Xbox Series X - The next Xbox that's boxy but sexy xXx

Finally got one this week. It’s all new and shiny and fast, but honestly, the biggest thing I was impressed with (which I had heard would happen, but wanted to see it for myself) was how easily everything from Rock Band 4 transferred over. Even the songs no longer sold! And the speed - oh, the speed…

Oh yeah. The new NHL game is nice, too.

I would love to get Rock Band 4! I wish Microsoft would open up a way to homebrew a Legacy adapter to connect 360 era instruments. I keep my old 360 limping along because I’ve got a ton of old instruments and songs from that era, and the Legacy Adapter (or RB4 instruments, for that matter) will set you back hundreds of dollars. :(

Yeah, I even bought the Legacy Adapter a few years ago, and then stored it for safekeeping at either my house somewhere or my parents house. And then last year I finally bought Rock Band 4 on sale and I looked and I looked and I looked for that legacy adapter. It’s somewhere, but I sure as heck can’t find it. So I can’t actually play RB4.

Yeah, I’m sure my legacy adapter is around here somewhere. But I did buy an extra drum adapter for the ION drum kit, since that’s all I pretty much play, and didn’t want to be w/o if the first one went down. It hasn’t yet, thankfully.

I’d also be good with getting an actual MIDI drum kit to work with RB4, but I don’t have the skills needed to do that transformation myself. I don’t care how easy you may think it is, I couldn’t do it. Seriously - no mechanical or electronic skills at all. If I have to do more than plug something in - I’m out. And I have to follow instructions on where to plug things in. It does help when the plugs and receptacles are of a shape that makes it easy to figure out (thank you, HDMI cables).

Because I can’t seem to embed Tiktok videos

It’s the series X’s bigger cousin!

YEEESH on that 2TB pricing

I still think people’s need to have everything installed at the same time is weird and a bit obsessive compulsive. But if you have an ISP with a download limit, I could see it being a problem.

But yeah, I usually have only two games I’m rotating between, with maybe a couple more rotating in and out at most, and everything else that’s usually installed is just “oh yeah, don’t forget to go back to that”.

The answer is pretty simple: get a cheap external USB HDD, plug it in, and use it for cold storage of Xbox Series games. You can also use it to run Xbox One and older games, or store them on the HDD and move them to the internal SSD if you want to take advantage of that speed.

That’s what I’ve been doing. But that certainly causes delayed gratification - it’s probably a 15-20 minute process to move a big game off and then move another big game on, and I’m pretty sure it can be longer.

Even worse is when you move a big game, get excited to play… and have a 15gb patch to install.

I’m actually fighting off the techlust to get one of these external drives. It’s just some games. I hardly have time to play them anymore anyway. All it would be used for is basically storage.

I’ve got 4 kids at varying ages. We have a bunch of different game installed at the same time because of this. Also, there are certain games that I play off and on throughout the year, mainly racing and sports games, that I don’t want to have to reinstall when I’m in the mood to play them.

With all that said most games can be run off a standard external drive right now so I don’t see why someone needs a really expensive 2TB Seagate expansion right now. Maybe a couple years down the road when the majority of XBox games coming out require the faster drive? By then we should hopefully have more storage options.

Ah yes, I always view gaming as such an isolating singular activity, I always forget about the possibility of multiple people using the same console. That’s a great point. And also about the racing game, though I usually have one main racing game that I have installed all the time as well. But yes, driving games are getting kind of big these days. I suspect Forza Horizon 5, to be a permanent fixture on the hard drive will be pretty massive, just like Microsoft Flight Simulator. I’d hate to have a Series S with both of those on top of whatever else currently playing. On the Series X there’s plenty of room, thankfully.

My next level brain bought an Elite 2 last October and has mandated that I leave it in the box and not install it, as I continue to use the default Xbox One X controller for no real reason other than it seems fine and I like the texture.

Yep, proprietary is always overpriced. That’s why it’s proprietary.

Might actually be underpriced if it’s based on this Seagate FireCuda ssd. The prior version had 5000 Mb/sec read speed versus 7300 Mb/sec for this one.

The SSD built-in to the XSX is a PCIe gen4 running at 2.4GB/sec. The PS5 SSD is much faster at 5.5GB/sec, but tests have shown that (as expected, and as I said many times in this thread and others) Microsoft and Sony’s chatter about SSDs being transformative rather than just faster storage was all bullshit, because much slower SSDs work fine in the PS5.

Anyway, the going price for a 2TB SSD like the one in the XSX is around $340. Charging more than that is just a proprietary tax. And to their credit, MS is only charging a ~18% upsell and they guarantee it’ll work, so it isn’t like offensive, but it still sucks compared to Sony’s position on upgrades.

The problem will come when commodity SSD prices drop over time and the Xbox upgrades don’t.

There is something nice though about the fact that the expansion hard drive slots in like a memory card on the PS2.

I mean, there’s some non trivial value to be had with that user experience, as most people do not feel comfortable opening up systems and dealing with installing hardware (especially in the cases of needing to do things like attaching a heat sink if the drive didn’t come with one).

Yes I agree, I don’t think the sixty bucks is completely offensive.

But in a year when 2TB NVMe Gen4 SSDs with 3GB/sec speeds are $199 and the Xbox 2TB expansion remains $400, well shucks, that’ll suckle sack.

Ya, I’m totally cool with my current 1TB drive right now, and can afford to wait a while before I need to buy that expansion.

That aside there’s a noticeable difference between games designed with it in mind and those that aren’t. I don’t really think anything on the Xbox really does yet (nothing I’ve tried anyway)but several things on PS5 have like Returnal, Ratchet, or even the Demon’s Souls Remake. Deathloop felt old and last gen with all its loading screens even if they were brief.