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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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm slightly embarassed to say it, but I really like the update.
I love the streaming videos more than I probably should. In fact, I'm going to say I love it for the exact reasons I play games on the console rather than the PC in the first place: I don't like messing around with the PC settings at all when I'm trying to entertain myself. The netflix streaming videos didn't work instantly on my PC and I never bothered with it again, on the console it worked immediately. Call that laziness if you want, I'll just turn around and call you something else.
I was entertained for about 10 minutes with making an avatar even though it was a blatant ripoff of the wii and somehow cheesier.
The running games on the hard drive on the other hand was a letdown, as Halo immediately told me I should not be running the game off the HDD. For offline games it still sounds like a good thing, as the disc drive on those things crap out frequently.
The new menu is really a tossup and not that important either way.
My god, someone at MS found the wonder of the alphabet!!!
Honestly, browsing to find DLC is now easy as you don't have to scroll through every game to find the game that you want, you just click on the letter then find the game. That, to me, is by far the NXE's best feature.
But I have to admit after 30mins or so of playing around, getting used to where everything had moved to and customising it it's growing on me.
The party system is a nice touch, being able to join a group voice chat with a bunch of friends then taking that group into whatever game you all decide to play is pretty cool. You can make parties private or public with the latter allowing you to jump into an existing party on your friends list, see what they're doing and join a game they may be playing.
Community games wasn't working right for me last night, but what I saw looked decent.
There's a few minor changes people have wanted for a while such as being able to remove zero achievement games such as trials you never went on to buy or games that turned out to be crap that would previously just clutter your achievements/played games list.
The avatar thing isn't bad, although it doesn't really seem to be overly useful yet, apparently the true extent of it's usefulness is still to come. Unfortunately my first attempt at creating an avatar ended up looking like Stalin, and the second like Hitler so I think we need more customization of them, I think this came down to there being a severe lack of shorter hairstyles, apparently Microsoft think 99% of the population have pony tails or just generally long hair whether male or female. Still I did come out with an avatar that looked fairly normal at the end of it but unfortunately as my friend pointed out you can't in fact have green skin.
It's certainly more responsive, some people complaining that now only one of the theme pics you bought gets used rather than one per blade and you can't choose which. I can see why this would be annoying for anyone that paid for a theme but also I can't help but snigger to myself that they were foolish enough to spend money on a theme in the first place.
Old gamerpics can still be used contrary to popular belief, you just have to change back to them after creating your avatar.
So right now to sum up, it's certainly not groundbreaking and it definitely doesn't do anything to make the experience worse. All the useful new features are nice, but nothing that couldn't have come in with the old dashboard whilst all the not-so useful new features such as avatar makes interesting fluff at least if nothing else. Effectively I think it's an attempt to reach out to female and casual gamers with this sort of stuff and the games that will use avatars which is fair enough and it doesn't really infringe on their hardcore gamer userbase either- they will at least appreciate the party system and just jump into game without ever really using the dashboard much. So yeah, good but not in any way groundbreaking, at least yet anyhow, maybe some of the up and coming avatar related stuff will be as cool as Microsoft are telling us or maybe it simply wont. As long as they don't try and make me run round with my avatar in Gears of War 2 or whatever I'll be happy!
I'd be really curious to know how they are able to release an update that adds some quite significant features without having to charge for the update. Every time Apple brings out new features on the iPhone, they charge iPod Touch owners for that same update claiming that the Sarbanes-Oxley act means they cant add the features for free (with some sort of contract loophole for the iphone ).
Perhaps Microsoft could let Apple know what their accountants are doing that Apple's cant figure out.
TIAEAE!
Dude, Microsoft has been offering free memory cards and cheap hard drives to folks just like you: http://www.xboxstorageupgrade.com/ ... If your system's serial #/console id check out as "arcade," then MS will offer you a 20GB hard drive and 3 months of XBL Gold for $30. Not free, but not shabby, either.
HDD Upgrade Program
I was fully gung-ho as soon as I read I'd be able to run my 360 at my monitor's native resolution (1680x1050). Yes, it's letterboxed (very slightly), but I can finally play stuff at the proper aspect ratio, and without any excessive smoothing performed by the monitor itself.
After using NXE for a few hours, it was obvious that the entire system is just better. The navigation, the organization, the amount of information displayed....everything is better.
Despite what the first poster said, Arcade games are easier to get to. AND, you can remove demos/zero gamerscore games from your history. Just that alone is worth the download.
No reason to lie.