My Views on the NXE

Well it has nearly been a week since the launch of the NXE and I’ve been having a little fiddle here and there with it. What is to follow are the accounts of my experience with The Experience.

Now please keep in mind that I: A) live in the UK B) Am only a Silver Account C) My Xbox is never continuously hooked up to the Internet (the last two are due to lack of funds which should be rectified soon…hopefully)

In the early hours of the 19th I was constantly checking for the update when I began to give up and opted to go to sleep in hopes that when I woke up it would be there, and it was. Phew! I was notified that there was an update and the installation began which took around 5-6 minutes (I don’t have the greatest speed, Internet-wise but it apparently works well enough) I was then greetedby what I feared would be the feature lacking the most; the Avatars, yet over the time I’ve been using it I’ve grown quite attached to the little fellow and keep going back to tweak him or give him new outfits. The outfits however are what keep the Avatar from shining, you can’t change the colours and it lacks a lot of difference, hopefully to get people more excited that there will be FREE outfit packs or at least some which can come from games, the coolness of wearing a Gears armor or a WWII helmet from Call of Duty: WAW would definitely be a lot to ask for but most certainly would sweeten the deal.

Another thing which could be free and have a lot of people getting attached to their Avatar would be “A Kingdom for Keflings”, when the Wii was released you got WiiSports and seeing yourself as a little person sort of deep down inside got you attached to it, so how are we supposed to feel that if we can only play a trial game and then be told we have to pay the same price for it as Duke Nukem 3D, it does not bode well.

The design of everything now gives the Xbox a nice new image and greatly improves the speed of things a lot especially the old dashboard within the guide button, it just seems a lot more friendly although it took me about an extra five minutes than it should have to work out how to change the theme (it’s in “My Xbox” now) On release day you could see blatant hiccups which can be explained by the amount of people downloading the update which is acceptable; at least LIVE didn’t crash completely.

Now here are the gripes which I will condense because it’s mainly because I’m not hooked up constantly and I’m a Silver: I can’t use the party system, why not, what if I wanna chat with some people before they go off and play games, it just seems strange and when you’re not hooked up, you have nothing really to look at and everything looks empty whereas the old dashboard just looked like a menu and it didn’t bother you that you weren’t hooked up, now the Inside Xbox tab and the marketplace look empty and you want those sub-tabs with the fancy pictures and easy access (I do like how when you are hooked up and insert a game disk if you don’t play immediately you are treated to a picture within the game, not just the box art)

Now here are the location gripes: Community Games and Netflix are missed out in the UK, yeah we don’t have Netflix here but hopefully Microsoft and LoveFilm will team up to provide a similar service, it’s a killer feature and we can only sit and wait for the Community Games to arrive to other places than the US.

I think that wraps most of it up for now, If I feel or am told that I’ve left something out then expect a littler blog entry. (Don’t be afraid to comment on what I’ve missed)

Oh. and installing Gears of War to the hard drive takes approx. 12 mins