I watched The Game Awards Thursday night mostly because my roommate wanted to see if Cyberpunk 2077 was going to show up again, and it did, with a release date (April 16th) and a trailer where Keanu Reeves tells some rando in the crowd "you're breathtaking," and now that's going to be a meme forever, I can feel it already. But that's not actually what I want to write about today. What I want to write about is the Xbox.
Microsoft used the show to reveal what the next Xbox actually looks like, and its official name, Xbox Series X, which I've now typed four times and still don't love. Forget the name for a second though. Look at the thing. It's a black tower. A vertical rectangle, taller than it is wide, with vents on top like a little chimney. Phil Spencer stood up there talking about teraflops and ray tracing and I believe him, I'm sure it's a monster under the hood, but my brain kept doing the same thing over and over: that looks like a PC.
Not like a stylish gaming PC either. Like the beige tower under my dad's desk in 2003, except black now. Twitter figured this out in about four minutes and by the time I refreshed my feed there were already three different fridge jokes and someone had photoshopped a Solo cup on top like it was a mini fridge in a dorm room. I laughed. I also kind of get it? The Xbox One and the PS4 both did the long flat slab thing for years and it worked fine, it slid under a TV, it didn't need its own zip code. Now I'm apparently supposed to make room on my entertainment shelf for a tower.
I own an Xbox One S, the little white one, and it sits flat under my TV next to a Roku and a receiver that's older than some of my nephews. There is exactly zero clearance above it for a chimney vent. I'd have to rearrange furniture for a console. That's a weird thing to have to think about in December.
I'll say this though, because I don't want to be That Guy who just complains: I like that Microsoft is trying something different instead of shipping the same slab a third time in a row. Consoles have looked basically identical to each other for two generations now, black or white rectangle, take your pick, and at least this is a shape you'd actually recognize across a room. I just think they should've shown us a room it fits in. Every render I saw was the console floating alone against a black background, no TV stand, no cable box, nothing for scale. Show me it next to a soundbar. Show me the back with the ports. That's the stuff I actually care about a year out from buying one, not a hero shot in the void.
Cyberpunk got the better reaction of the night by a mile, for what it's worth. CD Projekt Red had Keanu on stage, the crowd completely lost it, the trailer looked genuinely good, and April feels far enough away that it might actually be finished by then (we'll see, wont we). Death Stranding picked up an award too, which, fine, sure, that game was something, even if I still couldn't tell you exactly what it was.
None of this changes what I'm buying next year. I've been on Xbox since the original green-and-black one with the controller the size of a dinner plate, so I'm not switching camps over a chimney vent. I'm just going to need a new shelf, apparently. Anyone got a good media unit recommendation that's deeper than it is wide? Genuinely asking. My current setup is not built for a tower and I've got about eleven months to figure it out.