As a kid, one of the highlights of my school holidays were visits to my cousin’s house which was in another small town a good 50 kilometres away. These trips were always well worth it; not only did I get to visit my relatives (including my dear grandparents), my cousin also had something that was a rarity in the early 1990s Malaysia: a video games console.
Never mind that it was a Famicom clone known as the Micro Genius, it served as an introduction to a whole new world consisting of Mario, Tetris, Excite Bike, Twin Bee and many more.
I didn’t get my own console until I had my first job, and that very first console was a PlayStation 2. It was a modded unit, and we had plenty of pirated games to go with it. When Sony officially launched the PlayStation 3 in Malaysia, my brother and I went to the local Sony Store to purchase one.
The folks at Sony did a bang-up job launching their consoles in Malaysia, and that has always been a major factor why I never did get an Xbox. Furthermore, the original Xbox had very finicky hardware.
Those that have been following my blog know that I’ve had a PS4, which I’ve since sold off after buying a PlayStation 5 last Christmas. Which brings us to October 2021. Thanks to my wife, we’ve finally added an Xbox Series S to the household, and with that we’ve a trifecta of current generation consoles from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
Why an Xbox Series S, and why now? I figure that the PS5 would take up all the grunt work for new, marquee titles at 4K. The Nintendo Switch will obviously take up Nintendo titles that you would obviously won’t get anywhere and else, and also certain games that lend themselves well to mobility (have a gander at Diablo III).
The Xbox Series S does stuff at 1440p and 1080p pretty well, and it serves as a Game Pass machine. Game Pass if you don’t know about it already, is a video games subscription service and subscribers get to access a catalog of games (100+ including some oldies but goldies such as Mercenaries) from a range of publishers for a single monthly subscription price… and this includes brand new games like Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite. Bye-bye to buying certain games at retail pricing.
For everything else, there’s always the 1070 GTX + AMD Ryzen gaming rig to mop things up. I’m looking forward to Age of Empires IV on that.
So give a shout out if you have a trifecta of current-get gaming consoles!
