The Mikey Man

  When you look at the Series S you either see an underpowered mistake made by Microsoft or you see a well-made move by Microsoft in making a next gen console for the low end. When I look at the Series S I see something much different. I see a purpose-built device that has been re-purposed due to market expectations and internal resources not being where they needed to be in order to be for the device to hit market as intended. To this day I think the Series S was built to be SOLELY a streaming device. Why do I think this way? Well, it is fairly simple. You only have to look at the specs of the device, which practically scream “I’m a streaming machine!” and some of the things that Microsoft themselves have said about the device to have similar thoughts. Let’s start with the specs, shall we? I am not going to rehash the spreadsheet because that has been done to exhaustion. I will just say that other than practically having CPU parity (it is clocked a bit slower) everything els...

          The Series X from Microsoft and Xbox is a fabulous piece of technology with some not so fabulous short comings. I will explain the short comings further later in the review, but first an initiation for those not familiar and a  refresher for those who are. The Series X is the more powerful of the two latest generation of video game consoles from Microsoft's Xbox division, it brings to the table a sizeable upgrade to the current consoles the Xbox one and Xbox one X. This upgrade is accomplished by moving to more powerful Zen 2 cores and a full RDNA2 architecture from the under powered jaguar cores and GCN architecture of the consoles they are replacing. This additional power along with the familiar architecture of the consoles (current and previous console generation are X86_64 architecture) allows for increased backwards compatibility, a strong suit of the Xbox ecosystem. This is also where one of the more glaring short comings is realized, w...

Microsoft blew minds this week with their Game Pass announcement, for some it was the greatest thing they could have done, I mean all you can play gaming and DAY 1 Microsoft Exclusives for only $10 a month YES PLEASE!! But, (I know there is always a but for me) for some, me included, take the announcement with come caution. Why? well while Game Pass is not a bad idea by itself the way Microsoft currently chooses to handle it may be. There is nothing wrong with Microsoft making their exclusives available on the service on day one but (there's that but again!), this should be a timed release and should expire after a limited time. This will help support the retailers by encouraging those who really love the game buy the retail version.  By applying the currently announced model to the Xbox you now essentially turn it into a service rather than a Hardware/Software ecosystem which could alienate retail channels if g...