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Inside the New Xbox Experience
Eurogamer has an in-depth look at the new Xbox Experience, which is coming on November 19th. They discuss the new interface and features, and their reaction is generally positive, citing graphical improvements, smooth file management, and better chat functionality.
"The Guide is also your access point to the new Party system, where you can gather eight of your friends together in a voice-chat channel and move the group between games. You don't even have to be doing the same thing: you can just chat along regardless. And because it's a service layer, it automatically works with all your existing games. Gears of War treats it like it's always been there. Instead of inviting a player, you invite the group; instead of ending a session and having to reassemble for another, you stay together. You can open it up to friends or set it to be invite-only, and while it's one of NXE's quieter additions, it's also its most authoritative statement: this is Microsoft saying, 'We figured we might need to do something like this, so we made sure we could.'"
The *one* feature I was interested in, install to hard disk, they only mentioned in passing, saying that "We haven't had long enough with NXE to gauge how much of an improvement installation is over playing off the disc, but we'll take a look in the coming weeks."
Thanks, that was the whole reason I read the stupid article.
more ad's more ad's! yes thats what consumers want! we like being horrored out!! oo yea baby! (i feel bad for the windows/MS minions some times.... man my country has gotten greedy... humm i should prolly clean up and load my guns beore this election uh? whelp i'm off...)
bored? try this http://jadmadi.net/blog/2005/01/27/linux-wine-how-to-running-windows-viruses-with-wine/
You know, I'm not going to take off points because a company is stealing a good idea and using it themselves rather than a worse idea. First of all, there are courts that take care of that. Second, innovation is good, but if one is clearly better than the other one, the worse one should go extinct. The next generation of consoles are probably all going to have motion controls, and there will be people who complain about ripping off the wii, but if we consumers get better games, better controls, better start menus, better ANYTHING, then I say rip off more.
I bet former SWG players cringe at that name.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
You know, I'm not going to take off points because a user is posting a good idea and using it themselves rather than a worse idea.
I just had to hop on here as an Xbox user from the first gen consoles. I love my 360, it doesn't read any optical discs other than DVD movies, but it made one hell of a media extender with Windows Media Connect 2.0 on Windows XP professional... Then I took a raw copy of XP slipstreamed some updates and Windows Media Player 11, did a reinstall (hey it had been 13 months)... Now I can't see anything from my 360's other than the one Vista PC on my network (it should be noted that by slipstreaming WMP11 I upgraded certain core files that prevented me from using WMC2.0). And not only that, .avi videos that used to play flawlessly under WMC 2.0 now stutter if they are playable at all. It's rather amazing how, atleast for me, Microsoft totally crapped out one of the greatest features of the Xbox by requiring Windows Media Player for media sharing. On another note, one I haven't tested extensively, it does seem my newest media sharing config has little if any problems with Windows Media files. Odd that...
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
...just tell me I don't *have* to create, use, or look at one of those retarded-looking avatars.
Other than this, it really feels like the driving force behind this is that they want more space for advertising.
Jerry Johnson insisted that a central tenet of the New Xbox Experience is "serendipitous discovery of content" - in other words, giving you stuff to do rather than expecting you to fire up the box with a plan already in mind - but after a few hours' use it's hard to shake the feeling that, among the more useful rows of panels showcasing the latest and most popular downloads, the new channels are simply a new wave of adverts that push beyond the old dashboard's capacity.
I'm going to throw you a warning, Microsoft, and you can take this from someone who has enjoyed using your consoles so far. You start barraging your best customers with adverts, even more than you're already doing (which is bordering on obnoxious already), and you're going to risk killing the lead you currently enjoy with your online services.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I use TVersity. It really works great and can play most videos I throw at it, and it will reencode the ones it can't play on the fly if you have the necessary hardware specs.
Get a Mac and install Connect360. Works flawlessly. :)
For the fanboys - I'm not seriously recommending he buy a Mac. Just a tongue-in-cheek comment based on the irony that my Mac works better with my 360 than his XP box.
The new party chat seems great but at 8 people it seems limited. How does it interact when you play games with more than 8 people. Does it work concurrently with whatever chat implementation the game provides or is it an either/or prospect - game chat or group chat but not both?
HDD install will be welcome and Netflix streaming will be welcome if/when they improve the awful selection available for instant viewing.
The avatar friends list thing does not seem practical. Hopefully there will be sorting by online status as an option to the alphabetic order thing.
BTW, if you are 30+ or so and prefer not playing with timmies and griefers but with folks your age with lives, jobs and families check out GeezerGamers. For me, it totally changed XBL from painful to fun.
And the Honda Civic experience will outsell the Dodge Ram experience so what's your point? They are two completely different audiences that have different gaming styles and preferences. I could care less about who's leading who. Any increase in gaming popularity benefits all gamers.
I'm not sold on the new avatar type stuff since I really just use the dashboard as a way to get into games or download content, not as a social networking site like MySpace or Facebook.
I do have to give Microsoft credit though for getting to market so quickly with what looks like a fairly large overhaul. Sony's Home make-over was announced in early 2007 and it is still in beta, while the new 360 experience will be out the middle of this month. Sony's setup may ultimately prove better - when it actually makes it to PS3 hard drives.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
after having it more than 2 years (just long enough for the warranty to expire) it gave me the Red Ring of Death. Also, the game Civilization Revolution was designed in such a way that it constantly accesses the CD, which in turn burns out the drive.. makes me wonder how they can release such crap.
I was hoping that we would get something more like the EyeToy, but that worked in a better range of situations. Maybe with multiple cameras? Then you could use it for cheap mocap :) Having controllers means you need either wires or batteries, and besides, you might break your tv :p
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As someone once told me "Good artists create, great artists steal"
Eat sleep die
I've heard (http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=665221) that this has been leaked. No live till the 19th though. At least I hope it's only until the 19th
Vice City.
Ok, without modding, or doing anything that would bring down the rath of microsoft (sorry! it's for a good cause though!) would it be possible for me to set up for my family, an easy way to access everything we would normally get off satellite (Fox News, Disney Channel... more news...) off of the new xbox live interface? The set up would like something like this: Xbox on Live hooked up to Windows Media Center Extender thingy, from which we could pull netflix, etc. But what about hulu? or other tv shows? Live streams from CNN, FOX, MSNBC? Come on! Any and all ideas! PLEASE!