XBox One Review

So this Christmas season was a nice one for us. I had the best Christmas present ever when my doctor told me that they got all the cancer out of me and that for now unless scans show something else started I am in the clear. I couldn’t ask for a better Christmas present than that; however, this season we also got some nice gift cards to Walmart and so bought something that I have been wanting for quite some time now in the form of an XBox One which is a pretty nice thing as well. So I have been playing around with it lately and I figured I would give a small little review of it.

At first, the XBox One’s menu is a bit odd. It is similar to Windows 10 from what I have heard but if you are used to the 360 it’s just a bit difficult to navigate at first. This difficulty will disappear in a short period of time though as it’s a pretty easy system, just different is all. My wife is still getting used to it but for me after almost 2 weeks of playing around with it I have become pretty comfortable with it now- of course she is far from as active as I am with the games.

A nice perk that I don’t have on my 360 that I do have on the One is that the XBox One is wifi compatible. I was told that a lot of the newer 360’s are as well but when I had gotten mine you needed a plug in device to access the wifi. It’s pretty nice to not have to be tethered to the wall anymore, this will give me the possibility of rearranging my living room,which may be a good thing.

Another interesting thing I found out just while doing things I normally would on the 360 is that I found that I now have a Blu-Ray player. I was not aware of this when I bought the XBox One but it is a nice little perk. I was getting tired of missing out on all the awesome special features since they have stopped putting them on regular DVD’s so it will be nice to have the features of the Blu-Ray now.

For the past few days I have been using my XBox in place of my Roku having downloaded Netflix, Hulu, and the WWE Network onto it. The funny thing is that I am even getting achievements and gamerscore through watching my shows now. It seems that you can net a few gamerscore points from binge watching shows and such, which I find just a bit funny. For example, my wife and son got me a few points this morning for hitting the achievements of watching 5 episodes before noon since they had Sesame Street playing in the background for the kiddo while he was playing this morning.

A nice thing about the XBox One is that you can get a 500 GB or a 1 TB hard drive on it. Personally I suggest the 1 TB. I have the 500 GB and I think I am going to have this full in no time flat. I have only a handful of games but that 500 GB is truly only about 350 GB after the XBox preinstalled OS and other things. Then I have BattleFront and Mortal Kombat X both of which were around 10 GB and then it comes with a digital download of Gears of War Ultimate Edition which ran 50 GB. Toy Soldiers was another 23 GB I think it was so as you can see the games for the XBox One are eating into this hard drive very quickly. One good thing about this though is that I have read that you can plug in other Hard Drives and thus expand your HD Size with removable media so who knows i may end up buying a 1 TB drive sometime to add onto it if I need to.

One thing that many see as a good thing is that Microsoft is making a bunch of 360 games compatible with the XBox One; however, the way they are doing it kind of sucks in my opinion. Instead of the game just being able to be played on the XBox One, you have to put your disk in and then it downloads the entire disk onto your hard drive for you to be able to play the game. As if the games for the system didn’t already take up enough memory as it was ya know? In my opinion, I would say if you want to play 360 games just keep the old 360 on hand they really aren’t that bad price wise, especially if you can get a refurbished one from gamestop or bestbuy or someplace like that.

So all in all, from what I have experienced in the past few days the XBox One is a great little system. I don’t have any complaints with it at all yet other than how much space games are taking up on the HD right away. The Graphics for the games I have are so amazing that I love it. I was playing Star Wars Battlefront and you could swear that you could reach through the screen and touch the plants in the game they are that realistic looking!  So yeah this is a great system and I am looking forward to using it even more in the days and weeks to come.