Is the Xbox Series X exploding?

 Burn, baby burn!

Launching a brand new console is always a risky venture and has been known to come with a few bumps and issues along the way; it's just the nature of these things. Putting together a new piece of cutting-edge (relatively) hardware is all fine and dandy in a bubble, but as those folded-screen phones from last year should tell anyone; there's any number of potential issues in the wild that most absolutely fail to account for. (In the phone's case it was lint.) Thus we've had situations where consoles have launched with errors that hit one day one or a deathly red ring that haunts that entire machine's legacy, and even beyond the mechanical errors there have been straight production errors such as when Nintendo under-manufactured their product and ended up playing right into the hands of scalpers. (That happened... oh that's right; everytime Nintendo have done anything ever.) But in all that time I don't think anything has happened on the scale of what some are alleging from the Xbox Series X, like not even nearly this bad, which should be one's first redflag that something fishy is going on.

So perhaps you've heard the stories and honestly, by now, the story has likely been wrapped up, but at the time of writing this there is some serious shade being thrown towards the Xbox Series X and her ability to... well... not explode. You see, circulating around Twitter there has been an image of an Xbox Series X literally engulfed in smoke as it pours out of every chamber like an overpriced kettle. I mean it looks bad, like the nasal cavity of a Dragon who's just finished a Phaal Curry extravaganza meal, there's steam just about everywhere. Needless to say, this isn't really the sort of thing any console should be doing, it's possibly the worst example of a system malfunction possible. It's so crazy it's almost comical, and almost defiantly fictional. 

You see, whilst the image of a machine literally spewing balefire and brimstone from the pits of hell looks really impressive, it doesn't really make any sense when you think about what you're working with. The Xbox Series X is a computer, one that isn't even liquid cooled, so where would all this billowing smoke be coming from? This isn't some car which might pop a gasket and break down, (I'm not a car guy, I don't know if that even makes sense) this is a boring old computer, malfunctions look like an error message screen. The worst I get to this day is a sputtering sound out of my machine whenever I want it to read the license for the game that I've already downloaded and instead it treats me like I'm a pirate who somehow magicked this data into my machine with the power of tech wizardry. (No explosions yet, maybe I should keep trying.)

 In order for an Xbox to seriously display the sort of symptoms that this viral tweet is suggesting the actual motherboard would have to be on fire; and how in the heck could that have happened? Electrical fires wouldn't even be this pronounced, this is silly. Perhaps with liquid cooling systems there might be a little malfunction there that could make this effect, though I'm struggling to figure out how such a situation could get so bad. (Although I'm no technician, perhaps it makes perfect sense to some folk out there) And as if it needed to be done, some outlets went the distance of actually sticking a vape in the box and observed how the effect was identical to the image, what a surprise.

Therefore I guess this can be summed up as a smear job from some rando out there who wanted a bit of the 'ol Internet fame, but can we talk about how nefarious this really is? Hardware growing pains are something that is the utmost fear of most early adopters, because it appears to happen more often than not. You have the Joycon drift issue for the Switch, the aforementioned Red Ring of death for the 360 and the actual shipping of Xbox One Xs to folk who ordered Series Xs because Microsoft's Marketing team are dumb. If this sort of story had picked up traction without being immediately challenged this might of had an actual effect on the early sales of the Series X people as worried consumers hold off demanding that Microsoft get their act together, all so what: The Playstation 5 would be better situated to a console age it's already in the lead for? It baffles me.

But if nothing else this has highlighted the inherent childishness that still haunts the console fandom to this day. Somehow, despite everything which we have been through as a society, people are still going out of their way to actively try and sabotage another corporate entity and the people who buy their product out of some dystopian worship for a company they bought a box from. And it's not just Playstation people; Xbox folk have been just as dumb in the past too; it all just makes absolutely no sense to me. If it weren't for the literal billions of dollars being thrown around securing console exclusivity for practically every cool game for the next half decade, I'd be tempted to just say 'screw em' and commit to PC. (But then the PC market tends to be ludicrously overpriced too so everything sucks, is what I'm trying to say.)

Completely disregarding the old adage about not getting in a fight in a pigsty, Xbox went so far as to debunk this 'smoking console', as though that were needed for anyone to see. Perhaps in a more enlightened age we could take this as a cautionary tale in how not to believe everything we see from a random tweet on the Internet, but there's been too many identical examples of situations like this over the years for me to believe anything will be learnt. People will continue to believe the absolute first thing that gets shoved into their face and there's not a thing that you or I can do about that stupid fact. Just wait until the Twitter video comes out showing how the Playstation animorphs into a katana wielding death machine if you plug it into your wall; coming soon!

I know that this particular blog might read a little exasperated, but I am. Heck, I can't even get my old Xbox One to play discs and there's people straight lighting their brand new £450 console on fire for Internet points, it just saddens and upsets me. (Not to mention makes me jealous, I wish I was comfortable enough to go pyromaniac on half a grand's worth of hardware) But hey, maybe when the month is over and games actually start releasing on this platforms, people will lose the motivation for stupidity like this. In the meantime however, if mister vape-Box doesn't want his Xbox I'd gladly take it off it hands. (Yes I have no shame, don't you judge me!)