The New Xbox Experience is clean, smooth, and very Web 2.0. I love how they retained the blade system in the new guide and the Netflix streaming is easy, beautiful, and works flawlessly. The ability to install games is nice, not great or earth shattering, but nice. Now I can play games without having to hear my loud-ass 360 disk spin up. The avatars are more hip and fun than Mii’s, and definitely less Japanese (which is a good thing). I haven’t tried parties yet (I don’t personally play many games that use parties), but it looks fun and very polished.

The Bad

Netflix WHY CAN I ONLY WATCH THINGS IN MY INSTANT QUEUE?!?! WHY CANT I BROWSE FOR THINGS TO WATCH?!? This is a big hang up for me. Before this came out, I used a plugin for Windows Media Center to watch “Watch It Now” movies on our tv. This was handy because we would often just browse for an old movie we haven’t seen in a long time and watch it. Now on the 360 we have to have everything we want to watch in our Instant Queue. This works great for TV shows, becasue you can just go to each one quickly and see the episodes you’ve watched and watch the next one, but if you are in the mood for something unexpeceted the system leaves you somewhat helpless.

Installing games is nice for the disk noise, but other than that the feature is totally worthless. I was hoping I would be able to install a game and then play it without the disk. This would be handy for games like Madden 09 where I’m always playing it, but the wife might have a movie in the disk drive or I’m playing another game from Gamefly. No such luck, the 360 requires you have the game disk IN THE DRIVE when you play it from the hard drive. This would be okay if installing to the HD had any tangible benefit (such as loading faster, etc) but it doesn’t. Load times are identical to when you are playing from the disk. I hope in the future they will allow you to install to the HD and only require you put the disk in once a week so there is a healthy mix of security/anti-piracy and convenience to consumers.

While the avatars have more clothes customization than the Mii’s, the faces of avatars have about 1/5 the customization ability of Mii’s. My avatar has a bear that covers half of his mouth, but I cant’ move his mouth down to fix it.

The Ugly

Avatars are a stupid Mii rip off and completely unneccessary. While they have pros and cons compared to Mii’s, they are still dumb in my opinion.

The new slide system is just annoying. I have a hard time finding things and sometimes will be completely over to the right on a slide line and have no idea where i was originially. They tried to mimic thier UI for Windows Media Center and I think it is a flawed model.

So what do you folks think of the NXE?

My thoughts: VERSUS MODE IS FUN AS HELL. Nothing beats being an infected setting up an ambush on the survivors. I personally like being a Boomer and vomiting all over the survivors (calling in the always fun horde), but it’s also very satisfying to be a hunter and pin someone down tearing at their flesh!!

I do feel, though, that people’s worry about L4D’s lack of content and multiplayer staying power is warrented, but hopefully Valve will keep us in downloadable content so that this game will be fresh and fun for quite some time.

If I can get a crew of people together I’ll be sure to play as much of the game as possible and give the entire game a full feldged review soon.

Bullet-Tooth Tony and I have a habit of sitting around my apartment, drinking, playing classic Nintendo games on my Wii while we proceed to get drunk (fun, eh?). So last weekend we thought this would be a great throw-back game for our classic gaming ritual but after playing for something like 2 hours we had only beaten two robots (I also again must confess, both of the defeated foes were the work of Tony).

I’ll confess I bought this off of WiiWare. While I usually evangelize the Xbox360 as the console to beat, I hate hate hate hate the D-pad on the 360 controller. A d-pad needs up, down, left and right and when you are playing classic games on a d-pad with diagnals (like Bionic Commando: Rearmed) it just screws things up.

So pick this game up from your favorite game dispenser and give Capcom the money they deserve for giving us new content in a familiar format!!!

*Now, disclaimer time, I routinely was behind the times as a child. While I did have a Nintendo Entertainment System, I rarely got new games and when I did they were gifts from family members who had no clue what the “hip” and “happening” games were, so I played Mega Man first in my late teens via an emulator.

The biggest complaints I have about the game is that the graphics are pretty terrible and the commentary gets repetitive. . . . . . VERY QUICKLY. The graphics are a pretty moot point, though, being the focus of the game is the content and not the visuals. The game’s narrative is pretty generic and quickly gets very repetative. After awhile you want to punch the narrator right in the face.

My only other gripe is that the big button controllers are infrared, which means you need to have the controller pointed at the included IR reciever for them to work. I understand that this was probably done to lower the cost of the controllers, but for someone like me it’s infuriating at first. When I play anything on the 360 I relax and kick back, so imagine my surprise each time I go to answer a question and my answer isn’t registered because the controller is in my hand behind the couch. After that happened a few times I learned my lesson, though.

Overall I like this game, it’s a nice and quick way for the girlfriend and I to have some fun together and being that it’s now 60 bucks it’s pretty reasonably priced. If they ever do release some downloadable content for this puppy it will be well worth every penny.

metacritic

Amazon