My thoughts on NXE

I applied to get the NXE early, and they just updated my Xbox yesterday.  Oh well, a few days early is kinda cool right?  My thoughts on it are pretty simple.  It's definitely geared to make MS more money, because it's very appealing to the eyes, and makes content feel more accessible.  It's right there as you turn the system on, wheras with the old UI, you had to go to marketplace.  You can also look at your games library, and look at content directly from your game title.  For instance, if I was looking at my achievements for Call of Duty: World at War, I can easily just press right on the joystick and look at all the downloadable content for the game.  I don't think it was that easy in the old UI.

Also, for Avatars, it's kinda cool, but I'm just glad that they didn't try to make the avatar the center of the world.  If you don't care about them, just make one initially and never think about it again.  I think that putting them in was a calculated decision at MS to make their system more personable, because some people give a shit about avatars I guess.  Until I can play COD as my avatar and kill my friends avatars, I don't care about them.

Anyways, those are my general thoughts on NXE, it's not that big of a deal.  The new aesthetic is visually appealing (to me anyways) and doesn't change much of anything.  So, no one needs to worry about what will happen on Nov 19.  The download was quick too, less than ten minutes.

have you copied a game on your hard drive already ? how long does it take to do so ?

My thoughts on avatars:

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No, I haven't yet, my 360 only has a 20gb HDD.  The sound of the 360 doesn't bother me enough to warrant doing it.  From what I've heard, the main difference isn't load times, it's that it completely kills the sound of the system.  I may do that for CODWAW, only because over the fall I'm gonna be playing it a lot.  I will try it when I get home from work.

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Does it have netflix?

Hey thanks for the impressions. I was wondering if you tried out using your old themes and if they work?

"My thoughts on avatars:

I don't like how a room full of "avatars" is replacing the friends list.  It used to be that I could just glance at a text list and see who's online, doing what, for how long, and it was easy.  There's something grating to me about having a 3d interactive room of people trying to do the job of a simple list.

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I find the NXE worthless. The glossy interface I dont give a damb about, I cant load games onto my HDD because its a 20gb (and you only have 13gb useable) and most of it has FFXI on it (which i love and wont take off, cant play without it on it anyways) so ive got maybe 3/4 gb free (which dosent cover most installs) for demo etc. The party are worthless since I only ever talk to one person at a time, if im ever playing with more its only for a specific game and I meet them in game. The only good thing is community games (which dosent need NXE since they did a preview for that months ago).

Then again this is just me. Im sure there are people who love the shiny interface, or people who need it be quieter or want to group up with 8 other people at one time while playing diffrent games but thats just not me.

"Hey thanks for the impressions. I was wondering if you tried out using your old themes and if they work?"

"Does it have netflix?

What happened to the BT partnership for UK content? Do you still get the mangy selection of 9 "pop" videos?

Do you feel pressurised into bigging-up your HD, now you have NXE?

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