My thoughts on all the Xboxes:
Original Xbox: Good system. Good library, especially if you like early 2000s PC games and didn't have a good computer at the time. This was more important at the time than it is now, considering most computers were total shitboxes and ones that weren't cost a small fortune, and would be obsolete within a couple of years anyway. Obsolete not as in "oh boo hoo I can't run this on ultra settings", obsolete as in "this game will not start at all". Original Xbox also had a built-in hard drive, so, no memory cards necessary, plus you could rip music CDs straight to the hard drive. Later on, you could hack it and install emulators straight to the hard drive, which was fantastic considering it was one of the first home game consoles that let you play SNES roms on a TV. (Dreamcast had DreamSNES, but couldn't run at full speed)
Xbox 360: Good first half, bad second half. The good first half was tainted by countless consoles failing due to bad solder, and the existence of that one model of console with no onboard storage, meaning games had to be designed to work without a hard drive to cache to. Still, it had exclusives, and most games of the generation got their best versions on 360. But the release of Metro UI, as well as controllers that would just die (at least, for me) meant that it's a terrible console to revisit. Thankfully, a good chunk of the library runs on Xbox One.
Xbox One: The horrific launch just doomed that whole console forever. It'll forever be seen as a joke, and rightfully so. Even the name is stupid. Xbone? And much later on, they announced the "Xbox One S: All Digital Edition", aka the "Xbox One SAD". Still, it ended up a fine console. No better than the PS4, of course, but if it's all you have, you'll still have plenty to play. One of the only exclusives on the entire platform was Rare Replay, the best game compilation ever, with 30 games (31 after Goldeneye) that go up through Xbox 360. The controller was heavily improved, giving us an excellent D-pad, too. It didn't end up a bad console, but you don't really need one if you have a gaming PC or a PS4.
Xbox Series X|S: Quite possibly the least exciting console launch ever. The UI is exactly the same as the Xbox One's current UI. Games native to Series are listed as "Optimized for Xbox Series X|S". Almost everything for it also works on Xbox One, though, it does play Xbox One games smooth as butter. It's a fine console, there's just not a lot to say about it. There are no exclusives, due to everything launching on at least Windows Store. The new controller is a slightly revised Xbox One controller, and is very good.
The whole Xbox ecosystem right now is straightforward and unexciting. Their controllers are king when it comes to PC, but Windows Store (which for all intents and purposes is part of Xbox) is one of the worse ways to play PC games. It's not EGS bad, but it has its own special way of installing games in obtuse ways that make doing anything with them a major hassle. Even basic things like launching your game through Steam might not be possible, and even workaround software like UWPHook are temperamental. Here's an example of why all that sucks: Taiko no Tatsujin: The Drum Master is an Xbox & Windows Store exclusive, meaning it has a PC release, but it really is exclusive to Windows Store. It's not on Steam or anything else. Since it's from Windows Store, it installs in its special Universal Windows Platform way that keeps it from launching through Steam, and it doesn't support my USB Taiko drum controller natively. There is no Xbox-branded drum, and you can't remap the inputs on the Switch one in a way that works. Thanks, Universal Windows Platform™.
