Doom 3

Today the original Xbox turns a decade old. Celebrate with our countdown of the 25 greatest games to ever appear on Microsoft’s first console. How many of these choices did you play, and how many do you agree with?

Ten years ago today, Microsoft released the original Xbox in North America. While it was far from the best-selling console of all time, moving a relatively meager 25 million consoles, the system was still groundbreaking in a number of ways. It also set up Microsoft to release their next system, the Xbox 360, which would beat the competition to retail by nearly a year. But how did Microsoft, a company that had never even dabbled in game consoles, go from nothing to great success in so little time?

We, naturally, have the answers. While some might argue that the PlayStation 2 (check out Six reasons the PS2 is the best console of all time) or the GameCube were the greatest consoles ever, there's definitely grounds to make that argument for the original Xbox as well, and we have compiled six reasons the original Xbox is, indeed, the best console of all time...

Doom 3 then. Too dark. Too claustrophobic. Too many corridors. Not enough carnage. Closet monsters, closet, monsters, closet monsters. And that torch-or-gun mechanic is cheap as hell. That’s the accepted wisdom of much of the internet these days. But you know what? Much of the internet is full of crap. Yes, Doom 3 has some flaws. Yes, it’s very different from the Dooms of old. But taken on its own terms, it’s also a blistering, nerve-pounding, brutally affecting thrill-ride, one that got under my skin like few other games before it, and had the scare-power to turn my very own home into a nightmarish domain of half-seen horrors, ambiguous noises, and thick, black shadows that absolutely, resolutely did want to kill me as soon as the sun went down. But you know, in a good way.

So follow me, if you will, through the mists of time, and let me recount to you just why Doom 3 is so special.

When it comes to first-person-shooters, there can be no studio more influential than id Software. Wolfenstein 3D practically invented the genre, Doom perfected it and Quake dragged us kicking and screaming into true three-dimensional combat.

Of these three games, Doom is arguably the most iconic. A tour de force in its day and a classic in its twilight, the original Doom series gave many great things to the FPS genre. However, despite its bountiful offerings, not everything that Doom delivered was taken up by subsequent pretenders to the throne...

Perhaps better than any other creative medium, videogames have managed to recreate entire ecosystems of imaginary creatures and presented them in an observable context. Books and movies may offer detailed glimpses of anatomy and behavior, but only in videogames does the observer interact with organisms and experience behaviors first hand.

You don’t have to see or play absolutely everything on this list to be a proper zombie connoisseur, but you should at least know them. These are the genre’s defining relics. Some are responsible for the very creation of the zombie mythos, others adapted and advanced it, while the rest simply encapsulate it so exquisitely that they must be experienced. This may not be everyone’s definitive list of zombie lore

Sunsets, love, war, babies, baby war… There’s just no telling when and where exactly musical inspiration will strike. Well, with the exception of this here article. Using GamesRadar’s collective knowledge of games and music, we managed to scrape together numerous instances of game soundtracks that were, let’s just says, all too familiar for an expose decades in the making.

There are enemies that are circular, and there are enemies that aren’t circular. These are the ones that are circular.

Euclidian geometry defines circles as the points on a plane which are the same distance from another point called the center, got it? That’s awesome. There is no geometric definition for enemies, but if there was it would define them as the guys that kill you.

Earlier this year we deduced that Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Eye of the Beholder II – The Legend of Darkmoon is the longest game name out there. Reader comments quickly proved there were a few names out there just as long or even longer, but will you be able to find a name that’s shorter than those on this list?

Collected here are the simplest, monosyllabic game names we could dig up