In June 2009, as a reward for completing middle school with great grades, my parents gifted me a brand new Xbox 360. The grades slipped after that, but I digress.

Fast forward to almost six years later, and that same Xbox 360 is alive and kicking it. Well, barely. The disk tray jams from time to time, and the disk drive barely works anymore.

Plus the HDMI output stopped working about two years ago, and the external wireless adapter I had to purchase before it became a built-in feature of newer Xbox 360’s (RIP $120) has barely worked since I bought it. And my hard drive died, so I recently lost five and a half years of game data, making me resort to saving all my games on a flash drive.

So yeah, I guess you could say my Xbox has seen better days. But, it does still work, even if only just.

Unfortunately, that is not all of my frustration. Adding to the hardware malfunctions, over the past six years I have had to spend a significant amount of money on batteries for controllers and a $60 yearly fee just to play the games online with friends. Not to mention countless system updates to fix an OS problem that ended up creating two more problems.

That being said, I have sunk too many hours, days, weeks, months, etc. into playing games to only speak badly about the thing that runs said games.

I have spent enough hours playing games to become way too good at some of them. First “Guitar Hero” (at which I became so good it is slightly embarrassing), then the “EA Skate” franchise, next “Call of Duty,” “FIFA Soccer” games, and most recently the “Grand Theft Auto” series.

Even if the hardware has problems, it has been my gateway to lots of fun, and to becoming even more of a hermit. However, with this console almost kicking the bucket, I will be glad to spend $400 to replace it with its newer and hopefully physically superior counterpart, the Xbox One.

Grade: B

To contact Clayton Mitchell, email sportswriter@occc.edu