I didn’t expect to be joining the ranks of next-generation console owners quite so soon after launch, because – what with the worldwide semiconductor shortage, Corona-chan keeping everyone at home, and stimulus money flying around – it seems like every console that rolls off the assembly line rolls right into the minivan of a waiting scalper for immediate listing on eBay or Craigslist.

On the other hand, I was out of soda, and that’s why I was in our local Fred Meyer this morning shortly before 8 AM, walking past the Electronics department at the right time to hear the following exchange:

“Hey, you guys have any PS5s?”

“No, but we do have the Xbox One X”

“Don’t need those, thanks”

…and I stopped, because Microsoft stopped shipping the Xbox One X months ago, and I watched one half of that conversation disappear towards the exit, and then I went in to talk to the clerk.

“Say, did you mean you have the Series X?”

“Whatever it’s called, the new one, we just got some.”

And that’s why I have this black obelisk-looking thing sitting on my desk, copying games to the internal SSD as I speak.

Last time we had new consoles launch, back in 2013, I pre-ordered a PS4 and had it on launch day and… well, I had Resogun to play, and Call of Duty: Ghosts, and my wife bought me the new Assassin’s Creed and the new Need for Speed for Christmas… and that was really all I had to play for most of the next year.  It was not a spectacular launch year.

In late 2014, I got a new Oneechanbara, which was pretty good, and then the floodgates really started to open in late 2015.

This time around, I plugged the console in, went through a frankly pretty cool setup routine consisting of “sign into the Xbox app on your phone.  Now have the phone near the Xbox.  Now go away, human, the electronics are having a conversation”, and when it was done it told me that I already had five games in my library that had Series X versions.

Plus Game Pass, of course.  It’s kind of a shame that I played through The Medium on my modestly-specced Windows laptop instead of waiting a couple of weeks, because I’m given to understand that it is quite the looker.

Anyway.  The first thing I plan to do, once everything has finished copying and updating and so on, is to load up the Series X version of the Master Chief Collection, and hopefully it will import my save, and then I am going to jump directly to The Silent Cartographer and shoot some random Covenant.  I can’t think of any better way to christen a new console.