Xbox Live's First Big Update

GameDaily reports on the first major Xbox Live update since the launch of the Xbox 360. From the article: "The forthcoming update will bring with it a number of additions designed to enhance the user experience, with perhaps the most notable function being the download manager. Currently, when downloading demos, trailers or other items from Marketplace users are tied to the download screen. The update will enable users to queue up and prioritize up to six downloads and users will be allowed to play music, games or do other things on the dashboard while downloads are in progress. If an online game is started, the current download in progress will be paused so as to avoid lag." For the visual among us, Joystiq has a number of screenshots showing off some of the new features.

Comments

The question is, of course, when?

[PSXer]

I've known about this update for at least a couple of weeks (saw it on the Beyond3D forum), but still no release date. Shame.

Guess I'll just have to keep checking every five minutes.

Other features

[PSXer]

Looks like they've seperated game videos from demos. No more looking at the listing for a game and thinking "Hmm, 3 downloads, that's probably a 480p video, 720p video, and a demo, but there's only one way to find out"

Also, you can choose to have it boot to the dashboard instead of loading the game automatically. Great for those of us who paid $400 for "next gen grafx, d00d" but got addicted to Xbox Live Arcade games

Speaking of XBL Arcade, it's not mentioned in the article, but I hope they fix that interface. When you go to the menu, it takes like 15 seconds to count all the arcade games you have downloaded and to show you the one you last played, which makes the "last played" timesaver useless. Oddly, if you go to the list of arcade games you downloaded it shows you no problem, so I don't know what'w up with that.