- Upgraded the interface
- Improved sound effects
- Added Avatars...
- Increased prices
- Added the ability to install games on the hard drive
Of those, one of them is really cool. Starting with the new interface... It reminds me a lot of navigating around the menus in my PSP. To be fair, this is an interface that is very similar to Windows Media Center as well as the PSP, but my first experience with such an interface was with Sony's portable system, so that's where my comparison will stay. It is much cleaner, faster, and it's easier to find things, especially on XBox Live. Gone are the days of sifting through pages of games in the Marketplace to find your game for which you'd like to download content. For games without a built-in game store (thank god Rock Band implemented one of these), this is a real time-saver.
The new sounds are aurally pleasing, but they are seriously exactly the same as the menu sounds from Sony's Gran Turismo series.
Avatars... where do I begin? Who here has played with a Wii? Show of hands. How many have made a Mii? You know the interface you use to make a Mii, complete with little squares used to show you the option you're selecting and quiet, cutesy music in the background? Well, port an interface that is eerily similar with comparable queit, cutesy music in the background to the 360, and BAM! you have XBox 360 Avatars. This feature annoys me to no end, because it utterly lacks originality. The Avatars are cartoonish (not quite as bad as Miis, but not nearly as mature as those found in the PS3s upcoming Home feature) and cheesy (I like that word today), which is a mistake as far as XBox 360's core audience is concerned. The 360's main audience is composed of people who like the more mature content (read: first- and third-person shooters, action/adventure) that the 360 offers in spades over the Wii. These folks, in my opinion, would prefer to have more mature Avatars. The next time my idiotic Avatar jumps up with a stupid grin on his face and waves at me, I'm going to boot him in the face. Or shoot him with some friggin lazers [(c) Jason Howell]. At least I don't have to use his goofy mug as my gamer picture...
Oh, and if that wasn't bad enough, Wired has described Microsoft's plan to release more content to use when creating you Avatar (the current selection is, well, lacking). The problem with this? Extra create-an-avatar goodies will cost money!!! Given that I could seriously care less about my Avatar, you can count me out of that purchase.
On the money note, "premium" themes are now offered for your Dashboard. Really they're just themes designed to work specifically with NXE. Older themes seem to work just fine, as my The Dark Knight theme doesn't have any issues. However, these new themes (which will likely become the standard theme offering) have gone from 160MP ($2.00) to 250MP ($3.12). Note to Microsoft: now is probably not the best time to arbitrarily raise prices on optional content, even if you did take the time to add the word "Premium" in the title of said content.
Finally, NXE gives users the option to install any game onto the hard drive. This is supposed to make the installed games run both faster and quieter. I can certainly attest to the fact that loaded games run quieter. Without having to query the DVD for every little thing, there's very little spinup and spindown. I can actually run a game at low volumes when my room mate is sleeping and still hear what is going on. As for faster... not so much. That can be attributed in many ways to lack of development for this feature. Once developers start coding for games installed on hard drives, load times will likely decrease sharply. In the meantime, a word of caution. Some games may actually run slower once installed. IGN is reporting that Halo 3 will run slower once installed than if it was running off the CD.
Basically, Halo 3 uses a special partition of the Xbox 360 hard drive as scratch memory to quickly load maps. Because it's pulling data from one device (the DVD drive) and copying it to another (the HDD) the software can do both at once. But when the game is installed solely to the hard drive, it can't easily perform both operations simultaneously and thus the process is slowed down significantly.Bungie has confirmed this and is "advising that Halo 3 players do not install the game to their HDD." The full rundown, complete with all the techspeak you can wrap your brain around, can be found on Bungie.net.
I personally like the feature, because I see lots of future value, and anything that helps the obnoxiously loud 360 run quieter is fine in my book.
As a whole, NXE is a good upgrade from the previous Dashboard. Avatars are underwhelming, and there's nothing particularly innovative about it, but it does add much-needed functionality, make things look and sound better, and make navigating the XBox Live Marketplace much easier.
Score: 7.0
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