Since the diabolical and horribly misguided announcement of the XBOX One and all the things that came stuck to it that we all hated, Microsoft have been steadily flip flopping on every single aspect to the point where they might announce that it can swim if that's what Twitter told them it wanted.
We went mental about the Always-On DRM, forcing you to connect your XBOX to the internet at all times otherwise it'd stop working, so they got rid of it. Then we had a fit about the restrictions imposed on second hand and borrowed games, so they got rid of them. Then a few people got sand in their arse cracks about the fact that they had to buy a headset rather than getting one free in the box, so that they could continue slandering teenagers on Call of Duty, and XBOX said they'd changed their minds and the headset would be free now.
The price remains the same, which is a major sticking point for many people, but the crowning turd in the waterpipe has to be much despised Kinect, which no one bought and no one wants to Microsoft tried to force it on you like brussels at Christmas.
3rd party developers wants nothing to do with the bloody thing, and gaming giant Rockstar have publicly washed their hands of it, albeit not while playing the riveting Wash Wash Handsy Man game, only for Kinect. It doesn't really properly work either, so the dream of being able to swipe around your menu like a bored Tom Cruise is just that; a dream. The voice recognition is bollocks so you can't tell the XBOX what to do either. Not without it doing something else entirely.
At first Microsoft said that the XBOX wouldn't work without the Kinect being active, and that if you tried to cover it up (it can't be switched off, and it watches you the entire time and sends data about what it sees to all sorts of people, including anti-piracy watchdog RIAA and the American government) then the whole thing would shut down until you learnt the rules and behaved yourself.
Then they said you could Pause it, or tell it not to upload data, but that you still had to have one and also you had to shut up. Now they've changed their mind again, like your girlfriend a Pizza Express, and decided that you can unplug the whole thing entirely and the XBOX will still work just fine.
It's possible they've done this to bow to public pressure, which is apparently their thing now, but also that it's a move to create two kinds of XBOX Bundle; one with and without the Kinect. Offering the XBOX One (the third XBOX) without Kinect would lower the price and make it competitive with the PS4, which is a bloody smart move.
What should we make Microsoft do with the XBOX One now? Release a version with tits on? Change the name to XBOYZOne? Give us two controllers as standard and make one of them obviously better than the other, so you can lord it over your little brother?
Answers in the comments please.
Words by Gazz Wood
