For Christmas this year I decided to pick up an XBOX ONE for my son.  He’s a pretty big Forza fan, in particular Forza Horizon and I had read on GAF that Forza Horizon 2 is a pretty decent game and since my son asked ‘santa’ for FH2 I decided to pick up a XBONE.  It helped that I had almost half of the cost in gift cards from some rewards at work.

Overall I am happy with the system, it does take some time to get used to as nearly all functionality that existed on the 360 is now run as an ‘app’.  Want to see your friend’s list, run the friends app, want to see achievements, run the achievements app.  I don’t find the UI that intuitive but that is likely a side effect of the XBONE UI (in it’s current form) being designed with the Kinect sensor (and voice control) being the primary way to access functionality.  Luckily it looks like Microsoft has designed the OS to be easy to patch and they’ve been doing updates monthly to improve the OS and add features.  This is easily my favorite thing about the XBONE, that Microsoft is being proactive in adding fixes and functionality in a timely manner.

It’s not all rose colored glasses though, there are some issues.

The OS is buggy – the XBONE has something called suspend/resume.  It’s an amazing feature that basically allows you to jump back into your game/app instantly.  Even if you’ve turned the console off.  Say you’re playing a game and take a break.  You don’t actually need to save the game, just shut down the console and come back to it when you’re ready.  When you restart the game it recalls exactly where you left off, even if the game doesn’t have a ‘save’ feature for that part in the game.  It’s really slick and makes the console feel like a console of the past, with instant loads (cartridges for example).  Sadly this suspend/resume feature only works for one game at a time *and* can cause the OS to become bogged down and flakey.  The only way to fix the issue is to hard-boot the machine.  Not a big deal but annoying once you get used to how awesome the suspend and resume feature is.

Overall I like the machine and it complements the PS4 well.  The console feels connected, something the PS4 does not, though the PS3 didn’t either.  Personally playing on the PS3 and PS4 never feels like you’re part of a larger community whereas the community aspects of the XBOX are front and center, so even if you don’t play a lot of online multiplayer games you do still feel like you’re part of a larger community.  The XBONE is, on paper, the weaker (technically) machine though honestly I haven’t noticed anything that made me say “wow this would be a lot better on the PS4”.  When playing a game though I’ll always consider the PS4 version first simply because the game should perform better on the PS4.

Game pricing has also been more attractive on Microsoft’s console.  Microsoft threw in Assassin’s Creed 4 : Black Flag for free, which I spent 40 hours enjoying.  Microsoft regularly has sales on games.  (I just bought UFC and Peggle 2 for $15 for a digital download) which, at that price, makes buying games digitally a no-brainer).

It will be interesting to see how things progress.