The Xbox and I

We all have our weak­nesses. For some, it’s drink. For oth­ers, it’s choco­late. For me, it’s con­soles. I love them, I want to own them all, and it’s a tes­ta­ment to my own will power that I don’t own them all. They’d bank­rupt me, given half the chance. It’s not even really about the games that come on them; I owned, for a while, a Bandai Crys­tal Won­der­swan, an obscure lit­tle Japan­ese hand­held. I owned the grand total of one game for it, Final Fan­tasy IV, all in Japan­ese, which I can’t read. A point­less pur­chase, but I wept real tears when I sold it on to some­one else.

I want a PS2 so I can play Ico and Vib Rib­bon. I want a Sega Sat­urn, so that I can play NiGHTS Into Dreams. I want an N64, so that I can play Per­fect Dark, Paper Mario, and Mario 64. I want a Megadrive so I can play the orig­i­nal Sonic games as nature intended, and I want a Mega-CD and 32X, not because they have any good games, but because I never had the oppor­tu­nity to get them the first time around. I want a Super Nin­tendo for Star­Fox and Super Mario RPG, and I want a NES for, well, for all those NES games that are being re-released on the Game­boy (it’s just not the same). I already have a Game­cube, Game­boy, and Dream­cast (wouldn’t mind a replace­ment, though — mine’s ended up with a nasty yel­low sun­light stain on it, and if you’re going to col­lect these things, you really ought to keep them mint.)

And that’s just the main­stream con­soles; what about the PC Engine (the white Japan­ese orig­i­nal, of course), or the Neo-Geo (car­tridge, not CD), and the FM Towns Marty? The Neo-Geo Pocket Colour, the Lynx, the Jaguar, the Game Gear, the CD32, the 3D0, the GP32…I’ve not even gone into the lim­ited edi­tion ver­sions of every­thing — the Hello Kitty Dream­cast, or the Pearl Pink PS2, or the white Sat­urn. And then there’s the forth­com­ing Nin­tendo DS and the Sony PSP. How am I sup­posed to keep up?

So, my name is paul, and I Have A Prob­lem. I’m deal­ing with it, though, and even though I could get most of those men­tioned above on ebay for about £20, I haven’t. I’m resist­ing, like a reformed alco­holic refus­ing to even touch a lemon­ade shandy.

But. The astute among you — par­tic­u­larly those of you who read the title of this post — will have noticed one con­sole, quite a pop­u­lar one, that isn’t in this list. It’s the one con­sole that has never appealed to me, not even in the slight­est. In fact, I’d say I hate this con­sole. It’s big, it’s ugly, it’s…so Amer­i­can. It’s the Xbox. There’s not a sin­gle game that jumps up out at me and screams “This! This is why you need an Xbox!”. Speak­ing as a bona fide Nin­tendo bitch, it’s more or less the com­plete antithe­sis of every­thing I love about gam­ing. I’ve never wanted one. On Fri­day, I bought one. Whoops.

Dou­ble your money, step right up

It was only by chance that all of this hap­pened. I was pass­ing a branch of GAME, and I saw it, and it saw me. It was one of the crys­tal Xboxes, lim­ited edi­tion, and (I knew from look­ing in the past) sell­ing on ebay for any­where in the region of £160 to £240. It was here, sec­ond hand but in per­fect con­di­tion with two con­trollers, for just £85. Now, I’m no maths geek, but even I could see that if I bought it for £85, and could sell it for £160, well, that would be worth the effort. So I bought it, and the staff con­grat­u­lated me on my swift pur­chas­ing skills. They’d only had it in there for 15 min­utes, and they’d expected it to go quickly. Feel­ing a mite proud of myself, I took pos­ses­sion of the con­sole. Did I want any games to go with it? No, I did not. This wasn’t about enjoy­ment. This was busi­ness.

The Xbox did not warm itself to me any more in tak­ing it home. It weighs a fuck­ing ton and is as big as a house, but for­tu­nately, my good friend Clarie was will­ing to be my pack horse and carry it some­times, as man­ual labour on behalf of oth­ers brings her closer to God, and who am I to argue with that?

I checked ebay again when I got home, and yes, there were the crys­tal Xboxes, being sold for a min­i­mum of £160. Hur­rah for me, I thought, and allowed myself a touch of gloat­ing time, until, a few hours later, when a friend pointed some­thing out to me.

Not so lim­ited any more.

Well, bug­ger. I like to think that I keep on top of all things console-related, but that really passed me by. Crys­tal Xbox re-released. I checked ebay again, and yes, peo­ple were sell­ing them at £160, but — and this is the more impor­tant fac­tor — nobody was actu­ally buy­ing them for £160. They all knew.

10 day returns

So, I wasn’t going to be mak­ing any money that day, but that was ok — after all, GAME have that funky 10 day returns pol­icy, right? I’ll check the receipt — yes, here it is:

10 Day Returns
We want you to be happy with your pur­chase, if not we will offer a full refund or exchange.

Well, that was ok then. I could just take it back, get a refund, and put the whole sorry inci­dent behind me. It would mean lug­ging that mon­ster of a con­sole back to the shop, but still, at least I wouldn’t have lost out.

I did look around at Xbox games first, though. After all, it had man­aged to get this far into my house, I thought it deserved a chance, but still, no, noth­ing. The most I could find were games that I wouldn’t have minded play­ing if I had noth­ing bet­ter to play. I even unpacked it and set it up — god­damnit, I gave it a chance, but no. This is not a con­sole that’s been designed for the likes of me.

I phoned GAME this morn­ing, to check that it was ok to return it. It wasn’t. Shit. I’m very glad I did phone them, as I would have been a touch annoyed to have car­ried this thing all the way back and then taken it home again. It turns out that GAME’s 10 Day Returns pol­icy doesn’t include con­soles, or PC games, or DVDs. I can under­stand PC games and DVDs, but not allow­ing con­sole returns — what do they think I did, make an ille­gal copy of the Xbox to share online? Pah.

I said this was a moral­ity tale, and I think it’s quite clear what the moral of this story is: “Always Lie Through Your Teeth”. If you want to take some­thing back to the shop because it was a bad idea, tell them it was bro­ken. If it was a used prod­uct that they tested before let­ting it leave the shop, drive a screw­driver through its sen­si­tive bits first — you make that bitch com­pletely unus­able and you tell them it was like that when you — no, not you, when your 9 year old neice — opened the box. Hon­esty will get you nowhere.

I’m open to sug­ges­tions as to what I should do with this now.

Tags:

• Xbox