New Xbox Experience: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
The Good
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?