I feel your pain, bro. Even on my WinDOZE partition, virtually every single time Billzebub updates WinDOZE, or there is a HALO MCC update, I lose the ability to sign into Xbox Live. This is due to some sort of longstanding bug within HMCC, which they have of course never bothered to fix. So I have to go in and manually back up my old config folders, start up the game again, let it log into XBL, regenerate the relevant system folders, delete out the new versions, restore the old versions to get my hotkey configurations back, and THEN slaughter my way through the Covies and Prometheans.

That is when I see the Red Mist come down, and I find myself uttering the usual, “I’m too old for this shit!” line.

The XBOX might just be a PC in a fancy case, but I can turn it on and be playing a game in around 20 seconds. I also don’t have to screw around with any settings other than storage management every now and then since most games run on the internal SSD and it’s only 1 TB. Finally, building a PC with its same 4K60FPS output would easily cost me 3 grand, with at least a third of that going to the GPU.

I know PC gamers will say “console peasants don’t have mods,” but that’s not true either. Most consoles are trivially easy to jailbreak these days, and certain game communities have made tons of mods available. Check out Project M, CTGP-R, or Newer Super Mario Bros. on the Wii, for example. I was just last night playing a heavily modified version of Smash Bros. Ultimate that had everything from new characters to gameplay and physics changes to make it more like Melee.

I love PC gaming, but at this “plenty of money and energy but no time” point in my life, it’s just not for me!