A reader looks back on the Xbox 360 era and is frustrated at how things have evolved since then, with ROG Xbox Ally and the move towards multiformat releases.
I though the Xbox Games Showcase on Sunday was pretty good. Like Sony ’s State of Play, it was mostly third party games but there was some interesting stuff there and I think overall the vibe was better than from Sony. I liked the look of High On Life 2, There Are No Ghosts At The Grand, and Cronos: The New Dawn the best but there was a lot of potentially cool games – I’d include Keeper, because it looked interestingly weird, but I don’t feel Double Fine are ever very good at gameplay.
The biggest news out of the event was the new portable with the terrible name: Asus ROG Xbox Ally . I bet you can just imagine some parent asking that for that at shop at Christmas , to buy their kid? Not that that would ever happen because the thing’s going to be stupidly expensive.
It seemed like a distraction, a small experiment at best, and I didn’t really pay much attention to it, especially as I already have a Steam Deck. But then today I read that Microsoft has cancelled its plans for their next gen portable and that actually this ridiculously named non-Xbox device may end up being the future of gaming for Microsoft.
I’ve always preferred Xbox as my console as choice, probably because I was always a PC gamer before that. Although now I look back at things I have to admit that I only got the Xbox One out of brand loyalty and I wouldn’t have if I’d been thinking about it more clearly.
By that point I was in too deep and so I bought the Xbox Series X/S out of muscle memory more than anything, wasn’t I proven to be a chump?
What frustrates me most about Xbox at the moment is how indecisive it seems. I almost didn’t watch the Xbox Games Showcase because I knew I’d have to see Phil Spencer, or one of his goons, grinning into the camera, as if nothing is wrong. And, of course, that’s exactly what he did, ‘hinting’ about the return of Halo, as if everyone was going to be pumping the air to hear about that.
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News flash, Phil: no one cares. You’ve run that series into the ground, like all the other Xbox exclusives, to the point where they just feel old fashioned and tired. Old school fans don’t care and newer ones definitely don’t. It may sell okay at first on PlayStation 5, but only out of curiosity and as a kind of celebration that Sony has finally defeated Microsoft.
To all extents and purposes, Xbox is now third party. The only thing that makes them not is that they still make their own console hardware but how long is that going to last? The ROG Ally is made by Asus and if Microsoft don’t make a handheld are they really going to put out a home console instead? That’s going to cost a lot of money in R&D and marketing and everything else, and I don’t know who could argue that it’s got a chance of selling more than the Xbox Series X/S.
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