Xbox Live 'Most-Played' Sees Xbox 360 Invasion

Larry Hryb, Xbox Live Director of Programming at Microsoft, has posted a list of the top 10 "most-played games over Xbox Live" to his personal blog. The list is a fairly regular feature on the blog, but this week's chart marks the ascendance of the Xbox 360 on Xbox Live, as virtually all titles listed are games for the just-released next-generation system. #1 on the list, however, is still the Xbox chestnut of Halo 2, whose online mode with detailed stat-tracking available on the web is still the most popular thing on Microsoft's system a year after its release. In second place is Call of Duty 2, followed by Perfect Dark Zero: both of which are -- like Halo 2 -- first-person shooters, a genre whose emphasis on multiplayer commands a lot of time spent online in deathmatch and other more exotic game types. Project Gotham Racing 3, a fairly realistic racing simulator, takes fourth places on the XBL list, just ahead of Battlefield 2: Modern Combat on the original Xbox. Battlefield marks a string of chart grabs by Electronic Arts, which also publishes Need for Speed: Most Wanted at #6, Madden NFL 06 at #7, and … Madden NFL 06 at #8. One of the Maddens is obviously an Xbox and one a 360 title, but the list doesn't say which version edged the other out in the rankings. Hexic HD, the Alexei Pajitnov-created Xbox Live Arcade game, finishes out the bottom of the list at #9 just before a very curious #10: Kameo: Elements of Power. Rare's third-person platform game is due to receive an update which confers online co-operative play, but for the time being, the game is offline-only. One possibility is that time spent in the single-player mode is logged on Xbox Live anyway, due to Microsoft's requirement that all 360 titles be "Live Aware." If this is the case, one wonders which other 360 games have had their chart positions inflated with offline play as well.