Looking back at Xbox
The big news in the video game world this week was that Phil Spencer left as the head of Xbox/Microsoft Gaming, along with his preferred successor, and his replacement is someone who used to be the president of Microsoft’s CoreAI division. No doubt this means that the Copilot AI anchor that is dragging down the rest of Microsoft will finish off the Xbox, and if Microsoft ever releases another game console, it will probably called something like the “Microsoft Gaming Copilot Pro 365 With Copilot”, and the interface will just be an endlessly spinning wheel as Copilot fails to load on the home screen.
With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at my experiences with Xbox.
For the 2000s and the 2010s, the Xbox was a source of irritation and frustration to me. I used to do university tech support, and if people couldn’t get into Xbox Live, I heard about it, frequently and vociferously.
But by the time 2022 rolled around, I was older and perhaps somewhat marginally less cranky, and wondered what I had missed out on. So I got an Xbox Series X and tried it out, and was happy with it.
Here are my favorite games I played on the Xbox in the last four years.
-HALO 1, 2, & 3. These are legitimately great games. I can see why HALO 1 was such a successful because it’s such an admirably simple game. You can only carry two weapons at a time, and you have to watch your ammo and pickups carefully. Master Chief was a great protagonist, so it’s regrettable Microsoft kind of steered him into the ground in the post HALO 3 games.
-SKYRIM. Of course I played SKYRIM on the Xbox. I finally beat the game for the first time on the Switch during COVID in 2020, but I finished all the expansions on the Xbox. I think the Xbox Series X really was the ideal platform for the game, since it loaded smoothly and quickly while the original Switch kinda struggled with it at times.
-PENTIMENT. My younger brother basically lectured me into playing this. It was an interesting work of art, and I’m glad I finished it.
-OBLIVION REMASTERED. I spent a lot of 2007 and 2008 playing OBLIVION on PC, so it was nice to return to an upgraded game.
-STARFIELD. Overall, I think STARFIELD is my favorite game on the Xbox. STARFIELD is one of those games where you either love it or hate it, but I definitely was in the “love it” category.
The downside is that every single one of these games is actually owned by Microsoft, which I suppose shows the downsides of corporate consolidation.
So, I suspect this is the beginning of the end for the Xbox, but I’m glad I got to see some of its best in its final years.
-JM