A moment of silence, if you please. (Press X to remain silent.) My Xbox One is now installed in my living room’s entertainment cabinet, but to make room for it, my beloved Xbox 360 had to die.
I’m kinda not kidding; it was already making horrible, wheezing, grinding sounds when I was playing South Park: The Stick of Truth earlier this year, and I hadn’t turned it on in months. Before I unplugged it last night, I switched it on to make sure there were no discs in the tray, and the sounds it made… let me put it this way: if my dog was making those sounds, I’d have taken it to the vet and I’d probably have said my goodbyes in the car on the way there.
I’m reluctant to throw it away, being that, among other things, it’s still the only way I can currently play Red Dead Redemption (which is a possibility that I never entirely rule out). And getting rid of it means that I also have to get rid of the few HD-DVDs I haven’t bothered to replace (of which there are actually quite a few, as it turns out). But our apartment has grown smaller as our toddler has gotten bigger, and at some point it’s gonna have to go.
As for the Xbox One itself? Can’t quite talk about it just yet, if for no other reason than IT DOES NOT FEATURE BACKGROUND DOWNLOADING, which is mind-boggling. You’d think it would, right? I mean, the 360 had it, and the PS4 has it, and it’s just common sense, right? And one of the two power options – “Instant On” – indicates that the Xbox One is more or less in the PS4’s rest mode, and can continue downloading stuff in that state? Nope. Instant On only means it can accept updates, but it does not actually continue downloading. And I can verify this first hand, in that I was up at 4:00 – again – and wanted to see if I’d made any progress in downloading Sunset Overdrive, and nothing had changed at all since 10:00, when I’d turned it off. I left it on before I left for work, and so hopefully when I come home tonight both Sunset and Forza Horizon 2 will have finished downloading, and then I can actually talk about the damned thing.
If I’m wrong about the background downloading, by the way, PLEASE let me know. As slick as the Xbox One appears to be at first glance – and it certainly puts the PS4’s dashboard to shame – I was actually kind of surprised at how non-intuitive some of the Xbox One’s dashboard features are (especially as I don’t have the new Kinect, which means I couldn’t just say “Xbox Settings” and find what I was looking for).
