I finally got around to trading in my Xbox 360 the other week, and all I can say is that I wish I had done it sooner. This is because during those last  weeks of it just sitting in a box under my bed, not even once did I think about buying a new game for it. This was largely due to my possession of a Playstation 3, but part of it was due to what my Xbox had become in its older days.

By the time I had stopped seriously playing my Xbox, my collection of games was only a shadow of its former self. I had long since traded in any game that would fetch me a fair price at GameStop, while using the profits to fill my shelves with PS3 games. Eventually my collection of 360 games could have been used to make the argument that the Xbox was the new console, with my the only games left in my possession being The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth II and Rock Band 2; two games that I refused to get rid of for some slightly different reasons. Battle for Middle-earth II simply because I am unable to play the PC version (Mac FTW), and Rock Band 2 due to the huge amounts of money I invested into expanding my song collection. Rock Band 2  was key though, as I’m almost positive that it was the reason that caused the inevitable extinction of my relationship with my Xbox 360.

The demise of my Xbox 360 was directly linked to the huge drop in popularity of the music game genre, or at least that is what I’ve decided on. At first I thought that I was the only one losing interest in banging on plastic drums, but eventually it hit me that the trend was more widespread than I had thought.  The news of the Guitar Hero franchise being canceled came as great news to me, even though I had known the whole music game genre was just a phase. Yet it was a phase that lasted quite a long time and involved my friends and I spending countless hours wielding those plastic instruments like they were attached to our bodies. Like all good things though, the fun of playing these games came crashing down faster than they had began.

To put it simply, I think I just got tired of playing the same old songs over and over again. Sure, the large amounts of songs available to download were a nice added bonus, but eventually all the songs, especially  while playing the drums, began looking the same. Unfortunately, I began to associate this sense of dull, boring game play to my Xbox 360, which sadly, made me never want to touch the poor thing. I guess you can say that this is a pretty dumb reason to give up on a system, but its the truth.