This is ridiculous. What the hell was I thinking? Oh, the hubris!

Amazon’s availability of brand new Xbox Series X consoles has been extremely low since its release on November 10, 2020. As in, indefinitely unavailable. Only within the last two months has Amazon extended an invitation-only option to secure an Xbox if one is deemed worthy. All you have to do is submit an invitation request and wait it out. I thought, why not? I’ve been casually checking availability once in a while anyway without much urgency to actually buy the thing; what could it hurt? With a confident click of the mouse, I sent my invitation request. I put it out of my mind immediately. I was expecting to hear back in the next six months. Perhaps a year.

I got the email two days later with the subject “Congrats, you’re invited!”

Eep.

It begins…

Well, damn. Okay. I wasn’t prepared! They caught me off guard! 72 hours? Why, that’s somewhere between 2 – 4 days! They cornered me into a hasty decision! $500. $550 with tax. Shit, that’s a lot of food I could buy to feed my kids, I– nope! Too late! Click click click, proceed to checkout.

Two days later, it was in my hands.

What was I getting myself into?

Oh my God, dude, I have to open the box? It’s 9pm on a Sunday, I have work in the morning, and I have to open the box? Gotta get a knife. Ok, easy does it, I don’t want to carve into the console like all the cars I keyed this week. Why are there so many pieces of tape on this thing? Which way does the box even open? Every side is folded into a different edge! It’s like one of those impossible figure illusions.

Whew, ok. I got it. Careful. Open the box carefully so that the console doesn’t crash onto my hardware floor and scatter 19,000 broken pieces all over my house like razor-sharp shrapnel. Oooh, cool, it comes with its own HDMI cable. My Xbox 360 didn’t come with one. I had to steal one from work.

Jesus, everything is wrapped up in this thin foam packaging. It doesn’t look like it would help whatsoever if I just dropkicked this shit down my stairs, but I won’t try that until I play Dark Souls. Why did they secure these cords with tape. MORE tape? I’m a busy man! I can’t be fumbling around with– ah, there we go, that was easy actually. Now to just take the controller included with the console and– WHY AREN’T THE BATTERIES ALREADY IN IT? I spent $550 on this! With tax! And how old are these batteries? There’s a 2021 date on them, aren’t those expiration dates supposed to be about seventeen years in the future? It’s going to corrode the electrical contacts. That’s going to blow up my whole house when it inevitably explodes, causing me to descend to Hell before I get a chance to confess all my sins!

Ok, never mind, these batteries seem fine. There’s another date on there that says 2029. That’s when that asteroid was supposed to hit Earth. That’s a long way away, so we’re good for now.

Captain Holt has never touched an Xbox in his life.

A plug here, and outlet there, some connections here, now we’re in business! This thing is huge, it can barely fit in that little shelf underneath my cheap 11-year-old Target TV stand. I have to move all these kids toys we shove in there for no reason at the end of every day. They can just go in the garbage. They won’t even miss them!

Oh God, what now? I have to link my console to my Xbox app? My what now? I barely even have a cell phone! I already have two apps and one of them tells me the weather. Fine, Microsoft, you forced my hand again. Now, with the app, I can set up my new console exactly two minutes faster! That’s actually pretty damn good, every second counts in my hellish existence. That, however, takes me 25 minutes since I’m a goddamned moron who forgot to turn his WiFi on. That’s a whole episode of Bob’s Burgers! This isn’t worth it!

What’s this now? Syncing the console with the controller? Why? I never had to do that before. Isn’t it like a TV remote? Why do I have to do this? And this takes me another 30 minutes because I press the button on the console and then it blinks and then I press the button on the controller and then it blinks and then nothing happens. Then I go through every single combination of pressing and holding and doing one before the other and sacrificing a hippopotamus to Baphomet and nothing is working! It’s not working! It’ll never work! I spent $550 on this thing with tax and now every controller I ever try to connect to this damn thing is going to– oh, there it goes. I don’t know what I did, but there it goes. I hope I won’t have to do it again.

Look, nerd, you stay away from the Microsoft products! Bad! Bad Bill Gates!

Look at this thing! I can re-download my purchased games! I can browse the store! I had never bought an Xbox One, so there’s plenty of last-generation games I need to catch up on. There’s a whole slew of old Xbox 360 games I wanted to play too and never got around to either. This is great! Wait a minute, what’s this? They have Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX, X, X-2, XII, XIII, XIII-2, and XV available? Remastered? Are you shitting me? I haven’t played X in 17 years, I’d love to play that again. I never thought I would ever do that again! I’ve always wanted to play VII, VIII, and IX but I have never had the opportunity. And now I do? I’ll never play all this! I–

Hold on. A remastered compilation of the PS1 Crash Bandicoot games? A remastered compilation of the PS1 Spyro the Dragon games? Have I lost my mind? Those were my FAVORITE games in the late ’90s. And I get to play them again and relive some childhood magic? You mean here, in 2022, I get to play all six of these masterpieces with enhanced graphics? But I have so many other new games I’ve never played before! I have a job and kids and I’ve rekindled interest in other hobbies through this blog! I’d love to find time to read novels again someday! I–

YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS. A REMASTERED TRILOGY EDITION OF GRAND THEFT AUTO III, GRAND THEFT AUTO: VICE CITY, AND GRAND THEFT AUTO: SAN ANDREAS?

I can’t own this Xbox. What fuck did I get myself into? This cannot happen to me, this is too much. It’s too damn much. I’m hyperventilating. I’m going to go crawl into a hole. I can’t handle this. I’m going to cry. Someone, anyone, please, just hold me. Tell me it’ll be ok.