(Rant)
Funny how I get so worked up over people predicting the Wii U's failure when I'm about to do the same to the Xbox One. This article is slightly different in that respect, mainly because the bashing of the Wii U is uncalled for. People say the Wii U will fail only because of the Wii's supposed status as a "kiddie console", which occurred because the news sites wouldn't stop drilling that phrase into your skull. That feeling, for some reason, carried over to the Wii U, which isn't fair. However, in this rundown of the Xbox One, I have specific points as to why you need to stay as far away from this massive silver slab as humanly possible.
I treat home game systems like I do with Pokémon games. You can buy one and still get away with it, but if you want the full experience, you're gonna need the second one. I own a Wii for the Nintendo goodies that I can't go one generation without buying, but when new games started coming out that I had no way of playing, I turned to the Xbox 360. I would've gone with a PlayStation 3 if it weren't for the fact that the 360 is what all my friends had at the time and that it had Halo, which I would stay up until 5 AM playing with said friends. Getting a 360 let me experience some of my favorite games of all time, such as Assassin's Creed II, Sonic Generations, and Portal 2, and I don't regret getting it. Here's the catch, though: while Nintendo's massive first-party IP library is exclusive to their consoles, virtually everything else is on both the Xbox 360 and the PS3. You'd be hard-pressed to find a game that is exclusive to one or the other, making it so that if you owned a Wii and a 360 like I do, you wouldn't have a need for a PS3 because all the games out for the PS3 are also on 360. What it comes down to is whether you prefer Persona and Rachet & Clank over Halo and Fable. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Halo, but it's droppable. The obvious flaws in the 360 and the rumors of the "Durango" had me prepared to drop Microsoft entirely in favor of Sony...I just didn't expect that the Xbox One reveal conference would solidify my opinion so quickly.
The Xbox One conference opened pretty well at first. 500 GB of hard drive space, a significant imporvement over my 360 S' measly 4 gigs. It holds a whopping 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, allowing it to multitask between movies, games, and internet browsing. The controller, while really uncomfortable-looking, sports a D-pad that isn't somehow worse than the GameCube's, unlike the 360's D-pad. The console sure looks sleak, even if it's the size of my desktop tower. The best part is that the Kinect 2.0, as people are calling it, is pre-packaged with the system so that you don't have to pay half the price of the system to get something that doesn't have have anything worthwhile compatible with it. The disc drive is Blu-Ray and the Kinect camera is now 1080p.
See, it's all fine and dandy, right? It has nice features, and looks cool. What more could you want out of a game console?
Oh, wait, I know! GAMES.
Microsoft is under this moronic impression that they need to cater to "growing technology" and outfit their console with TV integration and sports and movies and music and STOP IT. We're investing in your console for games, not for fantasy basketball league plugins (which they actually teased; this is too stupid to make up). This whole mindset is absolutely ridiculous. As for the cool features they talked about, I realized partway through that the Wii U already does the majority of this stuff and so will the PS4, making owning an Xbox One pointless and a waste of cash if you're getting it for just the features alone, which is the only selling point right now because they barely teased any games whatsoever, but we'll get to that in a minute.
These are things you could get past, though. Some of these complaints are kinda petty. Maybe you want a whole bunch of junk like voice commands and TiVO shoved into what's supossed to be a gaming system. Maybe you want to use voice commands that are probably unresposive to turn on your TV as opposed to the Wii U's GamePad that even lets you take your game away from the TV. Well, does the actual gaming side of the Xbox One hold up enough to make the purchase worthwhile based on what they showed during the conference? I'd answer that with a resounding "Are you insane?!".
The Wii U is backwards compatible with Wii games. You can transfer your Virtual Console games over to it, if for a small fee. The PS4 can kind of do backwards compatibility; I'm still confused on how the whole game streaming thing works. So how come Microsoft completely cuts out backwards compatibility as a whole for both physical and digital games?! For a system advertised to be an everything-in-one system, it's pretty stupid that you'll have to have two huge boxes on the counter to be able to play all of your games. Oh, and if you're an Achievement Hunter, better kiss your hard work goodbye because your precious Gamerscore isn't transferrable to the new system. Low on money? Wanna buy a used game? Well, too bad! Every game purchased is registered to an account, meaning that you can't play any used games. They said you can transfer the license for a fee, but who knows how massive that'll be! They also brought up how many servers they have. Look, the cloud's cool and all, but if they crash, you're in for some trouble, because that's also where you'll be storing your save data for your games and your digital purchases. Not to mention there was no word of making Xbox Live Gold free as opposed to its stupid $60-a-year price tag.
Look, you're an Xbox fanboy and want to support this, whatever. It's your money. I'm just giving you friendly gamer-to-gamer advice by telling you to back away from this thing. It doesn't make any sense as to why you'd spend money on it when all it does so far is do anything but play games, and the few games announced for it aren't even exclusive titles. I used to defend the Xbox, but now, I'm not supporting this idocy anymore. If you complained about how difficult and annoying the 360 in general was to use, you're going to have a hell of a time with the Xbox One and trying to even get your games to work properly. Until I see some games that aren't repeat shooters and inane sports games, I'm not in the slightest impressed. I've made my decision; I'm switching to PlayStation as my secondary third-party system.
Funny how I get so worked up over people predicting the Wii U's failure when I'm about to do the same to the Xbox One. This article is slightly different in that respect, mainly because the bashing of the Wii U is uncalled for. People say the Wii U will fail only because of the Wii's supposed status as a "kiddie console", which occurred because the news sites wouldn't stop drilling that phrase into your skull. That feeling, for some reason, carried over to the Wii U, which isn't fair. However, in this rundown of the Xbox One, I have specific points as to why you need to stay as far away from this massive silver slab as humanly possible.
I treat home game systems like I do with Pokémon games. You can buy one and still get away with it, but if you want the full experience, you're gonna need the second one. I own a Wii for the Nintendo goodies that I can't go one generation without buying, but when new games started coming out that I had no way of playing, I turned to the Xbox 360. I would've gone with a PlayStation 3 if it weren't for the fact that the 360 is what all my friends had at the time and that it had Halo, which I would stay up until 5 AM playing with said friends. Getting a 360 let me experience some of my favorite games of all time, such as Assassin's Creed II, Sonic Generations, and Portal 2, and I don't regret getting it. Here's the catch, though: while Nintendo's massive first-party IP library is exclusive to their consoles, virtually everything else is on both the Xbox 360 and the PS3. You'd be hard-pressed to find a game that is exclusive to one or the other, making it so that if you owned a Wii and a 360 like I do, you wouldn't have a need for a PS3 because all the games out for the PS3 are also on 360. What it comes down to is whether you prefer Persona and Rachet & Clank over Halo and Fable. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Halo, but it's droppable. The obvious flaws in the 360 and the rumors of the "Durango" had me prepared to drop Microsoft entirely in favor of Sony...I just didn't expect that the Xbox One reveal conference would solidify my opinion so quickly.
The Xbox One conference opened pretty well at first. 500 GB of hard drive space, a significant imporvement over my 360 S' measly 4 gigs. It holds a whopping 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, allowing it to multitask between movies, games, and internet browsing. The controller, while really uncomfortable-looking, sports a D-pad that isn't somehow worse than the GameCube's, unlike the 360's D-pad. The console sure looks sleak, even if it's the size of my desktop tower. The best part is that the Kinect 2.0, as people are calling it, is pre-packaged with the system so that you don't have to pay half the price of the system to get something that doesn't have have anything worthwhile compatible with it. The disc drive is Blu-Ray and the Kinect camera is now 1080p.
See, it's all fine and dandy, right? It has nice features, and looks cool. What more could you want out of a game console?
Oh, wait, I know! GAMES.
Microsoft is under this moronic impression that they need to cater to "growing technology" and outfit their console with TV integration and sports and movies and music and STOP IT. We're investing in your console for games, not for fantasy basketball league plugins (which they actually teased; this is too stupid to make up). This whole mindset is absolutely ridiculous. As for the cool features they talked about, I realized partway through that the Wii U already does the majority of this stuff and so will the PS4, making owning an Xbox One pointless and a waste of cash if you're getting it for just the features alone, which is the only selling point right now because they barely teased any games whatsoever, but we'll get to that in a minute.
These are things you could get past, though. Some of these complaints are kinda petty. Maybe you want a whole bunch of junk like voice commands and TiVO shoved into what's supossed to be a gaming system. Maybe you want to use voice commands that are probably unresposive to turn on your TV as opposed to the Wii U's GamePad that even lets you take your game away from the TV. Well, does the actual gaming side of the Xbox One hold up enough to make the purchase worthwhile based on what they showed during the conference? I'd answer that with a resounding "Are you insane?!".
The Wii U is backwards compatible with Wii games. You can transfer your Virtual Console games over to it, if for a small fee. The PS4 can kind of do backwards compatibility; I'm still confused on how the whole game streaming thing works. So how come Microsoft completely cuts out backwards compatibility as a whole for both physical and digital games?! For a system advertised to be an everything-in-one system, it's pretty stupid that you'll have to have two huge boxes on the counter to be able to play all of your games. Oh, and if you're an Achievement Hunter, better kiss your hard work goodbye because your precious Gamerscore isn't transferrable to the new system. Low on money? Wanna buy a used game? Well, too bad! Every game purchased is registered to an account, meaning that you can't play any used games. They said you can transfer the license for a fee, but who knows how massive that'll be! They also brought up how many servers they have. Look, the cloud's cool and all, but if they crash, you're in for some trouble, because that's also where you'll be storing your save data for your games and your digital purchases. Not to mention there was no word of making Xbox Live Gold free as opposed to its stupid $60-a-year price tag.
Look, you're an Xbox fanboy and want to support this, whatever. It's your money. I'm just giving you friendly gamer-to-gamer advice by telling you to back away from this thing. It doesn't make any sense as to why you'd spend money on it when all it does so far is do anything but play games, and the few games announced for it aren't even exclusive titles. I used to defend the Xbox, but now, I'm not supporting this idocy anymore. If you complained about how difficult and annoying the 360 in general was to use, you're going to have a hell of a time with the Xbox One and trying to even get your games to work properly. Until I see some games that aren't repeat shooters and inane sports games, I'm not in the slightest impressed. I've made my decision; I'm switching to PlayStation as my secondary third-party system.
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