(UPDATE#2) Reason 206 on why I stopped buying game consoles

[boredalways]

Original post here: https://opposite-lock.com/topic/19855/update-reason-206-on-why-i-stopped-buying-game-consoles/1

UPDATE#2: Had to wait until I got interested again this past week, then ordered a can of CRC Electronic Cleaner that came this morning. I gave all the suggestions a go, including connecting the drive to my PC to see if there was anything visible. No luck whatsoever. The HDD for the X360 is fully borked. Was able to format it again but of course, lost everything.
Or so I thought.
I forgot the X360 has a small onboard memory chip and it had some of the saved files on my old games. I reinstalled 8 GB of GTA 5 and was able to start right where I left off -- 12/28/2013!!!

As for the OG Xbox, it required a $40 investment in a used DVD drive. I fixed that last weekend.

[Manwich]

@boredalways

I’ve always been of the opinion that game consoles look good on the surface initially, but in the long run, you’re better off with a desktop PC for gaming

[Dusty Ventures]

@manwich Agreed. In my case though I just don't game often enough for a gaming computer to make sense (maybe 10 hours a month? Double that if something particularly grabs me), but I can justify a ~$300 console.

[Mr.Ontop]

@manwich I dunno, my son's ps4 is still going strong after several years of almost constant use.

[Jb boin]

[Nauraushaun]

tried a playstation? the 360 was known for being prone to breakage. i own both a PS4 and an Xbox One, and one of them works a lot better than the other...
and it's not (ever) the Xbox.

[facw]

@nauraushaun The 360 definitely had issues (almost all around the Red Ring of Death and scratching discs if you moved the console while it was on, I don't recall hard drive complaints about the hard drive, aside from it being overpriced). Of course if you go back a generation, the PS2 also had very high failure rates. Think it's better to look at the 360 as a unit that had a very bad design flaw rather than as an example of a systemic problem on the xbox line.

[BritsnSwedes was MINIGTI]

@facw my PS3 died YLOD, along with the PS1 before it. Still have the colecovision my sister and I got for Christmas 1984 and it still works tho!

[Nauraushaun]

@facw i think the more i learn about xboxes the more i learn that it's systemic, and probably systemic to microsoft as a whole. other cost cutting like making you buy an extremely expensive proprietary adapter rather than giving you a 3.5mm port in the xbox one controller, making you use a proprietary power cable, and how original 360s had tiny little 500mb hard drives, making the console virtually useless.
it's a whole lot of little things that make you feel like you're getting ripped off, and if that turns you off consoles it's because you haven't tried the competition.

fwiw i don't know anything of PS2 failures, and I still have both of mine from that era, still working. (my family aren't rich, my parents were separated with split custody so we ended up having both :P)

[facw]

@Nauraushaun The condition of the Launch 360 was better and worse than you represent it. It launched with two models, the $300 Core and the $400 Pro. The Core was garbage that didn't come with any storage, lacked a component output cable, and came with a wired controller. The Pro came with a 20GB hard drive and a better set of cables. The Core was eventually replaced with the Arcade which shipped with a 256MB card and 256MB of internal storage (later upgraded to 512MB). MS never should have even offered a system as crippled as the Core, but I guess someone really wanted to hit that $300 price point. Proprietary power cable seems like a weird complaint? Lots of devices have proprietary power bricks, and the 360 does use a standard PC power cable to connect from the wall to the brick. The xbox one controller did get modified to include a 3.5mm jack, mine has one (I don't have an xbox one, I just use it with the computer).

And yeah, failures were definitely an issue with the PS2. I don't think they were anywhere near as bad as the red ring, but way higher than is normally tolerated for consumer electronics. My friends with PS2s all had at least two replacements, but I think that level of failure is unusual (small sample size and all that).

[Nauraushaun]

@facw oof. yes my facts are a bit off. i knew they crippled early consoles to save costs, i didn't know it was quite that bad. at what point in the generation did games start requiring installs, rendering those consoles literally useless?
also, did any of those consoles survive to see that day?

but that's what you learn when you're used to playstations. every single (non-handheld) playstation has a generic power cable, and for a long time generic USB controller cables too. xbox are reluctant to give you that kind of flexibility, and it's not right. it doesn't seem that bad, until you own the competitor and realise the way it should've been done.

to be fair, my PS3 eventually crapped itself, but it was very old and i give it a pass. my PS4 died within the first year and was replaced under warranty.

[facw]

@nauraushaun I don't think anything on the 360 (aside from backwards compatibility titles, which needed a tiny bit of disk) required installation. At launch you couldn't even install games at all. Once you could, it was easy to fill up that 20GB launch disk (I upgraded mine to a 120GB and later to a 320GB, both using normal PC drives and some hackery, since MS didn't officially support that).

Power situation is really the same as the Playstation, Sony's machines just have the power supply internal rather than external. But they both use standard cables to the power supply. But yeah, using USB to charge the controllers via USB rather than a proprietary cable was nice. MS was slow to adopt Bluetooth support as well, preferring proprietary wireless standards.