Teksuo
11-17-2008, 01:14 PM
After playing with the NXE for a few days, I thought it'd be nice to post a little review up about it. Before my friends and I got into the NXE Preview, it was honestly the most anticipated thing I'd been waiting for all year, even more than Gears 2, Soul Calibur IV, anything. Now that, I have it, I can say, with a big ass smile...it was soooo worth the wait.
It's hard to nail anything as "the biggest change" since this is like going from 2D Mario to 3D Mario; fundamentals are the same but it's a whole new beast entirely. The new system is fast, fluid, and very pretty. Everything loads incredibly quick and scrolling through menus is far more streamlined. Menus are much easier to read now thanks to new color scheme.
For those of you who bought the Premium Themes for Gears of War 2, you're in for a treat; those premium themes when applied to the new dashboard give your Friends List channel a spiffy new look, showing off your friends and their avatars in front of battegrounds, vehicles, cover points, and more. The NXE comes with four premium backgrounds, with more on the way. For example, the Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix (damn you, Capcom and your convoluted titles!!!) theme looks pretty nice, highlighting Ryu's Dojo stage as the main background.
Also, when selecting a theme, you now no longer have to apply the theme in order to preview it; you can scroll through the list, and it will automatically show you what the main background is going to look like when you hit apply.
The only real drawback here is the spherical horizon you have at the bottom half of your screen; it makes it harder to chose background images that work well with the new dashboard. Also, there's no way to change the color of the horizon manually, only by changing the theme. In a weird way, it feels like they took out a little of the customization here, but when you see how well much of the other elements work, it's forgivable.
When you go to the marketplace, for example, and you want to look up a game like Soul Calibur IV; it used to be you had to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the list if you searched for it under All Games. Now, you can search for things in by alphabetical order; rather than scrolling all the way down to S, you just select S and look through there.
Once you get to the soul calibur page, there's a wealth of information about the game you never had before. Where the old dashboard only had a little bit of scrolling text and some trailers, you know have the scrolling text, screenshots that you can browse, dates related to when content was posted, and a "Featured Downloads" section that highlights new and popular downloads; especially handy for games that have a hefty load of support like Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
If you like the old blade system, don't worry, it's still there. When you hit your guide button; rather than having a blade come out from the side of your screen, you have a blade system, very similar to that of the old dashboard, appear in the center of your screen. From here, you can access friends list, messages, chats and IMs, along with 2 quick launch features and your party.
The quick launch let's you pull any game that's on your harddrive and an run it from your guide blades, rather than having you go all the way to the games section of you dashboard.
The party feature allows you party up with up to 8 players in chat through your dashboard, which means you're no longer stuck talking to just one person in PC, or having to get everyone in a game together if all you want to do is sit around talk. Go to your friends list once you're all partied up, and see your avatars chilling together as a group. Get enough of them together and they begin to interact with each other; randomly turning to each other to talk, doing the wave, little goofy stuff like that. It's sickeningly cute at times, and gives the 360 an almost Sims like quality.
One possible annoyance is if you have someone who's constantly sending voice messages to someone outside the party, the system alerts you when someone has left and rejoined the party every time they send a message. However, unlike the dashboard of old; the system now drops you back into last chat channel you were in. If you're private chatting with a friend and you send a voice message, you no longer have to manually rejoin the chat.
Other little things have been fixed here and there, such as when someone signs on, it no longer pulls up their profile when you hit the guide button. No more accidentally pulling up RandomFriend's profile when all you want to do is pull up your playlist.
New to the NXE also is the addition of Netflix; if you've got a netflix account you can download a small app from the dashboard that lets you play movies from your netflix streaming queue right on your 360.
Lastly, the 2 big features I'm sure everyone wants to try; Installing games to your harddrive and the Avatars.
Installing games is something that's primarily going to be geared towards those with 60gb or 120gb hard drive. The rest of us still rocking a 20gb...yeah, you might get one game on there if you're lucky. There is a noticeable difference in load times. Gears 2 for example; if you've ever had that issue where your textures sometimes take forever to load in and you see the odd, lumpy, fuzzy models and backgrounds for a few moments? Yeah, that's damn near gone. You might see it for maybe a second, but when you do, it's rare.
Plus, it also makes your system a hell of a lot more quiet. Playing Gears from the hard drive felt like I was playing a Gear of War 2 demo, rather than the actual game, my system was so quiet.
As for the Avatars, Avatars are a great edition to the 360, giving you a virtual face in your little corner of the Xbox Live community. The editor is and fun to use, though, I do wish they had a few more choices in hair styles. It was hard to get my little Mini-Me one that really matched my usual look, and ended up settling on second closest thing I could find which looks like a mini-fro.
Clothing options are a little sparse at the moment, but there are supposed to be more on the way soon, along with an Avatar Store coming in the spring that will give you more clothes and such to further pimp out your avatar.
You can take a picture of your avatar and make him or her your gamerpic. While in the camera mode you can rotate Ava-You, play with different emotions, even make him burp by clicking the right thumb stick and changing the pitch of the belch by tilting his head around. :D
While there isn't anything out at the moment that fully takes advantage of your little virtual clones, there will be games coming in the near future that allow you to actually play as your avatar, as well use them in game (such Scene It 2 and UNO which are going to see patches that allow you to use your avatars in game).
All in all, I think the NXE is looking like it's going to be one of the greatest things Microsoft has every done for the 360 and the community, and it really shows that they've listed to a lot of the complaints and suggestions people have had about the console. The New Xbox Experience hits everyone's console on Wednesday, November 19th, and so far? It gets 5 burping avatars...out of 5. :mvdj:
It's hard to nail anything as "the biggest change" since this is like going from 2D Mario to 3D Mario; fundamentals are the same but it's a whole new beast entirely. The new system is fast, fluid, and very pretty. Everything loads incredibly quick and scrolling through menus is far more streamlined. Menus are much easier to read now thanks to new color scheme.
For those of you who bought the Premium Themes for Gears of War 2, you're in for a treat; those premium themes when applied to the new dashboard give your Friends List channel a spiffy new look, showing off your friends and their avatars in front of battegrounds, vehicles, cover points, and more. The NXE comes with four premium backgrounds, with more on the way. For example, the Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix (damn you, Capcom and your convoluted titles!!!) theme looks pretty nice, highlighting Ryu's Dojo stage as the main background.
Also, when selecting a theme, you now no longer have to apply the theme in order to preview it; you can scroll through the list, and it will automatically show you what the main background is going to look like when you hit apply.
The only real drawback here is the spherical horizon you have at the bottom half of your screen; it makes it harder to chose background images that work well with the new dashboard. Also, there's no way to change the color of the horizon manually, only by changing the theme. In a weird way, it feels like they took out a little of the customization here, but when you see how well much of the other elements work, it's forgivable.
When you go to the marketplace, for example, and you want to look up a game like Soul Calibur IV; it used to be you had to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the list if you searched for it under All Games. Now, you can search for things in by alphabetical order; rather than scrolling all the way down to S, you just select S and look through there.
Once you get to the soul calibur page, there's a wealth of information about the game you never had before. Where the old dashboard only had a little bit of scrolling text and some trailers, you know have the scrolling text, screenshots that you can browse, dates related to when content was posted, and a "Featured Downloads" section that highlights new and popular downloads; especially handy for games that have a hefty load of support like Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
If you like the old blade system, don't worry, it's still there. When you hit your guide button; rather than having a blade come out from the side of your screen, you have a blade system, very similar to that of the old dashboard, appear in the center of your screen. From here, you can access friends list, messages, chats and IMs, along with 2 quick launch features and your party.
The quick launch let's you pull any game that's on your harddrive and an run it from your guide blades, rather than having you go all the way to the games section of you dashboard.
The party feature allows you party up with up to 8 players in chat through your dashboard, which means you're no longer stuck talking to just one person in PC, or having to get everyone in a game together if all you want to do is sit around talk. Go to your friends list once you're all partied up, and see your avatars chilling together as a group. Get enough of them together and they begin to interact with each other; randomly turning to each other to talk, doing the wave, little goofy stuff like that. It's sickeningly cute at times, and gives the 360 an almost Sims like quality.
One possible annoyance is if you have someone who's constantly sending voice messages to someone outside the party, the system alerts you when someone has left and rejoined the party every time they send a message. However, unlike the dashboard of old; the system now drops you back into last chat channel you were in. If you're private chatting with a friend and you send a voice message, you no longer have to manually rejoin the chat.
Other little things have been fixed here and there, such as when someone signs on, it no longer pulls up their profile when you hit the guide button. No more accidentally pulling up RandomFriend's profile when all you want to do is pull up your playlist.
New to the NXE also is the addition of Netflix; if you've got a netflix account you can download a small app from the dashboard that lets you play movies from your netflix streaming queue right on your 360.
Lastly, the 2 big features I'm sure everyone wants to try; Installing games to your harddrive and the Avatars.
Installing games is something that's primarily going to be geared towards those with 60gb or 120gb hard drive. The rest of us still rocking a 20gb...yeah, you might get one game on there if you're lucky. There is a noticeable difference in load times. Gears 2 for example; if you've ever had that issue where your textures sometimes take forever to load in and you see the odd, lumpy, fuzzy models and backgrounds for a few moments? Yeah, that's damn near gone. You might see it for maybe a second, but when you do, it's rare.
Plus, it also makes your system a hell of a lot more quiet. Playing Gears from the hard drive felt like I was playing a Gear of War 2 demo, rather than the actual game, my system was so quiet.
As for the Avatars, Avatars are a great edition to the 360, giving you a virtual face in your little corner of the Xbox Live community. The editor is and fun to use, though, I do wish they had a few more choices in hair styles. It was hard to get my little Mini-Me one that really matched my usual look, and ended up settling on second closest thing I could find which looks like a mini-fro.
Clothing options are a little sparse at the moment, but there are supposed to be more on the way soon, along with an Avatar Store coming in the spring that will give you more clothes and such to further pimp out your avatar.
You can take a picture of your avatar and make him or her your gamerpic. While in the camera mode you can rotate Ava-You, play with different emotions, even make him burp by clicking the right thumb stick and changing the pitch of the belch by tilting his head around. :D
While there isn't anything out at the moment that fully takes advantage of your little virtual clones, there will be games coming in the near future that allow you to actually play as your avatar, as well use them in game (such Scene It 2 and UNO which are going to see patches that allow you to use your avatars in game).
All in all, I think the NXE is looking like it's going to be one of the greatest things Microsoft has every done for the 360 and the community, and it really shows that they've listed to a lot of the complaints and suggestions people have had about the console. The New Xbox Experience hits everyone's console on Wednesday, November 19th, and so far? It gets 5 burping avatars...out of 5. :mvdj: