Xbox 360 Review

Launching a year ahead of Sony bought Microsoft the entire generation. The 360 arrived with a unified online identity, a friends list that worked across every game, and Achievements, which quietly rewired how the whole industry thinks about progression. Xbox Live Arcade made downloadable games a real business and dragged Braid, Geometry Wars and Castle Crashers into the mainstream. Multiplatform releases ran better here for years because the triple-core Xenon and 512 MB of unified GDDR3 were far easier to target than Cell, so the practical library outclassed the spec sheet.

Gears of War, Halo 3, Mass Effect and Forza gave it a real first-party spine. Then there is the red ring. Solder joints under the GPU cracked with thermal cycling, failure rates ran into the double digits, and Microsoft took a $1.15 billion charge to extend warranties on a fault that was not properly fixed until the Valhalla revision in 2010. No console this good has ever been this unreliable. The A is for what it built; the design grade is for what it cost owners in return shipping boxes.