Snagged an XBSX

Brian_B

FPS Enthusiast
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I thought it was an April Fool's joke when Amazon listed the XBSX in stock on April 1, so I half heartedly threw in the order expecting to get trolled. But it arrived yesterday, much to my surprise. I decided to keep it for the moment - it does have a 4K Blu-ray player which i've been after for a while, and the PS5 hasn't been attainable for me (may just wait for the Pro or Slim at this point).

I have mostly been a Playstation guy for the last few years - I did own a 360 years ago, but mostly just to play Fabled, it didn't get a lot of playtime. The PS4 and Sony ecosystem themselves aren't without their faults, but it's the devil I know. I don't play on it full time, but I bounce between that and my PC, and Sony's catalog tends to line up better with what I play (a bit more RPG heavy than Shooter-focused)

So, my thoughts.

The interface is an utter mess. It's designed for people with ADHD I think. And it shows ads all over the place. Bleh.

I can not get Remote Play to work on my PC at all. After a bit of fiddling with my router to get Open NAT status (which really didn't have anything to do with NAT, it was port forwarding... except it would only seem to work if I let it open it's own ports via upnp2 on my edgerouter), I got it to work on my iPhone. But it refuses to work on my Windows 11 machine on the same subnet. The PC can see the Xbox and shows the correct status, but can't connect. Go figure.

The Microsoft store is a mess. There are about 5 different XBox apps for other devices. Some are depreciated but still available? I like how on the Playstation I can log into their storefront web page and buy stuff (mostly just the free PS+ stuff) and set it to install. Supposedly I can do that with Xbox as well, but I can't find crap on the MS Store if I open it from the PC. If I open it from the XBox app sometimes I can find it, but not always. And the web page I can find it and make it work, but the page fails to load crap half the time - and you can't manage installs on the Xbox via the web page, it just directs you to the App, which can't connect...

Xbox Game Pass - ok that does work. Cool. And when I logged in with my MS account it automatically added the child account for our son, with the appropriate permissions we had already set for his PC.

So far - not really impressed in the least, but will give it a bit of time and see if it grows on me before I start regretting it. Worst case, the son is all about it, I just need to get him incentivized enough to earn it rather than just giving it to him. It really feels very "Microsoft" - like there's all these old dinosaur legacy things lurking about that don't really get supported or depreciated properly as things move forward, and the (*&%^!@# name makes Google search useless, as I can't seem to differentiate between the original Xbox, the One, and the One Series X.

Also -- taking recommendations for 4K Blu rays to get, please!
 
Wow! I had no idea they didn't have their act more together. I seriously would've thought after all this time that things were not that bad still.

In terms of 4K suggestions, there are more than a few decent sites for that but this one is my main go-to. Just click on the 4K tab in the review column and go from there. At the top of the page in red is the link for sales and then just click on that 4K tab.

https://www.blu-ray.com/
 
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