Topic: Microsoft Rewards (Reward Points Thread)

New changes seem a bit tight. 3 points daily for play a game and losing the 5 point a day mobile app log in. Not sure what to make of it really. The new Xbox app quests haven't been rolled out to me yet =(

XBox Series X is in stock at the Microsoft Store on Xbox (UK) (thought I'd tag @FraserG )

I just used my £195 in Rewards points and snagged it for £254.99 (and two one years of menial tasks 😨😭😂😂)

It was a total ballache to order though, not sure if the store was broken. Every time I verified the purchase, it just would take my back to the confirm order screen.

Ended up ringing the Helpline phone number on screen and they completed the transaction for me.

Edit: it was just over one year of menial tasks, just checked and I'm on a 54 week streak. It blimmin well felt like 2 years though! Happy to be joining the next generation anyway lol. Looks like the consoles are still in stock on the UK MS Store on Xbox if anyone still fancies one

I did the same used my rewards points and bought a series X from Microsoft. £250 off the price. ordered thursday afternoon arrived saturday morning

@trev666 sweet, nice one! Mine is due tomorrow but I haven't received a shipping confirmation yet. Looking forward to it!

@ralphdibny Took you long enough... I mean enjoy.

I may prefer my PS5 right now, but I can't deny that the Series X is a beast. It's very good in it's own right.

@KilloWertz haha cheers yeah, had to save me some credits.

I do want a PS5 at some point. I think a few things need to happen though, steep discount either official or unofficial, a smaller hardware revision or an option to buy the current model with the red plates/controller bundled instead of paying extra for them or finally, just for me to have enough money in the bank, to see it in the wild and buy it on impulse. The latter actually nearly happened last year but after I left a ShopTo queue window open in the background for a while, all they had to sell me were expensive bundles that included games I already owned that would have free upgrades. I decided to pass on that in the end

@ralphdibny I wouldn't hold my breath on them bundling in the colored plates and controller or even having colored PS5s to buy. Aside from the PS Plus games and things like that, it's not PlayStation's style to give away things for free like that.

Someday these things should actually be able to be bought whenever you want to. At least you would think so. Then maybe you can see the light and realize how crazy you've been to side with Xbox all this time.

Seriously, you should be good with one console for the time being. At times, I kind of wish I only had one at the moment. I obviously consider myself lucky, but still, I hardly use my Series X right now, especially now that Horizon Forbidden West is out. Obviously that will change next year when the games start coming out on Xbox, but for the time being one would suffice.

@KilloWertz nah don't worry, I won't hold my breath. I usually come up with out there but still fair enough for working class mooks like myself reasons to dissuade me from plonking down £500 in one go

Haha you know I don't take sides. I swing both (all?) ways 😂. I actually have 4 different PlayStation's hooked up under the tele (2xPs3s, PS4 w/PSVR and a hacked PSTV), 1 Xbox and 2 Nintendo's (possibly soon to be 3 as I bought a second Wii U to do a hack on). Also 4x mini consoles. I'll probably drop the Xbox One X when the Series X arrives because it will occupy the same HDMI port.

Xbox is only my main console at the moment because I'm playing through the Yakuza's on Game Pass. After that, I will probably move back onto my mission to at least play most of the PS Plus games before I let that sub lapse in May. And I was thinking of just letting my Game Pass lapse in August when it runs out too. I feel like I really need to get around to actually playing games that I have bought and paid for instead of being beholden to 3 different subscriptions at all times.

I think the main reason I want a PS5 is because my base PS4 is a little bit ropey these days. The One X was the console least in need of an upgrade but id saved enough Rewards points to knock almost £200 off the base price and it was in stock on the MS store so I thought I might as well go in for the Series X!

@ralphdibny I let my GP sub lapse at the beginning of the year for the exact same reason - the pile of shame just kept growing while I got distracted by all the stuff on Game Pass. I made a list of all the stuff I had bought, but never played, and it was close to 600 games! That is counting stuff on compilations as multiple games - still have 40+ to play on the Mega Drive collection for example - so some of those will likely get abandoned pretty quickly, but it's probably going to take years to get through it.

@dmcc0 I often get fairly depressed at the thought that I probably have more games to play than time in my lifespan to play them. Not so much that I won't get to play the games, more that I don't want to book up the rest of my life with games. I am sure, and in some ways I hope that, that thought will grow and replace my normal "what's next" attitude where I just play a game in my spare time until I finish it and just move on to the next one.

On a less somber note, I think my wall of shame is pretty extensive. I think my backlog dates all the way back to the Wii/PS3. I think I drew a line under anything I own that's GameCube or older. Older games tend to get played more when they are part of a series or if it's something I bought recently that's new to me and I haven't played before

@ralphdibny Yeah, I've stopped seeing the backlog as some sort of chore that needs to be 'completed' and just think of it like my own personal Game Pass now. I've also cut back on buying new stuff too - not really a conscious decision, just that most of the stuff on my various wish-lists goes on sale fairly regularly so I don't feel the need to buy right away. Having said that, I am trying to pick up some of the remaining bits I want to play on 3DS before the eShop closes next year.

Yeah, I've got a fairly varied mix in there too - vast majority are Switch & Xbox but I've also got a decent collection going right back to Game Boy and various things in between that I've never played yet

@dmcc0 that's certainly a good way to look at it! I did a similar sort of thing during the first year of lockdowns and just played whatever, whenever. It was nice and I really wish I could go back to that and hope to do so one day.

I gota do the same for both 3DS and Wii U. I think I'm Gona buy some 10% off codes from the Nintendo Life codes website and just go on a spree in a few weeks time. Maybe like 150-300 pounds worth. Gotta wait for my wallet to heal after that £255 I put towards the series x though!

@ralphdibny I'm chipping away at the 3DS list rather that just hitting it in one go - I think if I drop all that cash in one go and buy everything I want I'll end up delving deeper and probably pick up more stuff just for the sake of it - stuff that I probably don't really want.

There are still a few places that have new physical 3DS games online too, so I've been comparing the prices to see what works out cheaper - might even go used on some of the more common stuff as they can be pretty cheap - for the rest I'll just pick up those on the eShop with those Nintendo Life discounted codes.

@dmcc0 that's a good shout actually. I think I delved too far in to the PS Store during the eventually retracted notice period.

I know there's a few digital only Nintendo titles I want to get across 3DS and Wii U, the Pushmo series comes to mind. I think I will pick up a few more DS VC titles too. It's such a tough one. I want to hack the extra Wii U soon so I have a safety net in case any notable games fall through the cracks in my shopping spree. Just don't know which hack to use, it doesn't seem as straightforward as hacking the PSTV.

@ralphdibny Thankfully, Sony reversed their decision with the PS3 before I stocked up on gift cards so I didn't actually buy anything, but I guess it's only a matter of time before they do pull the plug.

I don't have a Wii U, but hacking the Wii was straightforward enough as far as I can remember, but I do recall that they use slightly different methods - I was going to hack my son's Wii U, but he sold it to pay for a Switch before I got around to it! To be honest though, I don't think I've actully used it that much since I did it.

Haha nice! At least you got a Switch and a ton of the Wii U games got ported to it. My friend actually hacked their Switch recently. It's tempting but I lean towards the notion of having an official console and an additional hacked console if at all possible. For example I have an unmodified Vita so I am quite happy to hack the PSTV.

I can't say I play the hacked PSTV that much either but it was so worth doing. Just for that random game every so often that I'll want to play on the big screen. Over the pandemic, when I was playing games "with" my partner (she just watched me play some of my favourite game series 😅), we played Uncharted Golden Abyss, Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops and Splinter Cell Essentials on the PSTV as part of larger playthroughs of their respective series'. It is great though because the camera on PSP games is normally awkwardly mapped to the D-Pad which can be assigned to the Right Stick on the PSTV so you actually get some semblance of a dual analog control scheme even if the inputs are digital instead of analog.

In the (far and distant) future, my plans for it include playing the Valkyria Chronicles series (2&3 are PSP games and I think 3 is Japanese only so it requires a fan translation patch if one exists), The Resistance series (which I think has a PSP or Vita iteration) and the Killzone series (which I think also has a PSP or Vita iteration).

I think where I'm stuck on the Wii U hack is that my main reason for doing it is to play DS games on the big screen, including ones that never saw a VC release. All reports of loading DS games onto the Wii U seem rather tedious and piecemeal instead of having the ability to load them all at once. Of course I will probably end up putting some GameCube games on there as well but yeah, bit stuck on the old and contradicting guides that I can find online.

I've been playing a bit Mario Kart DS on the Wii U VC and it is so good on a 55inch OLED TV. Unfortunately the VC emulation can be a bit limited in terms of no button mapping, it's insistence on using the gamepad only for DS games and it's screen orientations which don't account for every style of DS game available. It's great for things like Mario Kart and I'd assume even stuff like Metroid Prime Hunters but I think I'd struggle to use it for games that use the two screens as a shared gameplay space or portrait orientation games (where the gamepad maps the buttons weirdly to one side of the controller). So I am quite keen to do a hack which either unlocks more features on the VC emulator or uses a different emulator that has more customisable options.

@ralphdibny One of the benefits of being a "2 Switch family" is that I get to borrow all his games! He's a 'typical' Nintendo gamer in that he generally buys the (full price) 1st party stuff so I usually don't have to.

I'd usually only hack something once it's no longer supported to be honest, so no plans to hack the Switch yet - I'd probably do something wrong and end up either bricking it or getting my account banned or something 😂 I do vaguely recall buying a 'chipped' PS1 back in the day though and renting/copying games from the Blockbuster round the corner - I did own the likes of MGS, Tomb Raider, Crash etc, so must've just rented the smaller stuff as the only thing I actually remember playing a copy of was a Muppets Karting game! I've no idea what happened to it actually - probably didn't play it much after I bought a Dreamcast and I think my brother likely 'borrowed' it when he joined the Army.

@dmcc0 I probably wouldn't take a hacked device online to the official network anyway. It's why i'd always want to do it to a second console, so I kind of still have an official one with purchases/friends/trophies etc

Oh yeah, I remember the chipped PS1s! I remember going with my dad to the market to get mine chipped and the guy said he'd have to take it home to do because it was a later model (the dualshock model). I'm sure it would have been fine but we still didn't trust it so never did it.

I remember you could just buy bags of copied PS1 discs from that market. I think we did that disc swapping technique where you stick some blu tak in the back of the disc drive to keep it spinning and swap out a legitimate disc with a copy or import when it reaches different speeds. I read about the technique in a PlayStation magazine at some point

I don't think I actually played that many copies to be honest. I remember playing that banned game Thrill Kill that got leaked. Bought a copy of that down the market. Also an import copy of A Bugs Life. Good game actually but imports played in Black and White unless you had a SCART lead or something 😅

@ralphdibny Yeah, far too risky, although my son did upgrade to a Switch OLED and still has his original launch one lying around, so might look into it if I'm bored one weekend. I'm definitely not buying a second console just to hack though - my wife already gives me grief for having too much gaming stuff around the house already and she'd freak out if a duplicate console turned up 😅

@dmcc0 haha tell me about it, I only managed to swing the Wii U because I took some amiibos and some unopened Lego Dimensions packets to CEX to trade in! 😅