Thursday 6^th August 2020

I’ve bought an xbox.

I know, I know, the timing seems all wrong. There’s a new Xbox due out in less than 6 months and so I’ve already bought into last generation.

But hear me out.

The last console I owned (other than the Switch) was a Xbox 360. I loved that console and used to have loads of fun playing games with friends over live.

However, the One never grabbed me. I didn’t like the partial backwards compatibility, felt they still had things to work out with digital delivery, and I was buying too many games. You see, I’d buy a new game each Friday, play it for a few hours, get bored and then never play it again.

Having an xbox was expensive.

Instead, I migrated towards games like Warcraft, a game with lots of different game mechanics built into it, all for a single price per month. I got myself a great PC and could play steam games if I so wanted.

But times have changed. The last 3 or 4 months feel like years and I honestly don’t see mass gathering happening this side of Xmas. I figure that I’m going to be spending a lot of this year inside.

I managed to find a deal on Xbox Games Pass Ultimate, nabbing myself a year for only £26 instead of £12-£13 a month. For that price, I get, not only a load of Xbox One games, but a load of PC games too. We’re entering the age of crossplay, and I love that, for example, I can log onto Fortnite on my PC, my laptop or my switch and still have access to all the same skins and progress.

I’m not sure Games Pass Ultimate is worth £12-£13. I mean, I think it’s great value, but it might not be great value to me. But at £26 as a first time customer, it made buying an xbox worth it.

Therein lay the next challenge. Trying to find an actual Xbox on sale was really difficult. I found one a couple of weeks ago, put it in my cart, alt-tabbed to find out some information and found them sold out by the time I alt-tabbed back. I looked at second hand recently refurbished ones, but they’re going for more than a new one. It seems like everyone had the same idea.

But I managed to find one earlier today, and wasted no time in picking it up.

There’s a bunch of games I really want to play: from Red Dead Redemption to No Man’s Sky to Witcher 3.

What I love is whereas before I’d buy a game and then have guilt when it didn’t engage me past a couple of hours, now, because I’m paying a single monthly fee, I’ll have no qualms about deleting a crap game and downloading something else.

There should be more than enough to keep me going through the winter months and now a lot of my projects have come to a break, it’s the perfect time to get some serious gaming in.