Having played for quite a long while on an original Xbox, I decided I wanted to get "back in the game" so to speak and enjoy a traditional modern Xbox experience.
So I went looking on Facebook marketplace and found this impeccable specimen of a One S with two controllers (albeit with their analog sticks bare, with the rubber chewed off, but still working) and 4 games.
Not here today to talk about the games themselves, but it was a good selection. 2 of these are available through Gamepass, and the other 2 I already own on Steam - but hey, whatever excuse to play them again is always good.
What I am here to talk about however is just how Microsoft nailed the design of the Xbox One S even all these years later.
The controllers on this thing still are to me one of the best ever made, with the perfect combination of grip and good buttons.
And not to mention it looks so good that the Series controllers are essentially just rehashes of this.
Then there's the menu.
Whilst it's true that the original Xbox One came out with a terrible inconvenient and frankly God awful menu, they have updated it to a point where it's not only pretty but very functional and quick to move around in.
Sure, it's filled with ads - but your games are still front and center and I love that. The design language also isn't bad at all, the circles and the squares of the buttons really do complement each other quite well and make for a pretty UX.
I decided to deck this thing out with an external hard drive so I'd have 2 terabytes of storage, this is one of the advantages of running a former generation console: the easy expandability.
Is storage slow? Well, most definitely, but at least for just $15 I can add a whole extra terabyte into my little box to fill it up with games.
Another thing I bought was one of these cheap 800mAh batteries that you charge through their own USB port. This beats buying batteries all the time.
I actually have a AA battery charger but only two of my rechargeable batteries are working, and since I have 2 controllers this ended up being the cheapest and most convenient solution.
Now now, what about modernity in available software?
This is where getting an older console makes you suffer a little. Not a whole lot of games are coming out for this thing.
I find it quite surprising that Call of Duty is still getting supported considering how poorly Warzone runs, but I'll tell you one thing: Black Ops 6 works perfectly.
I don't know what black magic they did on this thing but BO6 just runs incredibly well and quite fluently with very little in the way of frame drops.
There's also of course the juggernaut of F2P games, Fortnite, which looks and runs quite well on this aging 2016 (2013 but with a slightly higher clocked GPU) machine.
Overall, I'm having fun. Gamepass never disappoints regardless of what system you're running it in and in case you need new games, there's always cloud gaming, and the One S makes for a great cloud gaming box to have hooked up to your TV.
Another good thing about it is its support for 4K content - not games, mind you, but I personally like to collect movies and being able to watch them in 4K HDR with the Xbox One S is a good thing, this is a feature that was sorely lacking from the original Xbox One, specially with how much they advertised it for "TV, TV, TV!"
Anyways, I'll be back to Crash Bandicoot 4 now, thanks for reading!
