I got a Xbox One at launch without a pre-order, instead I was lucky enough to get a display box unit and made an elderly Future Shop employee angry cause I wasn't going for the "bundle" they'd set up. They only had 2.
Whilst setting it up I ran into issues, namely the console doesn't support anything other than 16:9 aspect ratio. I use my computer monitor to play all my games, since I don't own a tv, and it's aspect ratio was 16:10 which while I love for it's greater desktop real estate... most games are being made for the 16:9 aspect ratio since that's been adopted for 'everything' under the sun.... even phones oddly enough (dumbly enough I'd say).
Anyhoo another issue while fiddling with video settings was that I think I borked the system while changing things like color depth and the like, so it would only output black... and the buttons you can press to supposedly reset it's display settings entirely weren't working and as you can imagine it's hard to ask the internet if a troubleshooting method is working when they just come back at you with garbage like "did you try the cables". Cables worked fine blah blah, think it was ultimately a bug that did that. The console didn't seem to recognize holding the power and eject buttons, using my tech intuition usually no sound should play or something else should play but instead most the time the sound for eject AND power would play at once... making me think it just wasn't understanding it was supposed to be doing a special command... because of this it would sometimes just turn it on and sometimes trigger the eject sound.. again... communication issues I gather.
So I got to see the new and improved Xbox support website which actually is kinda pretty nowadays, very very easy to click your way through to what you will need replaced and all that, and it's almost too easy to get the process for a new part (console, controller, headset whatever) sent to you for free, with a shipping label to print out and everything. While that was happening I bought a fairly cheap new monitor that was in fact the more popular 16:9 aspect ratio, and slightly larger than my past monitor, all for $80 :)
Having the new system, and the new monitor has renewed some gaming in me and I even have been playing the ps3 I bought for Last of Us again, since it also didn't support 16:10 at the time... Seems like the Xbox 360 is the only existing console to support the aspect ratio at all, and if I remember correctly it did so only after a patch prolly a year into it's life, along with a vga cable that they released. How hard is it to just support these things though? Oversight based on the effort put into a console launch? If so why does the ps3 still not support it even almost a decade since it's release? WHATever.
So I'm playing Dead Rising 3, Forza Motorsport 5, and some recently bought PS3 games like Journey and Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch! Might check out some of the free PS Plus games I have also too, namely I wanna check out Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, I think it's crazy that game was/is free on PS Plus...
I highly recommend anyone that owns an Xbox One to get on it if there's anything faulty about it, even if you scuffed it up or something. Microsoft is really good about making repair stuff easy, the headset that comes with the console is cheap as fuck and I think because of that mine wasn't outputting sound properly, it would output some static and sound sometimes so I just assume the very flimsy wiring in there was slightly wonky. Getting that stuff replaced for free is great, and the normal warranty everyone who owns one has is good for mid-Feb 2014 I think, well worth it to keep that in mind. I have to assume replacing a controller is free too considering the console itself is not only free but they have those 2 options... send it to them and they fiddle with it until they fix it, and or send a new one to you so you will for sure get a working one from them, and option 2 is they just straight up send a new one instantly, and you send your old one to them supposedly as soon as you can. Kinda a weird trust thing with that one.
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