The XBOX One

Speaking of the graveyard of MS corporate ADD…

So much for my thought that I might pick a Series X at the MS store in my town.

It seems like Microsoft is cutting dead weight. I wonder… is this in response to COVID, general belt tightening, or shoring up the bottom line for a big loss leader in the XSX?

A little of column A, a little of column B I’d imagine. My employer closes down underperforming stores as normal business and decided that COVID was a good time to dump a bunch of stores at once by simply never reopening them.

Okay, just cruised through all those videos. They definitely put the ‘hits’ in the first one, but there were a few more interesting games in the rest, mixed in with what felt like a dozen pixel art side-scrollers.

Ok, that was mean, at least one of those looked interesting, Carrion by Devolver- that’s some cool shit right there. And I guess Backbone technically fits that description, too, but isn’t that sort of game.

Voidtrain, The Ascent and Everspace 2 look good as well, but we’ve seen them before. Also, Universim could be cool.

Thanks for posting those.

I just got done watching these. Thanks for posting them!

I thought they all had really interesting looking games except for Spotlight Series 6, the last video. In that one I was only interested in Voidtrain, the rest looked uninteresting to me. And there were a couple of 2D pixel art action games in the previous videos that looked uninteresting, but other than that, they all had a lot of potential.

I’ll put it this way, if this was back on the 360, where every XBLA game had a demo? I’d be checking out nearly all these demos. As it is, most of these will come out and I’ll never even know it. Which is sad. I miss demos.

The Mixer app has apparently been deleted from my console, and any links to it such as inside the MS Rewards app are gone as well. I can still get to mixer.com for the time being, but looks like all trace of Mixer is gone from my Xbox.

Its still built into the Dashboard for now. Just use the triggers to go down. I’m sure that will be gone with the next system update.

Yeah that’s the thing, I’m in the skip ahead alpha system update, and I guess they went ahead and pulled Mixer out of that one.

This is kind of funny. Xbox is having a Summer Game Fest the week of July 21-27 where they will be making new game demos available, but only during this week. I’ve bemoaned the loss of demos this generation, so I guess this is cool. Have to try to burn through as many demos in a week as possible, I suppose.

I wonder if we’ll get a Falconeer demo? I should probably read the link.

Huh. I guess that’s almost exactly what I was asking for! Yay! I definitely will be checking these out. I’ve actually watched the videos you put up about the summer fest games multiple times now.

This is the first time I’m kind of feeling pressured to play Xbox games this weekend even though I have no desire to. I have to earn 3 achievements this week if I want my 43 week rewards streak on the Rewards app to keep going. In previous weeks it was never an issue, since I was usually playing a game on PC or Xbox anyway, so I was never going out of my way to do anything special for it. Not bad to accumulate 43 weeks that way.

But now I’ve been playing PS4 and PC games that aren’t on Xbox Live, so I might actually lose my streak if I don’t go out of my way to earn some quick achievements over the weekend.

Anyone have any ideas for a really quick achievement or two that doesn’t take more than a few minutes on Game Pass or Gold games?

That happened to me at some point earlier in the year and I realized the rewards apps were incentivizing me into activities I didn’t enjoy for barely anything (essentially $10-15 a month for spending many hours between daily bing searches, playing games I wasn’t interested in just for quick achievements or quick quests, etc…). I finally just said screw it and got myself to stop paying attention to that.

Fractured Minds on Game Pass had some reeeeally fast achievements. It’s also somewhat interesting, although not the best example of its genre.

Thanks! I’ve never heard of it. That sounds perfect.

It’s gotten so bad for me I haven’t even been playing games unless it’s to get the 3 achievement streak and then I quit.

Fuck!!! I went to do my daily point searches and see they changed the rewards to 1 point per search instead of 5 points per search. I don’t think I’m doing this anymore.

Yeah. My own time is too valuable to me to justify trying to maintain streaks of achievements or searches on Bing because MS might let me redeem GP for free every month if I do really well. I’ll pay for GP and enjoy my time on my PC or Xbox on my own terms, thank you.

Yep. I’ll collect whatever points happen to come my way organically, but it’s just not worth spending the time and attention to grind them out to maximize them.

You’re right, of course. But it’s hard to when you’re on the streak itself. It’s like the stupid Bing daily activities. I tell myself, easy come easy go when I lose the streak, but it still feels weird, as if a part of me is really bothered by it.

I cashed in $85 in points last week, and $60 last year, not too burdensome versus the perks of free MS bucks to spend in their store.

Hyperdot hands them out pretty easily when you start.