New Xbox Experience Goes Live

Today, Microsoft launched the New Xbox Experience for Xbox Live. The list of new features includes the streaming of TV shows and movies through Netflix, the ability to install games to the HDD, an avatar system, and the Community Games platform. The launch itself was shaky at first, but most issues have been smoothed out. Sony-owned Columbia Pictures immediately pulled their movie selection, though it may return when a licensing deal gets worked out. Halo 3 developer Bungie pointed out that not all games will run faster when installed to a HDD because of the way the games already interact with the drive.

Comments

defectivebydesign

[robvangelder]

I'm so sick of this tag showing up under each microsoft article.
we're at 3 comments posted, and already the tag exists.

either installed by an alliance of hardcore slashdotters, or by the admins themselves.
the preferences bug prevents hiding tags. it feeds the conspiracy theorist in me.

either way, it smacks of the behaviour politicians employ just before losing an election.

Re:defectivebydesign

[MBraynard]

Tags on slashdot are non-functional. They are like the new joke, the new 'from the xxx dept' line.

New features rock.

[Frac O Mac]

Quite a few of them should have been implemented long ago but if nothing else, this makes the xbox just that much better. Its not mentioned in the summary but the new party system is awesome; I can chat with all my friends at the same time even if someone has to leave and come back, and we don't even have to go through all the menus. While this update may not be too newsworthy for many out there, for people like me who play their 360 far too much (left 4 dead ftw atm!) this is a huge increase in overall functionality.

Re:it's pants

[Frac O Mac]

The old blade system has been turned into the new guide menu, just with all the useless extras stripped out. While I myself don't like having to relearn where everything is, I think its an improvement overall.

Re:I love it but feel stupid for doing so

[AlexMax2742]

-We've gone from 5 tabs to 50+ screens. It's crap.

No, you've gone from 5 tabs to 5 main menu items, it's only that instead of going left to right it goes up and down.

-The menu defaults to the "showcase" channel, which advertises Microsoft's newest games. This means that Microsoft, not content with getting us to pay $300+ for a console and $50 / year for Live, feels the need to advertise to us every time we go to the dashboard.

Are you new to 360's in general? The OXE was cluttered with advertisements in more traditional form, banner ads. And I'm pretty sure the default menu item was the game I had in my DVD drive when I turned it on from a fresh start last night.

-Old themes port very poorly, stretched across the background in awkward ways.

Paid themes were for suckers anyway, they usually looked awful even in the old system. Is the NXE not a new enough theme for you?

-Haven't fixed the glaring file management bugs - it's not possible to do something like, say, delete 150 old Oblivion saves to reclaim disk space while keeping 5 of them without pressing 4 buttons for each individual savegame. Not a problem until you realize they're over a megabyte apiece, and on a 20gb hard disk this adds up fast.

I might be mad except for the fact that one of my biggest issues with the old system, the way it loaded the list of arcade games you had installed, has in fact been 100% fixed. Personally, I play my games far more often than I delete saves, so I can understand if their engineers put priority on different things (and avoid playing awful games like Oblivion period).

Overall, I'm a huge fan of the NXE because it makes the interface a good deal more responsive. The old blade system seemed to always be one or two steps behind you and I was never a big fan of its stylings, and now it feels quite polished and slick.