OK, so.

Astro Bot on the PS5 was incredibly pretty, and I’ve been putting in a bunch of hours in Genshin, and I loaded up Stellar Blade because I wanted a HDR showcase and that game has a lot of shiny… objects on screen.

And then I thought, gosh.  Back when the generation was just getting underway, in the heady days of 2020, I was really bullish on the Series X.  By 2024 I was absolutely disenchanted with it, mind you, but I remember being really excited about Microsoft’s Big Black Monolith way back when.  I’m certainly not going to buy another one, but what would happen if I cracked open an Xbox One X and swapped out the horribly slow HDD for a 1 TB SSD that happened to be lying around?

And having done that, I am reminded how much this console felt like The Future when it came out roughly 9 years ago.  I have been playing the original Assassin’s Creed, and the 4K upscale Microsoft managed to apply to this thing makes it look like a whole new game (well, assuming you can ignore some jaggy UI elements)

I’m also finding out that I really don’t notice 30fps games, which was a surprise.  Or, well, maybe I notice them but it doesn’t take me too long to stop noticing.  I thought I would be more sensitive, honestly.

One thing I DID notice turned out to be more than a little sobering.

After downloading Assassin’s Creed, I popped open my games library and went to the “Full Library” tab, which showed me that I owned 270 games.

And, on a lark, I filtered this down to only games that would play on the Series S or X.

It was two games.  TWO.

I am forced to realize that I owned a Series X for four years – FOUR YEARS – and in that entire time I played almost nothing on it that couldn’t have been run on an Xbox One X.

At least it was a pretty monolith?