Official Taxigamer Blog

Some impressions of the New Xbox Experience

It’s been a little bit more than a week since my Xbox 360 has been (officially) updated with the NXE. It’s time to sum up my impressions. 

First thing that you will notice on november 19th is that the user interface is much much faster than the old “blades” dashboard. Even the guide which would took forever to come up in games, now responds almost immediately. Same goes for the game library which was very slow when you had dozens of demos/XBLA/Xbox Orignals on your hard drive. Now it’s there instantly. 

As you may have seen in our video, the menus are, in many cases, pretty much the same but reorganized differently with the new Media Center-esque look. 

In fact the thing that has changed the most is the marketplace. Before, to find a download that wasn’t in the spotlight or the new arrivals, you had to scroll down for ages to get to that specific game. This time is over because you now have access to filters, either by letter or genre (already in the old marketplace). Once you get to the game you want, you now have all the downloads for that game gathered into one place. But wait, there’s more. You can now watch a slideshow of screenshots, see the box art with all the technical informations (ex: number of online/offline players) and even a small summary of what this game is all about. 

A new thing added with the NXE is a nice 3D representation of your friends, with their avatar standing next to the box art of the game they’re playing. 

Now, about some new features that come with the NXE :

• Let’s start with the famous avatars. The creation process is very easy and offers many possibilities, I think everyone will pretty much be able to recreate themselves virtually. Some will regret that the avatar editor lacks the ability to move and resize the facial elements. The avatar creation process is really mandatory as it is the first that you will need to do when you log on with your profile. 
• Hard drive installation. A feature that I’ve waited since Microsoft announced the NXE back in July. The time needed for the installation depends on the game. Some larger games take less time to install than smaller ones. All in all, it takes approximatively 10 min. So how does it affects the games ? Obviously loading will be faster, again it depends on the game. For instance, I didn’t really see the difference at the launch of Burnout Paradise but in Project Gotham Racing 4, it makes a good difference. Not only does the races load faster but for example, on the Nüburgring when you were far from the starting grid after finishing a race, the replay would need a long loading whereas now it’s almost instantaneous. Another example is Fable II, those of you who played the game know that the user interface is really slow. When installed, you don’t avoid this UI as much as possible anymore and the game also seems more fluid. 
• Some other features are truly there, like 16:10 support, options for HDMI color spaces and parties. For that last bit, unfortunately no one on my friend list got in the NXE Preview Program, so I couldn’t test it. 

I checked (foolishly) to see if there was a backward compatibility update tied with the NXE, there wasn’t. Rallisport Challenge 2, Top Spin still don’t work on the Xbox 360.

In conclusion, I would say that this new interface is really a new xbox experience. The Xbox 360 feels completely refreshed and most of the major problems have been solved. There are still some little bugs sometimes, but hopefully they will be gone on november 19th.

Tags: avatar, backward compatibility, dashboard, fall update, hard drive install, HDMI, microsoft game studios, nxe