My Thoughts on the Xbox One & MCC

2 1/2 years ago i walked away from gaming; it was weird as it was something that I had done since I was a little kid. At the time Halo Reach was out and I was the community manager here. I got on one night to play  reach and we found out one of our friends/team mates had cancer, everything just kind of stopped. I hated reach anyway, what made it somewhat bearable was playing with my friends, when that started to fall apart that kind of drove a stake in the heart of it all really. When I left gaming I got into automotive photography, it pretty much absorbed me every day and still does to an extent.

6 months ago a couple of my friends wanted me to get a 360 and Halo 3 and play some games, after much hesitation I decided why not, it would be good to talk to them, laugh and play some games. At first it was the usual suspects, myself, biorod, trizev, royal, mr white and a couple others. There was an announcement of MCC for the Xbox One and to be honest I was somewhat excited about gaming again, even though things seemed extremely different now than years before. 

What do I mean by different? when I used to sign on there used to be no shortage of people to invite to play games (halo), now people were scattered across all kinds of games that I had never even heard of, people were older and just had less time to be on, whether from kids, or work or both. I checked 2o2p, surely people were still talking on the forums and getting there game on, not so much it seemed. Threads seemed to be slow and dead from the start, waiting for a response to a thread now i might get a couple grey hairs vs a few yrs ago when you could refresh and have 30 responses. Some of the things I used to do as CM was have play dates, tournaments, xbox.com play dates, leagues, 2o2p game nights, game give aways. My thought was you have to be active to keep the community active and excited. If they had a good time, they would be spreading the word, talking on the forums, and blogging about their experiences. I think this version of 2o2p could probably use a little of that, although im pretty far removed from what’s left of this community, so It's possible I could be wrong. 

The Xbox One, I finally sacked up days before the release of MCC and got one on sale. I will say that Im not that impressed. I feel like since i have had the xbox one, live has been down multiple times, the friends list has been down a couple times and party chat has failed us numerous times. I do not have the kinect version so i find that navigating the menus can be somewhat painful. The Xbox Live Marketplace seems to have taken a few steps backwards, the version on the 360 used to be awesome; it was like its own little big deal. now its just clunky... 
Im still not a fan of this snap shit, maybe im a hates change kind of guy, or a if its broke dont fix it kind of guy. I fell like the snap feature works great on touch devices and probably works good with the kinect, but for non kinect users its pointless. 

Games, wtf lack of games....this system has been out what, over a yr? and the games suck for it. I have forza 5, but for some reason all the cars sound very similar, although the the game is nice to look at and decent to play. Everything else just looks meh, titanfall looks meh, cod well ive never liked cod, Destiny erm no, MCC is still broken but somewhat tolerable. Where is college football? i have to settle for shit madden? oh that’s right the players would probably sue if they made college football, se we get screwed, id even play a gears of war for the xbone if it came to it. Im slightly disappointed that the xbone doesn’t have the ability to play 360 games or 360 arcade games. there are very few game demos and very few games i even want to demo after checking them out on youtube, it's kind of sad

MCC the good the bad and the ugly. Myself, Triz and Bio have been playing MCC everyday pretty much since this game came out and it is still broken after about a month. It is somewhat tolerable now since the last patch, but it is still painful to play every night. If you go in by yourself im sure everything works fine lol, if you go in with friends well, there in lies the problem. For as long as I have been around Halo, one of the most important things is the lobby and playing with your friends. Since the last 2 patches, joining our friends lobbies seems to be fixed, they have also somewhat fixed where we were getting split up after games. What is still broken is you and your friends getting split up in game. So far this is what we have noticed, Halo 2 Classic and Halo 3 seem to work fine, we actually very rarely get split up in those two, Halo 2 championship anniversary tho, well that’s a whole nother story, i think 80% of those games we still get split up. 

The game play itself in H2C is pretty damn good, Halo 3 is great with one exception, it still has major audio issues, you essentially have to tone out halo 3 because none of the sounds are coming from the right locations. talk about disorienting. H2A feels like H4 on H2 maps, im not a huge fan of H2A, I play it but spend most of my time in H2C and H3. 

there is still no word on when the next patch comes out or if there will even be one