Halo

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...

Weapon progression is tricky. On one hand, developers want to keep the player interested by creating a series of cool guns and abilities to gain throughout the game. On the other, we’re smart enough to realize they’ve hidden a badass doomsday weapon somewhere in there and we want it right now.

While most games take this approach, some shouted "screw it!" and shoved the best weapon into your hand right at the start. Then told you to kill everything in sight. This is our tribute to seven of those glorious games and their excessively effective implements of death...

Halo wasn't the first shooter. Halo wasn't the first to introduce online multiplayer. Halo wasn't even the first Bungie game to feature an armored peacekeeper and sexy female AI battling aliens in outer space. Halo, in many ways, is unoriginal.

Yet no other series – with the possible exception of Grand Theft Auto – has had such a clear, obvious and indisputable impact on the videogame industry over the past decade. To welcome the release of Halo: Reach tomorrow, which also marks the end of Bungie's involvement with their best-selling creation, here are seven of the franchise's biggest influences...

With each new console comes a promise of gorgeous new worlds, brilliant new level design and, best of all, genres and concepts we never could have predicted. The first time you sit down with your new machine is a treasured day of pure discovery, for in that brief moment everything is fresh again. Provided, that is, you chose the correct game from the launch lineup.

Not all launch games are equal. Oftentimes the games that help kick off a console are gussied-up versions of the same stuff we’ve been playing, or cash-grabbing releases meant to capitalize on the launch day fervor. But somewhere in the pile is the gem, the one game that encapsulates everything that’s great about your expensive new piece of hardware. And here we’ve narrowed down the best of the best...

The purpose of any good trailer is to sex up the thing it's selling. That or give you informative warnings about head lice prevention. So we get that games sometimes appear more exciting than they actually are when they're compressed down into 90 second chunks, with ninja editing skills and a rousing soundtrack.

But bugger us if watching the Halo: Reach trailer then seeing the playable footage from Microsoft's E3 conference isn't the equivalent of Songs of Praise being advertised with a Debby Does Dallas trailer. Take a gander inside to see what we're talking about.

Welcome to Bungie, where you're more likely to catch a guy walking down the hall swinging a Gravity Hammer than a guy walking down the hall in a necktie. Last week, I visited Halo HQ for five hours of hands-on with Reach's multiplayer and, while there, snapped some photos of the lobby, hallways and game demo rooms to share the experience with you, my jealous readers.

After all, why should I be the only one who gets to stand next to a life-size Master Chief? Enjoy the tour, and let us know if these "behind the scenes" peeks are something you'd like to see more of in the future...

Now that the veneer of freshness is drying off of our copies of Modern Warfare 2, we can fully devote ourselves to complaining about the lack of dedicated servers, and just how much the maps suck because our piss poor ranking certainly isn’t due to a lack of practice and the statistical disadvantage of playing against millions of people, no! Which got us thinking: What multiplayer maps reign over all others?

So you didn’t have a Halloween costume this year. Boo hoo. Well, GamesRadar will come to the rescue yet again. All you need is some paper and a printer (and some scissors to cut out the eye holes), and you’ve got yourself a quick last-minute Halloween costume in, well, a minute! You’ll be the star of party. Or you’ll just be laughed at

Halo is more than a franchise. Halo is a cultural phenomenon. If you need proof, look no further than this page. When Halo 3 launched two years ago, we launched an epic adventure of our own: nearly 50 straight weeks of HaloRadar coverage.