to use a headset.
Metal Jesus: Oh, interesting.
Kinsey: Because then, long cord.
Metal Jesus: That’s true because it doesn’t have the place for the headset, interesting.
Kinsey: The more you know.
Metal Jesus: Yep, the more you know. Some third-party ones here I just wanted to show really quickly. I found this one, it’s an official Seahawks one. I’m not really a big sports fan, but I was like, “That’s pretty awesome.”
Kinsey: Yeah, got to represent.
Metal Jesus: And this one I think is hilarious, so this is a PowerPad. It’s technically slightly bigger than the original, believe it or not, it’s ridiculous, see? Literally, these little handles right here actually go out more. You know what’s funny though, is that this is so big, I was like, “How big is this compared to the PSP?” It’s almost as wide as an actual PSP, it’s crazy.
Kinsey: You know what, the Duke wasn’t quite big enough.
Metal Jesus: I know, let’s make it bigger. Although if we’re talking big controllers, the Xbox did have probably the biggest controller of all time… Do I have a copy of it around here? Well, in my storage area, Steel Battalion.
Kinsey: Forty buttons, mech goodness in your living room.
Metal Jesus: Yes. Crazy, crazy controller but I love it, it’s so over the top I think it’s awesome.
Kinsey: Yeah, it’s really fun to play, if you ever get a chance to play it, definitely.
Metal Jesus: And then finally, I just want to mention the Light Gun here. Pretty cool Light Gun, so this is, I believe it was Mad Catz, yeah? There’s a couple games that support it like, House of the Dead and some other ones but pretty awesome, so very cool.
Kinsey: All right, so next we’re going to talk about some of the games, and these aren’t necessarily hidden gems, top 10, whatever. These are just games that if you have an Xbox you should probably own these.
Metal Jesus: All right, so I’m going to go first here, I love this game so much, this is SSX 3. Now I talk about this game a lot because I love it so much, I’m not really a big sports guy but I do like the kind of X-Sports, kind of you know, snowboarding, I don’t know what it is, but they nailed it with this and the Xbox has the best version of it. Especially if you’ve modded your Xbox and you copy it to the hard drive, it loads just like that.
Kinsey: Nice.
Metal Jesus: It’s definitely awesome, go check it out.
Kinsey: And speaking of extreme sports.
Metal Jesus: Extreme!
Kinsey: Next is Jet Set Radio Future, and this is kind of a remake of the Jet Grind Radio on the Dreamcast and they’ve done some really cool stuff with this one. They’ve kind of merged some of the levels so that way it has, an almost open world feeling, not quite, almost. It has some really awesome multiplayer modes as well. There’s some turf battles where you have to tag the walls and try to tag more walls than your opponents, there’s races, it’s so much fun.
Metal Jesus: You were just playing this, this morning?
Kinsey: I wanted to refresh my memory a little bit on it and then I just played it all morning, and it was great.
Metal Jesus: And it has an amazing soundtrack. When I first played it I went out and I just bought the soundtrack, it’s so awesome.
Kinsey: It’s so good.
Metal Jesus: All right, next up is an Xbox exclusive that is Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge. For one, this has to be in our video because Drunken Master Paul, this is his pick. He loves this game, he’s played it to death and it’s such a really fun game. It’s a, how do you describe this? It’s like a flight, arcade, shooter thing?
Kinsey: Yeah.
Metal Jesus: But it’s awesome, it’s really fun. I mean, gunning people down, there’s stunts, there’s all these arial tracks you have to do, I don’t know, I’m not saying it right, but definitely a great game, highly recommend it.
Kinsey: Definitely, and, of course…
Metal Jesus: Never heard of this before.
Kinsey: What. What is…Halo?
Metal Jesus: Halo? Wasn’t that for Mac originally?
Kinsey: Probably.
Metal Jesus: On the Xbox, so weird.
Kinsey: This game, this is the reason I bought an Xbox to begin with and Halo 1 is amazing, I still think it’s the best one of all of the Halo games. I know, controversy. But it’s so good. I played it co-op dozens of times so far in my life and it’s great.
Metal Jesus: Well, it proved that you could really do a great shooter on a console. I mean, obviously GoldenEye was one of the first, but this one was also hugely revolutionary.
Kinsey: It’s awesome.
Metal Jesus: And the second one is the best selling Xbox, original Xbox game of all time.
Kinsey: This one was one of the first games I waited in line for, for midnight release.
Metal Jesus: Oh really?
Kinsey: Because it was, like, all I did was played online in college, I don’t know how I graduate, but it’s all I did.
Metal Jesus: I’m sure a lot of people are probably wondering that, too. Yeah, it was so popular.
Kinsey: It was amazing.
Metal Jesus: So, the next one is another Sega game here and it’s an amazing exclusive, Panzer Dragoon Orta. So this is an on-rails shooter and this got a start on the Saturn, right? But they moved it over to the Xbox and this is probably one of the best versions of that game, it looks beautiful, even today.
Kinsey: It’s so good.
Metal Jesus: So good. Again, it’s just an on-rails shooter unlike any other. The one thing to know about this one, and this kind of gets back to the hardware, if this game doesn’t start up or look right it’s because you have the last version of the Xbox. Microsoft switched the video chip on the very last version of the Xbox and it doesn’t play, actually, it may have problems with this and also, the Jet…what’s the name of that game?
Kinsey: Jet Set Radio Future.
Metal Jesus: I always get it mixed up with the original. But if those two don’t play, it’s because you have the very last version of the Xbox, so something to keep it mind.
Kinsey: Jerks.
Metal Jesus: Yeah, you have to change the resolution.
Kinsey: All right, and next up is actually one of my favorite games on the Xbox and it’s Fable.
Metal Jesus: Yeah, when this came out, this was huge. I mean…
Kinsey: It’s amazing and at first it took a while for me to play just because it didn’t look that great, it looked kind of cartoony.
Metal Jesus: It was different than normal role playing games at the time.
Kinsey: Yeah. It was so good though, when I finally sat down and I played it I definitely, you could play good or evil, your character looks so bad ass when you play as evil.
Metal Jesus: I always play evil.
Kinsey: It’s so good, it’s so worth it. But it’s amazing and it’s so long and it’s a world you can definitely get lost in.
Metal Jesus: Yeah, I totally agree. Next is one of my all time favorite arcade racing games, and the Xbox has one of the best versions, that is OutRun 2. I have a bunch of Sega games here, I don’t know how that worked out. But, dude, this is a great game, you know, the original OutRun was an arcade game, and I like it, it’s okay. I like this better just because of the way it handles, also the little mini challenges in here where you have to try to get the hearts and all that stuff, oh my God, I just love this game so much, so, highly recommended.
Kinsey: All right and next is, Morrowind. If you played this game you knew this was your life for, like, a really long time.
Metal Jesus: What’s cool about this is that this didn’t come out on the PlayStation 2, it didn’t come out on the GameCube, it was only out on the original Xbox, and PC of course, but if you wanted to play it on a console this, was it.
Kinsey: Yep, and it’s one of the first Elder Scroll games to even come to the console, so, if this never would have come to the console we probably wouldn’t have something like Skyrim, you know? On the new console, so…
Metal Jesus: That’s true. And this was such a big deal too. I remember when this came out so many people were excited about it and it was just so, talk about open world. Like the first time I played this game, because I also played the Xbox version as well, I was just like, “Where do I go, what do I do?” It was so open world, it was amazing. You know?
Kinsey: Yeah, and if you’re a console gamer, like I am, PC did more of the open world exploratory stuff, but this was like a brand new thing to me, and it was so beautiful and it’s wonderful. And if you get the Game of the Year Edition it also comes with all the DLC.
Metal Jesus: Ah, that’s cool. All right, next up is one of my favorite arcade, first-person shooters, that is TimeSplitters: Future Perfect.
Kinsey: It’s so much fun.
Metal Jesus: You know, so I was thinking well do I do TimeSplitters 2 or Future Perfect? But Future Perfect, is perfect, this is such a great game. It’s the last one so far in the series but they ended it on a high note. What’s cool about this game is that it has kind of the story that’s weaving through it and it’s funny because you run into previous versions of yourself, and you’ll see yourself and you’ll have conversations and it’s just this crazy, sort of wacky shooter…I don’t know, there’s something about this game, I just love it. Me and Drunken Master Paul play this a lot.
Kinsey: All right, and next, is some games that are very close to my heart.
Metal Jesus: Yeah, I love these games.
Kinsey: So, KotOR and KotOR two. BioWare masterpieces, well this ones not BioWare, it’s Obsidian but…
Metal Jesus: Right, that brings up a good point. So the original version was, I think, perfect in every way.
Kinsey: It’s so wonderful.
Metal Jesus: It’s so amazing, like, it blew me away. For a long time..it’s actually probably still up in my top 10 of favorite role playing games of all time, it’s just so awesome. Speaking of playing bad, or good or evil, in that game you can be evil as well, and it’s fun.
Kinsey: It’s real evil, too. Something about being a Sith in this game, you’re real bad. You’re like, “Oh, by the way I’m alien races contaminable.”
Metal Jesus: You could screw people over in so many ways. But now the second game is really interesting, that was made by Obsidian. So it was a different company, although they make good games, it’s a little bit…and it feels a little bit unfinished in some ways. The ending was not quite as good as I would’ve hoped.
Kinsey: It seems like they kinda rushed it towards the end, because it just kind of ended.
Metal Jesus: But, it was still really fun to play, had a lot of really interesting improvements on the game play, I like them both.
Kinsey: Yeah, they smoothed out the combat a lot in the second one, so in some ways it felt better to play.
Metal Jesus: Yeah, that’s true.
Kinsey: And they created some super interesting characters in this one.
Metal Jesus: That’s true. And you could actually turn your characters, their alignment in the second game, which is really fun.
Kinsey: You could make some people Jedis, pretty cool.
Metal Jesus: All right and then finally for this video, Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without a Pulse. So, this also was an exclusive to the original Xbox, it actually uses the Halo engine but it’s a third-person kind of action brawler, sort of game. Where you play a zombie in a alternate 1950s.
Kinsey: It’s so cool.
Metal Jesus: Dude, this game is fun and it’s wacky, too. Like there’s a, spoiler alert, there’s a level in here where you’re trying to poison the city’s water system and you basically, as a zombie, pee into the water system, and literally it has you aiming, as you’re poisoning the water. It’s that kind of game.
Kinsey: It’s awesome.
Metal Jesus: So, it made me laugh many many times, highly recommended. I love the original Xbox, I mean I was really excited to do this video because it’s one of the parts of my collection where, I love it because a lot of the games aren’t super expensive yet, but yet they’re the best version of those third-party games and it’s got some really interested exclusives, too.
Kinsey: Yeah, definitely.
Metal Jesus: Yeah, so, the other thing too I want to mention is that we’ve done a bunch of hidden gems videos on the original Xbox that if you are thinking about jumping in and collecting for this, I will put a link up in one of the corner here. All right, well thanks for coming on and doing this.
Kinsey: Of course, any time.
Metal Jesus: Yes. Thank you guys for watching my channel, thanks for subscribing and take care. All right, so we’re going to talk about the hardware and what you need to know when you are out, say at a garage sale or maybe you go to a pawn shop or an expo and you need to know, like, fuck.
Kinsey: What do you need to know?
Metal Jesus: To fuck…not in this video.
Kinsey: That’s the next one.
Metal Jesus: Yes. I just love it when Kinsey comes over, she’s such a cool person and such a great friend and if you like Kinsey, well, you’re in luck because on my channel we did videos on the GameCube, we did a buying guide, plus we did Mario hidden gems, yes we actually tackled that and tried to come up with some hidden gems of Mario games. We also covered the Nintendo DS and some hidden gems on there, but some other stuff too like, Star Wars collectibles, we also covered the Xbox 360 controller variants and so much more. Definitely subscribe to my channel and check them out.