I still remember getting my first game console – I believe it was Christmas 1998, the year after the Nintendo 64 was released. It came out in March of 1997, and a friend of mine brought his on vacation that summer. It was an excruciatingly hot day, and we went over to his cottage and played Goldeneye, and BattleTanxs. This wasn’t my introduction to Video Games or anything, in fact my dad was a big gamer, he just played them on the computer. I remember all the X-Wing, and Tie Fighter games that came on Floppy Disks, and then the Jedi Knight games the finally came on CD-ROM. This was a new world to me though – you could play game on the TV!?
I’m nowhere near the gamer I used to be, but I still enjoy a couple of hours of play instead of watching TV some nights, especially in the winter. I’ve had a lot of consoles, but in my mind, the PS3 was the definition of perfection in a game console. The XMBC UI was amazing, and storage organization and optimization was everything it needed to be. It functioned as way more than a game console, it was a full home entertainment device. In fact, when my wife and I moved into one of our old apartments, we had to wait about a week after moving in to have internet installed – we didn’t have many DVD’s, but on the PS3, I had seasons of Stargate Atlantis, and Babylon 5 on there, and close to 50 CD’s ripped to it. The Original Xbox had a lot of these features as well, and continued to incorporate them into the Xbox 360, but in my mind just never hit the same mark as Sony did with the PS3.
I stuck with Playstation in this, now previous, generation – but I’m torn moving forward. I’ve been unable to catch any of the PS5 restocks and managed to get an Xbox Series X in my cart a couple of weeks ago, but never clicked buy. I feel like Sheldon in the Big Bang Theory episode when the last round of consoles came out – I’ll likely find myself on the floor of a Best Buy with one of each in each hand yelling out the pros and cons and will probably walk out with neither. Microsoft purchasing Bethesda was a little bit of a hiccup for me, and the only PS Exclusive I’ve ever played was ‘The Last of Us’ series, but if games such as Fallout are to become Xbox Exclusives moving forward, Microsoft may have sold me.
… and lately I really miss the Halo franchise. I went to power up my Xbox 360 this past Saturday night to play some ODST Survival Mode only to be greeted by the Red Rings of Death that I had repaired about 10 years ago… ugh! The Xbox One only had one game in the series come out for it, so I feel like skipping a console generation, and playing it upscaled on a Next-Gen will be a pretty good way to go in my book!
Roving On 