 The Xbox Series X. That's this behemoth right here. So to even begin to review or, you know, I guess give impressions on a next gen system such as this, it starts and begins by giving you some context for me as a gamer. I am a Nintendo Switch kind of gamer. I'm a Nintendo gamer. I have spent pretty much this entire generation playing almost exclusively Nintendo platforms, be it Wii U or Nintendo Switch. Now I did own an Xbox One X for a brief moment in time last year before I unfortunately hit some financial problems and had to sell it. And no, I didn't buy it for myself. It was a gift from my parents. So I feel really bad that I had to sell it. But reality is that I don't have a lot of experience with the current generation, which I guess this is the current generation now, right? It's not next gen anymore. It's here, right in front of me. That means this is now. PlayStation 4, that's last gen. Xbox Series or Xbox One X, again, confusing name. That's now last gen. This is what's current. I didn't play any of PlayStation 4. So when I look at reviewing a system like this, it's a little interesting because a lot of the things you're gonna see with this are things that I'm not really sure how it compares to the last generation. I've heard things like pretty much every game I run on this, if it's been optimized at all, runs at 4K, runs at 60 FPS because they're all old generation games, but they now look crisper and run smoother than ever. I played around with a ton of games on this system. You know, I think seven or eight different games and I honestly really enjoyed the experience. I think the closest thing to next gen is something Microsoft was pushing themselves in Assassin's Creed Valhalla, but even then, that's a cross-generation game. Yes, it launched the same day as this. Yes, I bought a physical copy so I could test out the disc player and all that, but I honestly, I am very visually impressed by Assassin's Creed Valhalla, but I also know in the back of my mind that's not really next gen. That's not really what next gen is capable of. And even as I watch footage of Demon's Souls, which really impresses me on PlayStation 5, it's a remake. I still don't really feel that that even, though it's exclusive to PlayStation 5, truly represents next gen. So I think we need to start this conversation by what is next gen supposed to mean? Because typically when we've gone generation to generation, it's meant graphic bumps, right? From PlayStation 1 to PlayStation 2 to PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4, the biggest thing was better and better visuals every single time, noticeably better visuals. Same thing with the Xbox 360 to the Xbox One. And obviously Nintendo went down that route for a long time until we with the NES, the SNES, the N64 and the GameCube, four generations in a row, the big iteration, yeah, there were some controller differences was essentially, well, you know, better visuals. And then Nintendo changed course with going with motion controls with the Wii, and then they went back to better visuals with the Wii U. And technically the Switch is even slightly better visuals than the Wii U, but not as good as PlayStation 4 and Xbox. So I'm left here thinking, well, next gen clearly means better visuals. And this thing in theory should have better visuals. It's got, what, 12 teraflops of GPU performance. It has a current gen Ryzen CPU in there with big Navi GPU, which heck, we can't even get our hands on yet. We have, you know, SSD PCIe 4.0 in this bad boy. In fact, it's actually a removable thing in here where you could replace it. That's great. That is very future-proof because SSDs do actually wear out eventually. There is a limited amount of read and writes. And yeah, it's a lot, but still, even with the SSD on my computer, it's starting to show some failure rates and it's been about four and a half years. So SSDs do eventually fail. So it's nice that it's removable on this system. Also, you know, it's one of those things to me that beyond all of that and the 16 gigs of RAM and all of the specs and all that, I don't know that I'm seeing better visuals because I didn't really experience the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One that much. I mean, I played a little Madden. I played a couple of games on PlayStation 4. I've seen plenty of trailers. I've reacted to things, but when I'm playing this, it doesn't feel. The games don't feel like anything other than what I've already been able to do. However, there are some caveats to that. Everything loads faster. Everything is just snappier. You know what this feels like? This feels like I just upgraded my PC and I'm playing the same games. And then you know what? There's actually nothing wrong with that. I'm a huge tech enthusiast and a big PC gamer. I'm all about upgrading that technology to get a better experience. So in that case, I'm actually pretty pleased with the Xbox Series X. The problem was I wasn't already playing these games. So I'm not aware of how poorly they performed in other systems. I haven't even tried to arc survival evolved yet, which was Xbox Series X and S optimized, but I know people have told me that game runs like crap on last generation and I believe them. It runs like crap on the Switch. So I assume it runs like crap on all other platforms as well. So I didn't even get to see a game that I know runs bad improved on here. And obviously third party games that you see that are on Switch versus here, they're clearly better on this platform. Besides the fact I can't take it portably or can you? Little bit on that at some point. I haven't actually tried out XCloud and I haven't tried out remote play. So you could in theory take things portably, at least in your own home. But I find myself just sort of impressed, but impressed in the same way I would be if I had just bought new components for my computer. See the controller here, they added some new grippiness on the back, but honestly this controller, it's an Xbox One controller with a share button. It's got a better D-pad. With the D-pad we've seen before, it's on the Xbox Elite controller. So yeah, it's better. Yeah, you know, the adaptive triggers are nice. I haven't really noticed much. It still uses batteries, so it's not really an improvement in terms of that. Although honestly, having batteries is actually better for longevity. I don't know if you guys have had this happen. I've had this happen with rechargeable controllers in the past where the battery wears out over time. So after a few years, you're not getting to see them on a battery life. Haven't had this happen with Switch yet, but I have seen it happen with DualShock 3 because I did own a PlayStation 3. You know, if I go hook up that DualShock 3 right now, and I fully charge it, I might get 20 minutes. Yeah, not good. I'd rather have removable batteries or optional rechargeable batteries that you could replace. So in that case, this is nice. It would have been cool if they would have just put the rechargeable battery pack, gave it to you for free, included in and just have it still be removable. But you know what, that's just a minor gripe. You can always directly wire in. It does use a USB-C connection here. Interestingly enough, there's no USB-C on the actual system. You know, if I turn this around for you guys, there's just nothing in here. There's no USB-C and there's no USB-C on the front. So it's kind of interesting that the controller charges with USB-C, but they don't actually support USB-C in here. So you're not gonna get USB-C speeds anyways. So why are we using USB-C then? Good question. No, as for everything else, this UI is new to me. When last time I played the Xbox One X, I didn't get to experience this UI. So this UI didn't exist, this released later, and I like it. Everything is easy to navigate. I can quickly find games that are optimized for this platform. You can, you know, quick resume between different games. We'll get into that in a bit and how well that works. Cause I think it's a really neat feature. It's almost like alt-tabbing on a PC, to be completely honest. So that's kind of really, really cool. And I honestly think that the Xbox Series X is everything I want it to be. But what I want it to be is probably different than what many of you are expecting from Next Gen. I feel like people are hoping that Next Gen is gonna be this huge leap forward in a way that is extremely noticeable. And I think what's gonna happen is people aren't going to be as impressed with the visuals as time around. Ray tracing looks great. 4K looks great. 60fps looks great. I haven't seen anything at 120 yet because my TV is only 4K 60. I have tested HDR on my monitor. Cool. It looks good. But is it a noticeably massive improvement when I go back and look at trailers or gameplay of say, you know, Horizon Zero Dawn or you know, some of the best Sony offerings out there? It's crisper all right. It looks better on my TV than it did before. But is it a giant leap forward that most people are going to realize? I don't think so. So I think the initial impressions are a lot of people are going to hop into this Next Gen whether it's the Xbox Series X or the PlayStation 5 and expect something that isn't really there. Expecting a wow moment that makes your jaw drop and be like, man, this is not possible on prior generations. And you'll get that with the load times. You will definitely get that with the load times. Considering I've been using an SSD on my computer for a long time, I'm kind of used to quicker load times. And the Switch actually has pretty decent load times. So on some things, there are actually some things on Switch to take forever, but I honestly, I know it might sound like I'm negative here, but the Xbox Series X is exactly what I wanted it to be. I mean, I played a variety of games, checked out the UI. I'm really good at Madden all of a sudden because I don't have to worry about the game crashing like I did on PC. I don't know why, maybe it doesn't like my GPU. I have a 5700 XT in there. For some reason, it crashes with that. I don't know, but I've had no issues. In fact, one thing I can say about this platform that's great news is that it is extremely well built. I took this thing apart on live stream and put liquid metal thermal paste on. Not something I suggest anyone else does. I just did it to say I did it. And I'm probably gonna re-edit of some video together giving highlights of the liquid metal cooling and all that, but the thing is after seeing the insides of this beast, man, this thing for $500 is a steal. Honestly, if I had to guess, this is closer to $800 at manufacturing. You give that to the consumer with markup. I mean, it's probably $12 to $1400 worth of system here. This is going to outperform most gaming PCs that people have built in say the last five years. Now, it won't outperform the best of the best. You have a 2080 Ti, you have 3,000 series cards. It's not gonna outperform that. You get the 5,000 series Ryzen's or whatever, even the 3,000 series, 3,700X, 3,800. It won't outperform the best of the best. Of course not. But at $500, this is gonna be better than any budget gaming PC you can build. So even though all the games on here, on Game Pass are playable on PC or at least most of them, you can't get this kind of performance at this price on PC. So it's still kind of a great deal. Now, the big thing about this that's great because I didn't really partake in this last year with Xbox One X is Game Pass. So I did buy Assassin's Creed Valhalla and I did buy Madden, but all the rest of the games I played on here are directly off Game Pass and it's cool because you have instant access to a huge library of games and the day that this launched, EA games were added as well. So I actually just started up my first ever play-through of Jedi Fallen Order and I'm really excited about the fact that I just get to enjoy that without spending any extra money. In fact, the cool thing about this is if you buy this platform for $500 plus tax and shipping or whatever it costs for you guys, and then you buy Game Pass Ultimate for six months or a year, 100 bucks or whatever you wanna spend and you don't have to spend anything. Again, you instantly get access to a ton of games and all the future Xbox exclusive, Xbox family exclusive games like Halo Infinite or Medium or Fable or probably Bethesda games like I don't know, Starfield or Elder Scrolls 6, you're gonna get those games for no additional cost if you are a Game Pass subscriber. And heck, I'm Game Pass Ultimate which is basically just combining live and Game Pass together into one. I don't even know, does it include XCloud? I don't know, XCloud's still in beta on Android. So yeah, everything about this system just works. It just works. I think it's the best way I could describe the Xbox Series X. This is a next-gen console that just does what it should do. It's no thrills, no thrills. It just works and it's gonna play games probably better than you've ever seen them played before. Now, the knock is always where's the exclusives and yeah, we're gonna have to wait for them and hope that Microsoft delivers. They bought a bunch of studios, so there is that. Do I think you should buy one of these right now? I think that's gonna depend on who you are. If you're someone who's like me, who's a tech enthusiast, you want one just because you're curious. If you're someone who just wants to play every game that I've already played, but play them at better frame rates and higher resolution, this is the system for you. It's probably gonna play most third-party games better because it's a more powerful system, maybe. Devil May Cry 5, I don't know this first-hand, but according to Digital Foundry, in performance mode has 60 extra FPS on the PlayStation 5. But then in normal performance mode, like not performance mode, but I guess graphics mode where you get higher resolutions and all that, you get higher frame rates by 10 to 15% on this platform. Sure, because that's just the way this generation's gonna work, right? Some things will be better on here with certain games and a different mode might be better on PlayStation 5. It is what it is. I have to say that if you get nothing else out of this review or impression or anything, I want it to be that whether or not this is worth it for you is up to you. I do not regret this purchase. I will be playing tons of games, but I didn't play a ton of games this last generation on anything with Switch and Wii U, so I'm a different kind of consumer. I'm different than most of you. Most of you have likely played Xbox One games or played PlayStation 4 games. I didn't. So even when I review the PlayStation 5 someday, because I unfortunately couldn't get a pre-order in, even when I review it someday, a lot of my reaction is likely to be the exact same as I'm having right now for the Series X, and that is this is all really, really cool, but am I supposed to be impressed? I don't know what I was missing in the first place. So I'll just say, hey, compared to a Nintendo Switch, gaming on this is better. It's just better. I could imagine Breath of the Wild on this bad boy a 4K, 60 FPS. Just, mm, gaming's better. It's legitimately better on the system than I've ever experienced on a home console. Heck, it's better than most games I've experienced on PC. So there you have it, the Xbox Series X. Love this thing. Gonna be playing a lot of it. Gonna be playing a lot of it on Twitch at twitch.tv slash Nintendo Prime TV, but I'm not gonna stop playing Switch. We got Age of Calamity coming out. So I think what's happened now is that every third-party game, period, I'm just gonna play on this. And then all the exclusives. And then my Switch will just be for Nintendo games. Maybe, unless I really wanna take the game with me on the go. Cause that's still a thing. I don't know. You guys let me know what you guys think down in the comments below. This is kinda my little review of the Xbox Series X. I think it's a wonderful system. I can't really find any flaws with it other than, oh man, there's no big exclusive launch game. But even if there was, am I supposed to be impressed? Honestly, from a visual perspective, it looks similar to last gen, but crisper and smoother. Like, even Microsoft touted the less latency on the controller thing, I don't know. The latency feels the same to me as it did on the Xbox One X. Maybe I just can't notice those things. That might be something that more astute gamers might notice compared to me. So I guess they made a big deal of the new Bluetooth tech, but I don't know. I don't actually have any opinions on that. So, all right, folks. I am Nathan Robojant from Nintendo Prime. This is my official Xbox Series X review. You guys have a lovely day.