After spending a few months telling myself that I would not buy an Xbox Series X, and watching other people go to the next generation of consoles, I bought and bought an Xbox Series X . I’m starting to wonder if this was such a great idea.
I’m not going to lie: the decision to buy an Xbox Series X was a 100 percent impulse purchase, and not the result of weeks of spending on a console that did not come from a scalper. The British retailer Argos got some stock, and in the following way it was sold out almost immediately. Except for one shop, about 30 minutes by car, there are miraculously a few more available.
A few days and 40km’s drive later, I’m rearranging the top of my TV unit to accommodate the overgrown brick that is the Xbox Series X. Hurray! Right? Maybe not, because in the weeks that followed, I did almost nothing with it.
It was almost everything but a game console
In the weeks since I connected my new Xbox, I have actually played very little. Which is weird considering how many games can be played on a next generation Xbox. There are 20 years of stuff to enjoy, and all I use it for is to play 4K Blu-rays. If I’m not trying to sync my old storage files with the cloud, it is.
The crazy thing is that I already had an Xbox One S, and it was capable of playing 4K discs. Maybe it was not quite the same quality as a dedicated 4K machine, but it played it and took up only about half the space in the process.
The thing that bothers me the most is that I rarely have more time for games. Definitely not on TV, which is why I like the Nintendo Switch so much. It lets me track down a game whenever I want, wherever I may be.
I can stream the Xbox Series X to my phone very easily, but it’s not quite the same. I still feel like I have to sit on the couch in front of the TV with a controller in my hands. Especially since a lot of the games I have are great, elaborate games that benefit from a much bigger look at the world.
These games also take a lot of time and effort to keep up with, I discovered them first hand when I uploaded my Fallout 4 upload, and realized that I had not played the game for four years and had no idea what was going on . on. I was also shocked to learn that Elder Maxson is still alive, though I’m pretty sure I killed him to get the sweet coat he’s wearing. On top of that, I remember completing the game and destroying the Institute. But it’s somehow still there.
It was nice to run around and go look at the Commonwealth at 60 fps. But the fact that I’m an adult with a busy adult program that does not contain much time for games is still one of the things that makes me wonder why I picked up the X series.
The lack of exclusivity does not help
Consoles exclusive is usually very rare so early in a new generation, and it does not matter if you are the proud owner of a PS5 or an Xbox Series X. We are less than a year into the new cycle, and all the platform exclusives are also available on the older consoles.
The fact that I now have an Xbox Series X actually offers no new gaming opportunities for me. Because every game I could buy would have worked on my older console. It’s an amazing thing to think about, because the same disk can work over two different generations of hardware
This kind of foreplay has never been done before, and even in the glory days of the PS2, it was impossible to set up a PS3 game in a PS2 and expect it to work. Even the PS5 sells separate discs for its exclusive, like Spider-Man: Miles Morales. It’s an impressive display of technology and a consumer-friendly practice that you would never expect from a company like Microsoft even ten years ago.
Natural. the downside is that I can easily pick up a copy of something like Crash Bandicoot 4 and continue playing it on my Xbox One. The only major difference is that the Xbox Series X can run it at 4K 60fps. It’s a big step up from the original Xbox One and Xbox One S I’m still laying, but it’s not like I’ll miss much.
The same goes for Game Pass, since all the titles are multi-generational. The Series X may look better and play the games, but it’s not like I could not play it.
It certainly does not help that Microsoft seems more committed to supporting the Xbox One in the future. It’s great that gamers do not feel the pressure to upgrade if they do not really want to. But at the same time, it also reduces the value of the new console. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S are a little easier to find than the PS5.
Despite that, I’m not sorry
But when I start guessing my decision too much, I remember one thing: just because I have not played the console yet does not mean I will never do it. There comes a time when I desperately want a next generation console, and now I’m prepared. As the old saying goes, it is better to have something and not need it, than to need it and not have it.
Then again, whoever created the saying probably means emergency supplies or something like that. Not $ 499 game consoles. But hey, I will not play Halo Infinite in less than 4K, it’s something to look forward to. Just as long as Microsoft does not seriously regret jumping in early by releasing a console design for a limited edition that looks much better than the current matte black refrigerator.
The X series also taught me things I never knew about my TV. Like the fact that Samsung TVs of that era (the distant days of 2016) did not have HDR by default. I only found out because the Xbox still claimed that I did not use an HDR10 compatible screen.
It turns out that you have to dive deep into the settings and turn on HDR for each individual HDMI port. And even then, it’s not actually described as something that’s even tangibly related to HDR. Samsung expected you to just know, or at least that someone on a forum would point you in the right direction. So this is definitely a win for Microsoft, and another thing I can hold against Samsung. The win may not be worth $ 500 in itself, but it’s a win nonetheless.
I can wonder why I spent so much money on a shiny new console that I sometimes barely touched, but I do not want to go so far as to say that I have a serious remorse over the buyer. I just need to manage my time better and find some games that make me a little more eager to pick up the controller.