A Day of Gaming

I woke up this morning quite excited to finally get my Xbox One. However, Gamestop doesn't open until 10 and our dryer is sitting unassembled because I decided to try my hand at handymanning last night.

The plan was to head to the hardware store and find the piece I needed to fix the dryer, then hopefully get it fixed before Gamestop opened so my day would be wide open for gaming as I was able. Of course you know that when I start a story this way, things somehow turn south.

The hardware store told me to go to a place 20 minutes away, because they don't carry dryer parts. Fine, I had well over an hour and I could sacrifice a bit of time to get the project done. I head up to the other shop only to be told that he might be able to get the part Monday. No good, because I need it fixed now. As I head back towards the mall, hoping Sears was open by now, I drove by Gamestop and saw that they were open at 9. If it hadn't snowed last night I would have slammed on my breaks and down a Fast & Furious turn in to the place.

Instead I made the responsible decision to go to Sears first, since there was no way I was picking up the Xbox and then leaving it unattended in my car. Sears opened at 10, which was 45 minutes away. My decision was made, and I turned around and got my system along with Call of Duty Ghosts.

I danced my way inside, plopped the pretty black box on a chair, and tore in to it like it was Christmas. It was sooooo beautiful! I caressed the controller for awhile, enjoying the matte feel of the grips and smiling at how they've slightly redesigned the shape of the whole thing. My wife helped me get it all set up, and even cleaned the TV so I can have the best experience today (not really, but I'm pretending that's why she did it). Word of warning - the X1 is HDMI only, so make sure you have a TV or computer monitor with that hookup.

If you were on Facebook earlier today you know that I had a little trouble getting it to turn on. A few minutes later my wife used her technical know-how and plugged the power cord in to the back of the console, and we were ready to roll. And of course we rolled right in to a system update.

I leafed through all the paperwork and found that I had 5 codes to redeem. Ewwwww. Fortunately the Kinect has an amazing feature that lets you hold up a QR code (if the code has one next to it) and safe the hassle of typing in the 25 character codes, followed by another 25 characters because I can never enter them correctly the first time. I even got a Day One unlock code which was... weird, but groovy I guess.

After messing around with the Kinect for awhile, and being thoroughly impressed with how little it sucked, I was ready to throw in CoD to finally experience it for myself. Oh, a mandatory install. Well the update was super quick, so I figured this would only take a few minutes.

When I realized I was obviously wrong about that I decided to head back to Sears in search of my part, because I really wanted to cross that project off my list. Of course they didn't have it in the store, but they sure had it at their parts store 30 minutes away! I was already committed at this point, and honestly I wouldn't have been surprised if CoD was still installing, so away I went to buy the part. After standing at the counter and being ignored for a few minutes, they finally found my part and were about to send me on my way when I pointed out that the bag was missing some little triangle washers that hold the piece in its place.

"Oh do you need that? We don't have that here, but we can ship them to you in 3-5 days." It's a good thing I decided to pass on the guy who wanted to get me the piece by Monday, because I would still have been without those washers that, honestly, have no reason not to be included with the drum supports. I was left with no choice but to go home and twiddle my thumbs as I waited for two pieces of plastic to arrive in the mail.

I walked in the door to find a champion's lunch of pancakes and bacon waiting for me, along with my kids sitting on the couch watching Netflix on the Xbox before I'd even had a chance to play it! But after eating and waiting for their show to end, they were shipped off to nap/rest time and I finally got to play my Xbox!

So how was it? In my first game I went 14-5, was called a few offensive names, and found the gameplay to be the best yet. The maps however... wow. I'm pretty sure someone looked at a plate of spaghetti and said "Hey, let's have a bunch of verticality and winding passages so no one is ever safe! My next games consisted of me trying out different playstyles to see what worked, only to find that the style of "cross my fingers and hope people don't flank me" seemed to work best.

After some frustrating matches I decided to try out Squad Mode, which basically let me play against the AI with a cap on the XP I could earn toward my characters. Although a bit simplistic, Squads is a great way to take a break after a rough game to prove to yourself that you are capable of shooting an enemy.

After a couple Squad games I went back and tried some objective gametypes because deathmatch-style doesn't work for me. I went about even on my kills and deaths, but I was always in the top 3 because I was capturing and defending objectives like a madman, and all felt right with the world again. I definitely miss having people to talk to, because most strangers on my team eventually irritate me to the point of having to mute them.

I finished up and messed around with the different functions before letting the kids watch Hercules on Xbox. Daddy, on the other hand, decided to play the lottery and see if I could get on the Elder Scrolls Online Beta as soon as it launched. I couldn't, so here I am chronicling my day of gaming that has had a considerable lack of gaming.

So far I'm very happy with my purchase. I think the Kinect adds a lot with voice commands, and everything on the system moves so quickly! I'm definitely looking forward to seeing everything it's capable of, but so far I'm definitely a fan.

Now then, back to cleaning while I keep refreshing the ESO server to see if it's back online yet.


See you tomorrow!

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