A 10+ year old meme comparing the Xbox One to a brick. Which of the two did you invest in?
We're lucky to have valve. They actually managed to make a console without the downsides of a console.
My OLED deck has arrived today, can't wait to use it.
A linux PC would involve some amount of tinkering.
The steam deck is foolproof, a 6 year old can play games on it with no issues, so it's a console. The PC mode is just a nice extra.
Linux can be configured to be idiot friendly y'know, and it doesn't make it suddenly not Linux. The SteamDeck has the capabilities of a full fledged Linux PC with the PC mode, it very much isn't just a console.
The Steam Deck definitely requires a certain amount of tinkering, depending on when you got it and what games you're trying to play!
When one brick stops working, you usually get two or more smaller bricks which can be used as bricks.
But how often can you split a brick? What would the final unsplitable brick be called? Let's take the word from greek because greece is known for splitting their bills with the rest of Europe and call it unsplitable. That would mean atomos. Whoa dude. I think we made something beautiful right here.
But now for the real question. What if we put the atomos back together the exact same way? Are they still brick?
I'm so glad Xbox One toned down some of the always online rubbish before it actually launched. It wasn't that bad, fortunately. I have to say Xbox One user experience was pretty meh compared to Xbox 360 in the first year and half or so.
These days, Xbox One and Series S/X are pretty great, but unfortunately ever since the Xbox One launch I've adopted the "let's not get too hyped up about this because Microsoft just might drop the ball a little bit" mindset. Especially as a Halo fangirl.
I'm on PC and Halo stutters hard on a system that meets the recommended systems requirements. Tough time indeed.
Yeah I still remember back when MS just yeeted all this shit out. Basically killed their sales for their generation. And gave Sony that absolute banger of a trolling chance.
I've personally had a grudge against sony for years now after they robbed me of otherOS, that combined with their rootkit BS and blocking me from paying for something with a giftcard because I don't remember the 3 digit code on a credit card that stopped existing years ago.
For reference, I don't trust either Sony or MS to do the "right thing" but MS hasn't slighted me yet
I would contend that bricks are technically region locked, for the majority of people.
That is, if you see the shipping cost of getting one to a different region, you're absolutely going to leave it in its country of origin.
I've worked for a company that supplied key-in-hand clinics for developing countries; picture a three room rectangular building with an x-ray room, a doctors office and a central reception/waiting room.
We had tender from Angola where the client - a local aid organization - wanted us to supply everything for the clinic, including building materials, from Europe to the small lost in wilderness area the clinic would be built.
It was standard practice to source construction and materials locally because good sense.
Took several meetings to convince the client there was no added value to the project by having all building materials imported.
One of the most painful experiences in dealing with human beings I have ever had.
It was confusing, to be gentle, handling the situation.
Everyone involved were genuinely good people but lived with the impression nothing in their country was adequate and what passed through was a notion they wanted to boast about their clinic being built with the best materials available.
We managed to diffuse the situation and save them a good chunk of money by having our engineer go there to personally select locally sourced materials - including bricks - to "guarantee" adequate and top quality product.
But it was ridiculous.
We were treated like show items.
This is a deeply unfair comparison. There are bricks of different (somewhat incompatible) sizes between regions, and sometimes in the same region. While a brick is not "region locked" per se, they are only really a suitable material when replacements of the same size and general color are easily available.
Secondly, if your brick stops working, it is no longer useful as a brick, and has to be used as fill material, or disposed of. Indeed, broken bricks are pretty common, sometimes appearing in large piles.
Thirdly, the games you can play with a brick provide many hours of enjoyment, which is a major selling point of bricks that you've left out of the discussion.
I had to put my xbox one on a smart plug so it doesn't have power when not in use.
Otherwise it turns itself on constantly. Every time I came home it was on, and sitting in the livingroom with it off, it would randomly turn on. It does this both with and without network access.
If you mean that it spins up connected USB drives when "off", I've seen that as it tries to keep games updated in the background. But I've never had any fully turn on (power button lit up, on the main menu if you switch to the input) on their own. That's weird.
No, I mean fully starting up as if I'd pressed the power on button.
Plays the three beep startup sound, power light comes on, I then turn on the tv and it's sitting in it's dashboard doing nothing waiting for input.
Manually press the power button and it shuts down, then starts again a random amount of time later. Sometimes only a few minutes, usually within an hour or two.
I still have all my xboxes and they all still work flawlessly. The OG, the base model xbone, and even the original white 360. I'm also not an achievement hunter at all but still have over 130k gamerscore, which just goes to show how much use each of these consoles got over the years. I had the 360 through college with four roommates! Hell up until they recently made Lucasarts' Gladius backwards compatible on my series x I was getting out the OG Box once a year just to play that masterpiece again.
I used to mod XB1's. They're basically a computer inside. Had XBMC (the precursor to KODI) installed as my dashboard. My games were all copied to the 250GB hard disk I had put into it so they loaded and ran extremely efficiently. I had emulators for PS1 games and Nintendo.
At one point, I even paid a very talented chap for an Xbox board with double RAM and a 2x faster processor soldered onto it.
You had to get a tool from online to patch your executables to be able to handle the extra processing power, otherwise many of them would run at 2x speed because they were pegged to the clock speed.
Love those things. Lots of nostalgia.
Xbox one was a terrible game console but it was a great media center, that's for sure. I loved the HDMI passthrough, and I loved being able to control all of my stuff through the Xbox from the cable box to all of the streaming options installed on the console. I liked it better than the Fire Stick I eventually picked up when the Xbox just decided it would no longer start up.
I didn't care for their first party games; I bought the console bundled with the MCC and Halo 5; Halo 5 was a huge disappointment, and MCC just ran better on my PC. I feel like 343 doesn't get the universe they inherited.
There was just nothing worth playing that was console exclusive that I couldn't get on my desktop. With Playstation, they had banging first party titles all the way through the back half of the PS3 through to now with the PS5, and they are trickling them onto PC.
Ah, yeah that's all true. I thought you had issue with the console hardware itself, which seemed capable enough for that generation
Well, it did just eventually die on me. I had a power surge and that was that, it never started back up again. My 360 still works just fine though.
As far as power goes, it was perfectly capable on a hardware level, for sure. The games played just fine, it was just better for me as a set top box than a video game console as a PC gamer. I had bought an Xbox One X which was capable of 4k output, hoping I would have upgraded the TV. Now I have a FireStick 4k, and I hate it in comparison to the Xbox, it's such a piece of unmitigated garbage.
I remember they were really selling it as a media center in their pitches. It's interesting how they fucked that up. Streaming was still taking off, everyone was about to give voice activated personal assistants / spy devices to their relatives for Christmas.
If Microsoft had been smarter and sold it as a 'this has all the streaming apps on it', they probably could have had some Wii like success with cordcutters
hmm idk, that were competing with other products coming out at that time doing the same this for way less money. chrome cast, apple tv, Amazon fire stick, etc... a $100+ device already seemed like a tough tough sell to me in that market when the apple tv was that much, but that's just the apple tax...
That's cool and all but Smashing a brick isn't as satisfying as smashing a Xbox!