Xbox Adventure

 With gaming going to be one of my main hobbies moving forward, I decided that I wanted to play some older games from the Xbox360 era, namely the Halo series. Instead of buying a 360, I went for the Xbox One which I owned a few years ago, before I decided to sell it as it never saw any use. The Xbox One can play a lot of the original 360 games which made it an easy choice as most 360 games are cheap too. A new thing I'm doing is trying to only to use money I get from my hobbies to fund my hobbies. With some of the money I got yesterday from selling cards, I decided to put some of it towards an Xbox One.

I looked on eBay first, found a few, but I didn't want to take a chance of the package getting lost, damaged, or the console not working once I got it. I instead found one on Game Stop's website for $109 and ordered it for pick up last night. I got a notification early this afternoon that it was ready and went to go pick it up at a mall that wasn't too far from my house. The pick up process was easy and I picked up a game for it, The Master Chief collection, which would have all the games I wanted to play on it. This is where the first problem occurred. They didn't have the disk. The clerk said that they should have two copies off it, but it wasn't there. I told her it was no big deal and left with the large sealed box under my arm and awkwardly carried it through the mall and back to my car. I didn't open the box when I got to the car, as the mall has slowly been going downhill the last few years, and decided I'd open it when I got home. Before going home though, I decided to stop at another Game Stop to see if they had the game I wanted.

Thirty minutes later I arrived at the Game Stop. It was just me in the store so I was able to look through their Xbox One games easily. Second problem. They didn't have the game either. I was about to give up when I saw Halo 3 ODST and Halo 4 for the 360. Both of which would work on the Xbox One and were two of the games that were part of the Master Chief Collection. ODST was $6.00, and Halo 4 was $9. I grabbed both and then saw Portal 2 for the 360. It was $8.99. I decided to pass on it for the time being. At the counter the clerk rang up my two games and let me know that I had a $5 off coupon. That would make ODST $1. I went back to the rack and grabbed Portal 2. My total for three games was $19.25. An absolute steal in my mind. At this point, I decided to open the box to see if everything was there. The console was wrapped so I couldn't see it, but there was a controller (a red and white one) it was advertised as black, but it didn't bother me too much. All the cables looked to be there as well, so I was a little more relieved and decided to head home.

After I got home, I hooked up the console to my tv, turned it on, and to my relief it turned on just fine. It would have sucked to have it be a brick after driving thirty minutes to get it and being dumb enough not to ask any questions. After the start up screen it began searching for an internet connection. Problem three. It couldn't find one. I manually typed in the ID of my router, and received a message stating that the console didn't support the router type I had, which made no sense, as my old console worked just fine with the same router. After a factory reset, booting up in trouble shooting mode, and even going into my router to check the settings, nothing could get it to connect. At this point, I about gave up and figured it would be an expensive lesson that I would learn today. My last option was to try to hard wire it to my router. I didn't have an Ethernet cable so I once again had to drive a bit to get one. The place I went to had one option for it, a cat6 five foot cable. I googled if it would work, it said it would, so I bought it for $6.99.

I got home, hooked it up, restarted the Xbox and... it didn't work. This cheap Xbox was starting to not be so cheap. I guessed that the wifi card must have went bad and it crossed my mind that it could have been the reason its former owner sold it. I was getting ready to put it back into its box and forget about it for the night when the network screen changed to "connected." The Xbox was now wired to the internet. It went through its updates with no problem. I went to sync the controller and problem number four... of course it didn't sync. I updated the firmware on it, nothing. I hard reset the Xbox and the controller, nothing. This was a nightmare. Luckily, the type C USB cable still worked for it, and I had a pretty long cable for it. I was able to play ODST for a bit, so all in all, it worked out. I learned my lesson about used consoles though. Try to avoid them. Now I need to see if I can find a cheap wired controller at HPB or Goodwill. So at least I'll have something to do while I'm off next week.