Developments

During my Sunday day of extreme laziness, I somehow managed to talk myself into buying an XBox One..

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It was something I'd been thinking about for a few months.
An XBone or a PS4?
Which to choose?

A few days ago I stumbled on an XBone Bundle (XBone S, 500Gb with Fifa 17) for only ?224
Cheap, I thought.
But still.. Hmmm..
Sunday morning came, and @Geekanoids tweeted a promo code to get ?25 off the price of an XBone.
Which meant I could get one for less than ?200. (?199 to be exact)
Oooooh..

So I ordered one, and Amazon said it'll be here on Tuesday.

Monday morning came and went, and I got a fair amount of coding done.
And then the doorbell rang.
I was somewhat surprised to find a delivery man, with an XBone.

.. And that's the exact moment when my day's coding stopped!

If I'm honest, I probably should've been attempting to code stuff whilst waiting for the updates and installs and other gubbins to happen, but instead I sat and scrolled through various menus and settings and other bits and bobs.

The XBone is a nice enough system, but for a few issues.

1. Dear god, that menu's a sprawling mess!
I thought that Windows 8.1 on my phone, with it's "Everything all in one giant menu" was bad, but the way it's laid out on the XBone, with various bits and pieces all over the place, and having to navigate a curiously laid out screen of differently sized "tiles", using only a dpad. .. Yeah, not the greatest frontend UI, there, guys..

2. Update, Update, Update!!
One for the console, an XBox One S, which came out just about a week ago.
One for the controller, seriously the controller, which is apparently also a new version of the controller which was released with the S, just about a week ago. It still needed an update, for some reason.
And then I slipped GTAV into the drive and had to wait about half an hour for that to install, and then of course update, too.
I since installed Rare Replay, too, and I'm pretty sure that took even longer, although it installed in chunks so there was no specific percentage for it's installation.
Oh, and I also bought PacMan Championships 2 from the Xbox Game Store, which cost ?9.99, and was alarmingly over TWO GIGABYTES... For PacMan!!? *shrugs*

3. "It's HD! Make the text TINY!!!"
Yeah, it's HD, but please for the love of god, Developers, try to remember that players aren't sat 2-inches from a monitor.
I've a 42 inch TV, and am sat at the opposite side of the room.
And I'm old, and my eyesight sucks!!
Trying to figure out which buttons GTAV is telling me to use, is absolutely bloody HORRENDOUS, when all their buttons are the exact same looking "black splodge with white splodge on it", all at about 32x32 pixels in the tiniest corner of the screen.
It's a good job I've already played this game, and knew by muscle-memory what the controls were, because otherwise I'd be completely smegging lost.

*sigh*

I'm now sitting here with a killer migraine. I'm unsure whether that's from all the excitement of getting a new toy, or whether it was from all of the squinting to try to read the teensy tiny text, but I'll probably be avoiding the XBone for much of today.

After all, there's still an Advent Calendar to make!!

Hmm...

Daily Doodle : On The Team

Platdude has been selected to join the team.
I hope he does better than the last Platizen.

Misc..

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