So the NXE (New Xbox Experience) finally got its official debut yesterday replacing the old “blades” dashboard with a visually slick update. I’m sure Microsoft’s Live servers were being hammered all day and were probably groaning under the pressure but I must say that from a personal perspective the update was painless, and surprisingly quick – clocking in at about 10 minutes to download and install. A time I thought was an impressive feat for such a major system update that was concurrently rolled out worldwide.
After the brief but flamboyant video lauding a whole new experience I got down to the nitty-gritty of creating my avatar. The process itself is simple to use but I’m slightly disappointed with the initial selection of features and clothing options available. For me, the creative flexibility on offer feels far more limiting than say its most obvious comparable counterpart the Nintendo “Mii”. But, I’m sure it’s not going to be too long before we see some premium content popping up on Xbox Live Marketplace that will allow further avatar personalisation and customisation. I do however like the overall artistic direction of the avatars finding them to be a nice balance between the extremes of the overly cute and the ultra realistic.
As always there’s going to be a slight learning curve when presented with any new system and NXE is no different. Overall though, I’ve found it to be intuitive and it’s certainly no more difficult to navigate then the old dashboard. Having the fallback of being able to use the “X” guide controller button to bring up a miniature mock “blade” dashboard in the center of the screen is a nice feature and it’s certainly better than having that monstrous left side bar menu screen appear.
Personally speaking the biggest boon for me is the ability to install games to the hard drive. I’ve been looking forward to this ability since it was first announced and after a brief tour of the new dashboard I installed Gears of War 2 to the hard-drive. The speed difference may be negligible on fully optimised games, but the noise reduction is amazing!
And finally I’m now able to delete all those damn arcade trial games with zero gamerscore that have been cluttering up my achievement list for the last three years from the system by simply highlighting the game from within the list and selecting “Delete Game History”.
So far I’m impressed with what Microsoft have delivered with the NXE. There appears to be the odd fault or two that needs to be ironed out, like the occasional error message when attempting to view some content, but it’s a step (or maybe even a jump) forward in the right direction.
