When you talk about gaming consoles, others might actually think you are living in archaic times – after all, who plays games on consoles anymore? Wouldn’t your Apple iPhone suffice to play games on your smartphone? Doesn’t the Apple App Store or Google Play Store have enough variety of games to occupy you for your entire lifetime? The answer might be yes, but portable lifestyle devices such as our smartphones cannot replicate the gaming experience on a console. And the best yet is the Xbox One X, Microsoft’s latest foray into the hotly contested console gaming sphere.
To kickstart professing about my experience with Microsoft’s latest console is impossible without first mentioning about the controller. It is something that we have all grown up with, but the controller was ultimately overshadowed by the likes of touch controls on a phone’s uninspiring glass screen (that cracks on the first kiss with the ground). The Xbox One X’s standard controller might be bare-bones to the eyes of many, but its logically-spaced out buttons and optimal heft helps you actually feel that you are playing a game. Buttons are tactile and not too mushy, in comparison with other console systems.
For those seeking to one-up their gaming ante, Microsoft’s Xbox One Elite Wireless Controller is a must-have. Apart from the usual button layout, it has 4 custom functions at the back of the controller, with metal tabs at the gamer’s disposal to lay their enemies to waste. The convenience of the additional buttons at the back of the Elite Wireless Controller during a PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) game was an essential ingredient to my Chicken Dinner.
Along with a classy, no-messing-around colour scheme of black and graphite, the controller’s looks itself could kill. Pros have to look the part too, don’t they?
Both controllers make for a pleasant gaming experience with responsive feedback motors and button layout.
Now for the spotlight on the Xbox One X console itself. It’s capable of outputting 4K, HDR content at 60 frames per second (fps) with 6 teraflops of raw GPU processing power. I have never seen games look so great on screen before the Xbox One X. In Forza Motorsport 7, snowfall on the racetrack looks real enough for me to see it fall and melt into a puddle. Such realism is indeed the prowess of the guts in the console itself. Heck, even vehicular damage in the game is all very detailed, right down to the scuffing of the car’s paintwork! I didn’t even want to skip past the cutscenes, as just admiring the realism is something fantastic for me.
One gripe though, is that the hard disk storage space of the Xbox One X is really puny compared to the space demanded by the games to render graphics and store data.
The Xbox One X’s dash interface is also simple and easy to use, and focuses very much on the achievements that the player has amassed in his game career. Apart from trophies to collect, how Xbox One and Microsoft create a hardcore Xbox Live fanbase is formidable with its ego-centric dashboard menu.
Microsoft’s Xbox One bloodline has come to its best yet with the Xbox One
Photos courtesy of Brandon Neo of the DANAMIC team.
