My love affair with my xBox One is waning..

Look, it's not you, it's m-

Oh who are we kidding here? It's you. Specifically the time you take just to install games when I'm at a loose end one night and itching to try something from my collection.

Borderlands 3 above is a fantastic example. I've had it in the pile of games to get to since last Christmas and it's a good one and a half months later now and I figured it was more than high time to give it a plat last night.

So I put it in to install and knowing full well that it doesn't install anything quickly I also loaded up some Netflix to get into while I waited.

And waited.

And waited some more..

I'd just got through the very first episode of Cowboy BeBop on Netflix (not bad, might watch another) when it had hit 18% installation. And then told me I was looking at roughly 8 and half, possibly 9 hours to get through all of it. 

A shame they killed it after one season but still, my game may have finished installing by then.

9 hours? I could fly all the way to the Gold Coast, have a lazy beer in the airport lounge there, jump on a plane to come back home and it still wouldn't be finished. The last time anything took that long was...

Wait, nope. I can't think of any game in my gaming history that's needed nine hours to actually take up a section of my hard drive. There was a Silk Road MMORPG from years ago I remember that took that time to download but far less to actually get up and running. But nine hours is horrendous when half the game needed is right there on the DVD and the other half on the net. The same home net setup that could probably have it completely downloaded through Steam in less than half the time - so it's not the internet then.

I had to leave the TV off but the Xbox One on overnight just so I didn't have to repeat the process when I finally get to play Borderlands 3 tonight. God forbid I find myself with a copy of Cyberpunk for you anytime soon, I doubt a week worth of installing is going to get that one off the ground.

BUT IT'S NOT JUST BORDERLANDS 3 ON XBOX ONE EITHER..

I attempted to install Dead Rising 4 on there a couple of weeks ago and it told me that it needed a fair chunk of space for it. So I uninstalled a few old games the family wasn't playing anymore and instructed it to go right ahead. 

Only for it seconds later to tell me it needed an update. Actually quite a few updates rolled into one at best guess because the update was bigger than the game itself! Which I didn't have the choice of and I certainly didn't have the space for.  So it's back on the pile for when I buy an external hard drive to keep up with the ballooning xBox One games I have in my collection.

IS THIS A RECENT THING?

Have I been looking at the past of my Xbox One owning history with rose tinted mirrorshades? Because I don't remember having the same waiting frustrations like I am now with anything previously. And that includes a lot of the Forza Horizon series that are very big games. Or maybe it's the age of Covid that's making me look at it all differently - sure I've got extra time at home because of it but I sure as hell don't want to waste it waiting around for this machine to get its act together.

Especially when its predecessor the Xbox 360 loaded things up ready to play as soon as you popped in the disc. Can't we go to those heady days already??

THERE IS NO VANILLA HERE

I really find myself leaning more towards my PC when it comes to things like this - updating and patching things when I want to, not when something demands it and renders a game completely unplayable until I do. Which leads me to a feature on the Xbox One that I used to love...and now can't use anymore: The ready to play feature.

Same games had an point during the install where you could actually start up the game and get into something while you waited for the rest of the load to finally arrive. It could be the first level, a character creation screen, a major intro cut scene but it was something.

When I saw the ready to play option a third of the way through the install of Dead Rising 4 I thought 'Great, I might be wack a zombie or two early!'. But no. As soon as I hit the launch button, it reminded me it needed an update. 
Which it wouldn't get until it installed the full game anyway which effectively killed the ready to play point in the first place.

YOU'RE LOSING ME HERE...

Yes I bought the Minecraft version for the kids. They love it, I think it looks awful.

Look I tried to get past your limited backwards compatibility options and the fact that you never got around to making some of my still cherished Xbox 360 games come to life again. I've wrestled with your lack of space. I've even shelled out for extra controllers for other family when they've popped around to play Brawlhalla and Minecraft and the like. But you're taking your sweet time, bloating yourself silly and pushing me to spend more time on my PC (like complaining about you now Xbox One.)
Maybe it's time to move on?

(Does anyone know if the Xbox Series X suffers from the same irritations here?) Let me know in the comments below!