Just to get this out the way: Fuck this “supply chain issue” and “microchip shortage” bullshit. Fuck Microsoft for not getting their act together with sourcing the raw materials necessary to build enough Xbox consoles to meet demand. Fuck Amazon. Fuck Gamestop. Fuck Best Buy. Fuck Walmart. Fuck Target. Fuck Gamestop in particular for making me buy their lame “PowerUp Rewards Pro” program with the promise of “exclusive access” to an opportunity to give them more money and then the website still doesn’t work after they raised a shit ton of money from that “Gamestonk” circlejerk earlier this year. Fuck Walmart in particular for having the balls to charge an 86% markup (pictured above) on an Xbox. Fuck Target in particular for only offering the console online as some sort of “All-Access” plan that the sign-up didn’t work for and not telling me at any point during my interactions with their staggeringly incompetent customer service I could simply walk into their store and buy the lower-tier “Series S” model at the regular retail price of $299.
Which I did on Monday. It’s not the $499 “Series X” model, purported to be the most powerful video game console of all time, but it’s pretty goddamned good, runs much better than the Xbox One X that I got in November of 2017 – around the same time Trump and his loyal elected cult were working on their big reconciliation bill to hand corporations and the wealthy a huge tax cut.
Back to Xbox though: I wanted to take a screenshot of famous tough guy actor Danny Trejo playing famous tough guy actor Danny Trejo in Ubisoft map game Far Cry 6, but the Xbox console’s firmware is still a little fucked up and the game quit on me when I opened up another one that new special mission disappeared. But whatever, I still found this cool parachute dune buggy (though I think it’s about to be blown out of the sky since I didn’t destroy that region’s anti-aircraft gun yet).
Those bugs aside, the framework is there for a better experience, despite the worst efforts of greedy, incompetent capitalists leveraging specific chokepoints – supply chains, shitty ecommerce websites, and scalping or – to bring this back home – two particularly perfidious and frankly cunty Democratic Senators, to force us to settle for less when more is well within the nation’s means.
It’s some measure of economic justice/awesome next-generation action gaming. It’s not the nothing they want you to have from government. This isn’t to say be satisfied with it, whatever the end product is, always keep agitating for more. But don’t refuse to enjoy this package either, and especially enjoy the red-faced meltdown of those against it. That’s an entitlement in itself.