Microsoft Xbox

You can’t have Halo without the Xbox. Well, now you can but when Halo first arrived you had to have one of these bad boys to play it. Microsoft’s first console always gave me SEGA Genesis vibes. It was the “cool” console. This is a far cry from my opinions of its successors which range from “what the fuck is this shit” to “I forget you exist”. The similarities to the Genesis weren't just in vibe though. People really loved playing sports games on Xbox. Genesis and Xbox sports games are the bane of every video game collector's existence. Unlike the Genesis, if there was a game on Gamecube, PS2, and Xbox, the Xbox version probably ran the best. However, like the Genesis, it probably didn’t control as well. It makes sense. Microsoft was clearly trying to do to Sony what Sega did to Nintendo in the 90's. Not surprisingly, the trajectory for both was similar. There was a brief moment where Microsoft triumphed over Sony during the PS3 era before squandering that good will by releasing stupid hardware add-ons. It's remarkable, really.

The Xbox controller is strange. It's essentially a prototype of modern controllers. I’ve always used the “Controller S”. Initially, the Xbox was released with this absurdly large controller that nobody could hold. I have very little experience with it so you won't be hearing from me about it. The Controller S is a reasonably sized controller by comparison with slight differences in button placement. The achilles heel here are the Black and White buttons. They’re in a weird spot and would have served better as bumpers. Since most developers focused on PS2, multi-platform games would often have whatever was mapped to L1 and R1 to Black and White on Xbox. This blew chunks and made games like Grand Theft Auto control like shit. Third party controllers would rectify the problem but would often fall apart in your hand after a few days of use. That being said, the controller was excellent for first person shooter. Playing an FPS with a Playstation 2 controller feels wrong. Dual Stick games on GameCube also feel strange due to the C-Sticks strange design. Really, the Xbox was the first console where FPS games felt comfortable to play. N64's controller felt pretty good with them, but only because we didn't know anything else. Once you've used an Xbox controller to play a first person shooter, it's kind of hard to go back to the other contemporary stuff.

Xbox felt far more advanced than the other consoles of it's time. The built in 8GB Hard Drive gave the impression it had unlimited storage capacity for saves. You could rip your music CDs to it too; which I did often. You could even listen to your own music in games that supported it. While the PS2 did have DVD playback, nobody I knew used it. The Xbox was everyone’s DVD player, stereo, and video game console. I didn’t get my own Xbox until my 18th birthday. It was 2008, and very obsolete by that point. I didn’t care about Xbox 360, PS3, or anything else. I was still playing GameCube regularly if I was playing video games at all. Halo came with it, and I was sort of excited. Mostly, I just wanted to rip CDs to it. Halo had already thoroughly disappointed me by then. Still, I felt like it was worth diving into. I wanted to engage this game on it's own terms.