New XBOX Experience – First Impressions

The New XBOX Experience was released this week. It’s abbrieviated to NXE because everything has to be abbr. nowadays. Personally I think NXX would have been sexier but hey I’m no ad wizard. When I turned on my XBOX it told me there was a new update available. Since I don’t have a hard drive it asked me which memory card I wanted to save to. The update is 128MB. I picked my 256MB card and even though I had enough room on it, the XBOX decided I might want to take some time deleting save files anyway. Thanks for the suggestion XBOX, I probably won’t play Bully, Too Human or Lego Indiana Jones ever again. The update process took about 5 to 10 minutes and then I was greeted to a lovely ipod commercial intro movie.

The blades are gone and now everything is in boxes. Up and down takes you through the main menu and left and right take you to the things within the current menu item. There are some new themes to choose from but I couldn’t find what happened to the old themes. I’d hate to think the Ohio State Buckeyes theme I bought is gone or unusable.

The first thing to do is create a new avatar. This will kill some time while you’re waiting on your World of Warcraft queue and is more fun than 84% of XBOX 360 games. The avatars are a blatant ripoff of the Wiis Miis, except that they look like actual people and not Fisher Price people. 10 bonus points for Microsoft. You can customize face, hair and clothes and even take a picture of your new avatar to use as your gamer picture.

Now that my avatar was looking stylish it was time to hit the town. There are 3 games that use avatars and one of them is Uno, which I already own, so I started it up. The avatars stand there next to your cards and pose throughout the game. They are happy when you play good cards and they get mad when other people play draw 4s against you. At the end of the day you’re still playing Uno so avatars only make it about 0.004% more fun than it was before.

Overall I think the NXE is a great improvement over the old dashboard. Some people (Gozar) thought that the old one was too confusing so maybe this will make them happy.