 This is David with The Verge and this is Microsoft's Xbox One. Yes, it's a games console, the successor to the Xbox 360, which is now showing its age eight years after its launch. But it's also something much bigger, much more ambitious. The Xbox One is Microsoft's way of attaching itself to every single thing you do in your living room. It's a gaming machine, a set-top box, a cable box, and a computer all rolled into one $499 device. For all it's trying to do, the box itself isn't much to look at. It's not ugly so much as it is just boring. It looks like the ultimate sci-fi evolution of a VCR, or at least how people in the 80s would have imagined it. Part glossy, part vented, and all very black and boxy and humongous. There's a disk drive on the left side, a glowing capacitive Xbox logo power button on the front, and really nothing else to see. It's not pretty or well designed like the PlayStation 4. It's just a box for all the many parts of the Xbox One. With the new box comes a new controller. The Xbox One controller feels absolutely identical to the Xbox 360's gamepad, except in the ways it feels better. It has clicky D-pad buttons where the 360 had mushy ones, and has smoother triggers and a smaller bump for the removable battery. But if you've been using a 360, it will take exactly no time to get used to the new controller. There's a little more texture on the grips and a little less on the analog sticks, though they're still grippy thanks to new rims around their circular edges, and the whole controller has a higher, more curved profile. The glowing Xbox button takes you home from anywhere you are, and Start and Select have been replaced by the occasionally confusing view and menu buttons. The coolest new feature is the controller's impulse triggers, which are hyper-specific vibrations that fit whatever game you're playing. In Forza, it's made to feel like you're actually holding a steering wheel in a fast-moving car. It's really jarring and only exists in a few places anyway, but it's something developers are definitely going to make use of. Setting up the Xbox is a long, somewhat complicated process, and it does take a while, but Microsoft does a good job of guiding you through the many configurations, updates, and options. Basically, you're setting up a gaming machine, a universal remote, and a PC all at the same time. It's definitely worth taking the time to do right. When you turn on the Xbox One, you'll see a very similar tiled interface to anyone you would see on any other Windows 8 PC. It's pretty and colorful and customizable. Different users can have different colors and different layouts, and as soon as you sit down, the Xbox recognizes you and adapts everything to your particular setup. Actually, that part's important, because while this is very much built like a Windows PC, with an 8-core AMD Jaguar CPU, 8 gigs of RAM, and a 500 gig hard drive, it's not designed to be used with a mouse and keyboard, or with a touch screen. It's designed to be used with your controller, but mostly with your voice. That happens through the new Kinect, the astonishingly powerful and accurate device that comes with every Xbox One. You don't have to use Kinect, but you should. It's what automatically recognizes you and signs you in, what makes getting around the operating system much easier than it would be otherwise. You say Xbox On to turn the console on, and the Xbox boots up. From there, the two commands I used most were Xbox Watch, followed by the name of a TV channel, like ESPN or MTV, and Xbox Go To, followed by any app, game, menu, or option on the device. As long as you're in a quiet, small room, the voice controls work pretty well, but if there are any other people, other noises, or just any echo, it starts to get really problematic. It felt like half the time it took me two or even three or four tries to get the Xbox One to recognize commands, and it didn't always get them right, either. You also have to learn the particular cadence. Xbox Go Home works, but Xbox Home doesn't. There's a big learning curve here, especially for things like navigating in the browser or snapping Skype calls to the side of your screen, but it's worth figuring out. It's partly worth figuring out because the alternative, doing everything with your controller, is kind of awkward. It's just way easier to say Xbox Watch ESPN and then Xbox Play Lococycle. At least it's easier when it works. Microsoft has said that developing apps for the new console will be really easy, but we haven't really seen the fruits of that yet, other than Skype. Skype's integrated with the Kinect, and thanks to its wide, high-res camera and impressive microphone, it's a pretty fantastic experience to just sit on your couch and talk to someone. Otherwise, for now there's really just the standard set of media apps. Netflix and Hulu, Amazon and HBO Go, ESPN and the NFL, plus apps for channels like Fox and FX. The potential here is huge, and most of the apps work really well, but so far the experience feels pretty much like a faster Xbox 360. Actually, like the 360 only better is a bit of a theme for the Xbox One, at least at the beginning. Even the best games on the console, like Forza Motorsport 5, Dead Rising 3, and Rise, Son of Rome, don't feel like something completely new and different. They're gorgeous, with better graphics and amazing detail, but they just feel like the best yet, not a huge leap forward. And like the PlayStation 4, the Xbox One has a large group of third-party titles. You've got your Battlefields, Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, and of course all your sports games. Where the experience differs from the PS4 is the Kinect, and again, it's like the 360's but better. Kinect's exclusive titles fall into two very predictable categories. Full-on fitness trainers, and fitness trainers masked as arcade games like Just Dance and Kinect Sports Rivals. Xbox Fitness in particular is really fun, and is a great demonstration of how eerily accurate the new Kinect sensor is. Zoo Tycoon also uses Kinect a lot, and it's a surprisingly immersive and adorably cute simulator. The fun does wear off after a while, but it's a really cool example of how uniquely you can game with the Xbox One. Ultimately, the biggest way Kinect will come into play is how it can add to games. Games like Dead Rising 3 require you to literally shake your controller when a zombie grabs you, or shout things like, over here, to get a crowd's attention. Of course, if you don't like shouting and shaking, you can just turn it off in settings. With other games, any Kinect functionality was limited to leaning past walls or some kind of rudimentary voice commands. It's nothing that feels forced, and in this case is mostly additive and optional. But it's only going to get better and more interesting over time. The part of the Xbox One experience with the most room to grow, where Microsoft is clearly betting on the future rather than the present, is its TV integration. Right now, it's kind of a mess. Connecting channels with your voice is great, but it doesn't always work, and even when it does, it's just a series of Xbox menus over top of your cable boxes menus, with no clear indication of what's going on. And it's all happening through an IR blaster, old and cumbersome technology that doesn't make a good experience for anyone. It's not actually controlling your TV, it's just sending the commands for 7, 3, and 5 to get to channel 735. That means it doesn't work if you're in a menu, it doesn't work if you're slightly misaligned, it's really just a mess. It doesn't support Dolby Digital yet, either, which means no surround sound, which means I won't be plugging it into my cable box anytime soon. Really the best thing the Xbox One offers right now is that you don't have to switch inputs between the Xbox and your cable box. That's kind of the whole point, and switching from TV to game is really easy. But even then, the console takes a few seconds to turn on, freezes when switching channels sometimes, and every once in a while, the TV app would just crash and thus everything was broken. Everything else the Xbox One offers on top of your TV experience, the app channels and the awkward, overlaid playback controls, are really better left alone. For now, anyway, if Microsoft can integrate better and actually replace your set-top box instead of just being a middleman between it and your TV, it could be really great. That's really the story of the Xbox One. It's trying to do so much, it has so many good ideas. Of course having a computer underneath my TV is great, and of course I hate my set-top box, and of course I want to switch between games and ESPN and even do both at the same time. But right now, none of that works as well as it should. The voice control is just good enough that I want to use it all the time, but so inconsistent that I can't possibly do so. The Xbox One is a great game console, absolutely, and out of the gate there are more good games like Rise and Forza than on the PS4. But that's not what Microsoft is going for. If you're buying a console right now, for right now, it's purely a decision based on games. Pick the one with the games you want to play and buy that. One, two, five years from now, that might change and Microsoft might have a big, wide offering with everything from great games to the greatest set-top box ever. But there's a long, difficult road to that point, and I can only pass the time killing zombies for so long.