XBOX One repaired!

So, it turns out that my XBOX One wasn't actually broken, but somehow a failed update made the system not connect to my wireless network. Anyway, after having it unplugged for approximately two months, I plugged it back in, turned it on, and it downloaded updates again! So it is now fully armed and operational as Emperor Palpatine would say. I just bought an external hard drive for it from Amazon, we'll see how that turns out. I'm liking the fact that you can play a lot of the old XBOX 360 games on it, but the bad thing is how long it takes for it to download the game to the system once you insert a disc. I put COD: Black Ops I in, and it took at least 5 hours to download it. But I loaded Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga today, and it did it much faster, so maybe that was just a fluke.

Some other updates, I've been streaming every now and then on Twitch via my PC. My Twitch stream is at https://www.twitch.tv/gregatron5000 ... so look me up sometime.

That FIFA time of year again...

So FIFA '17 is out now, and I haven't bought it yet. I'm still pretty much sticking with FIFA '16 for a while...why? Because FIFA games never change much from year to year...right?

Well for the most part they don't, but this year's edition has added some kind of story mode...and the Frostbite 3 engine. I'm still not wholly convinced I should spend in the neighborhood of $60 for it yet though. The worst thing about EA games is that I can't even get them cheaply on the PC, thanks to EA forcing you to play through Origin. I'll be honest too, I mostly only play career mode as a manager and sometimes I play Ultimate Team, so the new story mode isn't really appealing to me.  I just like getting a League Two team and getting them promoted all the way into the Premier League. Sadly, the main reason I buy a new FIFA game is for the roster updates.

Which brings me to PES 2017; I haven't played a PES game since Playstation 3. I'm a sucker for the licensed teams, and PES doesn't have a ton of them like FIFA does. But I have heard that PES is the way to go for a better quality football (soccer) experience. But then I saw a video comparing the console to the PC version, and that was a major turn-off. Why would the PC version be worse than the console version? That makes zero sense. Here is a video showing the differences:

YouTube video comparing PES PC/PS4/XBONE

The GTX 970 in my PC should blow whatever a PS4 or XBone can do out of the water...instead it looks like Konami decided to screw PC users over. Which, Konami hasn't been the greatest games publisher over the past 5 years or so anyway. They've sold their souls for pachinko machines instead. I suppose I could buy PES on XBone or something though...which I may do, I suppose I could use the ton of Bing search points that I have saved up to buy it.

Anyway, as far as FIFA goes, I don't plan on buying the new version anytime soon, I'll just continue playing '16 for the meantime.

Have any thoughts on this topic? Please comment, I'd love to hear what you think.

XBOX One woes

In my gaming history, I've gone through the PC/console switch a few times, but I think for the most part I've been a PC gamer. The first thing I had to game on was an MS-DOS computer and for the most part, I've played PC games more hours than consoles. But that doesn't mean that I don't enjoy console gaming as well, especially when it comes to retro consoles. During the PS2/XBOX/Gamecube era, I returned to PC gaming when I bought a PC and upgraded the GPU when I was in high school. One of my friends convinced me to get an XBOX 360 when I returned from Iraq in 2007, and even then it took until I actually played Call of Duty 4 to actually get into playing the XBOX 360 consistently versus the PC I built in 2006.  When I was in college, due to online gaming and working at GameStop, I switched to gaming on consoles a lot, but around 2012, I started making my transition back to PC.

In 2014, when I was in D.C. for a bit, I decided I'd get an XBOX One to play with some people that I worked with up there, since they were not PC gamers. Since then I've sometimes played the XBOX One for exclusives or FIFA, but I haven't used it a whole lot. This weekend I was gifted a 1TB external hard drive, and I hooked it up and formatted it for the XBONE. After getting everything ready, I noticed that my wireless connector stopped working. I troubleshot everything, and lo and behold, there was a hardware malfunction.

This is what I don't like about console gaming. Now in less than two years from buying an XBOX One, I now have to send it back to Microsoft for repairs. I get that they have to get cheap components sometimes for building consoles, but seriously...less than 2 years?  Meanwhile, you splurge a bit on a PC, and you won't have to worry about replacing things for a while. Not to mention the price of games on PC are definitely cheaper. And thanks to Steam and GOG and Origin, decades of games are available on PC...on modern consoles, you're essentially limited.

The only consoles this generation that I've been really content with are the Wii U and the 3DS. They have exclusive, great games, and they are super reliable (as Nintendo usually is). Other than that get a PC...

Then you probably won't be spending $115 on a stupid repair for your modern console.

Updates

Well, sorry I haven't written in a while guys and gals, I just bought a house in December, and between moving in and all that jazz, haven't had a lot of spare time. But now, hopefully I can start writing a little again. I think that my format will include modern games, retro games, arcade stuff, as well as some TV and movie reviews. Hopefully I will be able to stay on track and get some stuff going, so stay tuned!