Lies's Blog: Well... This is a dashboard alright...

This post relates to: New Xbox Experience, Xbox Live, Xbox 360

So today marked the official release of the NXE (Although Microsoft has been slipping it out to large amounts of people before the fact), and I can safely say it lived up to my expectations.

Which were that it would be a dashboard. From which you can launch your games. And sometimes buy overpriced content. To play in your games. Which do not use the dashboard.

I almost have to marvel at the cunning Microsoft exhibited here. They really managed to get you people riled up about the DASHBOARD. Who really uses the dashboard all that much anyways? Pop game in, load game up, play game. Minimal time, if any, at the dashboard. This new Dashboard is pretty much the same. Slightly improved system speed, a new look, and Miis are all we got, and yet Microsoft somehow turned this into a big event. It was quite skillfully executed.

They essentially took a UI update, and inflated it to the status of a big game launch. Take a look around the dashboard. Five of the seven channels you've got exist to advertise or sell you things directly. And they couldn't even put the two useful tabs next to each other, forcing you to navigate between several layers of advertising to move between the My Xbox tab (which is where anything useful is at), and the pretty, but inefficient Friends tab. Most of the useful functionality is packed into the ONE My Xbox tab, while five other channels exist for no other reason than Microsoft needs to lift the revenue from XBL sales and advertising.

You're excited about having the amount of advertising in front of you INCREASE. You're excited about a UI update for a console that people rarely use the base UI on anyways. You're excited for Miis that don't even appear in many games (Unless you're into Kingdom for Keflings I guess). You're excited to have your existing themes obscured by the new coverflow system.

Don't get me wrong, it's a fine UI update, but that's ALL it is. You've been played as fools by Microsoft into their getting excited about their "New Xbox Experience", which is, by and large, the same old Xbox experience- perhaps with just more advertising.