Hands on with the New Xbox Experience

Xbox 360 owners were gracious yesterday as they were able to download the New Xbox Experience, a redesign of the 360's dashboard. The update also promised to make the dashboard more navigable and user friendly, while also making the entire experience more flashy and less bog-standard. For the most part, it works especially well.

Gone are the blades that needed to be scrolled through with the shoulder buttons or analog sticks at a merely-acceptable speed, and in their place comes a template whose core function is much faster paced. Upon an initial inspection, it looks like something that would be all flash and no substance -- this is Microsoft we're talking about (hi, Vista!) -- but it surprisingly has the substance to back it up. OK, there were some connection issues on the Marketplace whenever I wanted to download something, but those were just initial issues. I'm surprised there weren't any wide reports about the thing RRODing consoles across the world, though I'm also thankful that didn't happen.

Coming with the update are a number of new features. The biggest one is installing games to the Hard Drive, which will help lessen the load times in some games and make the system quieter during game play. I'm currently going though Conan, so I installed that to see if it would run better. The instillation was surprisingly speedy for a 6 GB game. I didn't notice too much of a change in the load times, but it was worth it for keeping the system from being as noisy as usual. Unfortunately, I only have a 20 GB drive, so I lack the ability to install a number of games at one time; and the complete ability to install massive games like Blue Dragon (at around 19 GB) and Lost Odyssey, the latter of which demands 23.2 GB of space to store four discs of content. 

As usual, it's the little touches that really count, and they're here in spades. Have you ever had the problem of waiting for game descriptions of Xbox Live Arcade titles to scroll down in very slow motion? Well that's a thing of the past, as you can browse through them with the right analog stick. I'm surprised that they addressed this, seeing as how it wasn't regarded as a huge problem, even though it was damned annoying whenever I wanted to see the full description of a title.

One of the minor-though-unfortunate aspects of having a new template are your now-useless older background themes, which don't look too good now that the background images are obscured by the actual template. Fortunately, there are new premium themes available for download that are specially tailored for the new template. Unfortunately, they'll cost you around $2.50 a pop. Some new themes come with it, so you can settle for those if you prefer.

Oh, and there's also the ability to create your own avatar. That's...great, I think. The current customization options are rather minimal, but Microsoft promised that updates are going to be coming within the next six months. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. Meanwhile, my current avatar kind of looks like me, except I'm a little fatter.

Overall, Microsoft did a pretty good job with this. A few hitches are to be expected with a new program launching, especially if it's from a company that released Windows ME and Vista (though this isn't even in the same ballpark as those). Browsing the Marketplace is actually a pleasure now with the number of pictures accompanying every game and the ability to manually browse through the descriptions.