I despise Microsoft. I think Bill Gates is creepy and I decided to boycott all Microsoft products for life back in 2008. I remember what a big deal it was erasing Windows and running only Linux. I asked my wife if she understood what it meant, but her only reply was that if she could keep watching YouTube, then it doesn’t matter.
The original Xbox came out before I felt that way and I still think it was one of the greatest gaming machines ever.
Hard Drive
Having a hard drive was something only for computers until the Xbox. Microsoft never really used it for anything other than letting you copy your CDs to it, but it made all the difference once you hacked it.
The Best Emulator
I remember showing my friends how the modded Xbox could play their favorite Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis games. When asked which games it had, the answer was very Sarah Palin, all of them.
Orginal Nintendo and Sega games were punny as well as any Atari games. Every single Super Nintendo game including the Japanese games added up to a few gigabytes. It wasn’t until you got to the N64 where you needed to delete any games to save space.
Speaking of the Nintendo 64, I have not seen a better emulator than the Xbox. It could play any N64 game smoothly, something a PC still can’t do today. It was really fun to still play Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and Golden Eye (The no Oddjob rule still was in effect.)
Movies and TV
A modded Xbox was way ahead of its time. The experience you had using XBMC (Xbox Media Center now called Kodi) was better than some paid services today. You could steam videos and podcasts as well as play any files downloaded from torrents. HD files at 720 hadn’t really come along yet, so you could store hundreds of TV shows and movies on the hard drive, making it a must whenever you visited a place without internet.
Xbox Games
You could download and burn games to a blank DVD, but it had to be a certain type and burned a certain way, so it was way easier just to download the ISO file then copy it to the hard drive.
What about you?
Do you agree with me that the orginal Xbox was the last great thing Microsoft did? Has anyone else removed Microsoft from their lives completely and forever? I think Sony is going to crush Microsoft in the next generation. I haven’t seen one person excited about the new Xbox, but everyone is talking about the new PlayStation.
