Restoring Xbox 360 Games vs Modding

[Judge Dredd]

TL:DR : I found some games at a reasonable price in poor condition. Should I bother with them, or just lean on modding and emulation?


I stumbled across a local shop selling Xbox 360 games for decent enough prices. There's a catch however, the boxes are in bad condition.

How bad? I'm talking cases used as tennis rackets before being hotboxed, and manuals dipped in orange juice before trade in kind of bad condition. This is fairly standard for second hand games in my area. I'm not sure of the quality of the discs, but I'm guessing that they've been used as ice skates if it keeps with tradition.

Restoring the cases is doable. Amazon sells green DVD cases if I want to swap out the battered plastic.

The big problem is the discs. Back in the day a local game shop offered a disc polishing service that would restore discs the 95% of their original condition for just a couple of quid, but that shop closed long before covid. The methods a quick google search bring up are ...questionable. Such as using car polish, vaseline, or removing a layer of plastic using a special tool.


The other option is, of course, emulation or console modding. It's still early days for Xbox 360 emulation, and modding would open the doors to any 360 game I missed, not just whatever turns up locally. But since I'm in no hurry for these games due to having a backlog of projects, I can afford to wait.

 

[The Backwards Man]

Just solder in a modchip into your 360 and play all your games off an HDD. If the discs have been lazerburnt, scratched or rotting it's not worth restoring them.

 

[Pissmaster]

A few years worth of Xbox 360s had that problem where if the console was rotated while a disc was spinning, it'd eat that disc and make it permanently unplayable, so I'm sure there are plenty of games floating around in the used market with that problem. I never heard about any kind of way to repair them, either, even with those professional disc buffing machines some places had.

If you can pirate & emulate them, I'd just do that. I've had plenty of trouble with Xbox 360s. Their controllers seem to malfunction on me more than any others, any systems before the S and E models are junk, and the dashboard is permanently crappy thanks to that big push for Kinect in its latter years. That is a console I am perfectly fine with never returning to, and just committing to the annals of history, only to live on in emulation.

 

[The Backwards Man]

Their controllers seem to malfunction on me more than any others

That's strange. For me 360 controllers seem to hold their own when it comes to durability. I've only had one 360 controller have it's thumbsticks break but that's all I've experienced in terms of technical grievances.

On the opposite end of the bow though, ps3 controllers have been nothing but fragile. I have a few of them lying around somewhere and all have issues with the trigger buttons getting stuck or the connector for the usb cable not connecting properly.

 

[whatever I feel like]

I still don't get how people manage to break the sticks on their first party controllers. Like what, are your pets chewing them or something?

 

[MrTroll]

Xenia is a very good emulator. RPCS3 (PS3 emulator) is even better. Between emulation and contemporary PC ports I can't think of any 360-era game that cannot be played on PC.

 

[Kel1 shi1]

he methods a quick google search bring up are ...questionable. Such as using car polish, vaseline, or removing a layer of plastic using a special tool.

I've tried them all and none of them worked, only professional disc polishers.

x360 games are basically given away in the regualr sales these days, probably cheaper just to wait and buy them digitally then to buy a used disc or mess around with modding.

 

[The Last Stand]

A few years worth of Xbox 360s had that problem where if the console was rotated while a disc was spinning, it'd eat that disc and make it permanently unplayable, so I'm sure there are plenty of games floating around in the used market with that problem.

Not "a few years worth," every Xbox 360 made has that problem with disc scratching. Reason? MS elected to NOT add rubbers on the disc tray, which causes the disc to make contact with the lens.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I still don't get how people manage to break the sticks on their first party controllers. Like what, are your pets chewing them or something?

Depends on how you define "break". I've worn my Xbox 360 sticks to the bare plastic. I've known multiple PS1/PS2/PS3 controllers have something break so the sticks get stuck on the outside. And then there's the infamous joycon drift on the Switch.

Much of it seem to be general heavy use combined with the ham fisted-ness of normies. Pretty much every second hand controller and even many of my friends controllers had spongy face buttons due to pressing them too hard.

Xenia is a very good emulator.

I hear conflicting things about that. I hear it's very good and well worth using. But I also hear it's in it's infancy and lacks things such as proper transparency and shadows, support for 1080p games, or support games that used the 360 avatars. I didn't think of PS3 or RPCS3. Most of the games I want got PS3 ports. I do have a PS3 and should look into modding that.

 

[whatever I feel like]

Depends on how you define "break". I've worn my Xbox 360 sticks to the bare plastic. I've known multiple PS1/PS2/PS3 controllers have something break so the sticks get stuck on the outside. And then there's the infamous joycon drift on the Switch.

Much of it seem to be general heavy use combined with the ham fisted-ness of normies. Pretty much every second hand controller and even many of my friends controllers had spongy face buttons due to pressing them too hard.


I hear conflicting things about that. I hear it's very good and well worth using. But I also hear it's in it's infancy and lacks things such as proper transparency and shadows, support for 1080p games, or support games that used the 360 avatars. I didn't think of PS3 or RPCS3. Most of the games I want got PS3 ports. I do have a PS3 and should look into modding that.

I don't mean drift, I mean having the plastic worn off or internal parts broken so that they don't recenter.

 

[Book Thief]

I played through Sonic 2006 via Xenia, and I can report that, for a game that's infamous for long loading times, the emulator managed to cut down those load times to just a few seconds. There was a few visual glitches here or there, but overall I'd say it was a better experience playing it emulated than on original hardware (and I've done both).