Eight changes we'd make to the NXE

The New Xbox Experience is great, but it could be better...

The New Xbox Experience dashboard update arrived in force yesterday and we’ve been mighty impressed so far. A wealth of shiny new features have made this both the most extensive and the most technologically impressive update so far. However, tech is seldom perfect and we’ve sniffed out a few niggles that we’d like to change whenever our friends in Redmond get round to tightening the loose screws.

1.) Avatarded - The most commonly heard whinge on gamer forums right now is that the whole Avatar thing is a bit too, well, Wii-y. And it’s a fair complaint, but it’s going to be a cold day in hell before companies stop ripping off other people’s successful ideas to make their own products sell. Our gripe is not with the fact that Avatars are childish to the point of nausea (although that doesn’t help), nor are we suggesting that there’s no space on a ‘hardcore’ games console for something a little childish. It’s more that Microsoft has seemingly forgotten its main user base while designing the avatar system.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with adorable cartoon character that you can personalise, but where’s the real silliness? Why are we playing dress up with wacky hairstyles and facepaint and not arming our Avatars to the teeth with oversized swords, or cladding them in a hulking mech suit? Perhaps while the designers were ripping off Miis, they should have thought seriously about ripping off LittleBigPlanet as well.

2. )Sorry, Themes - Pity the fools who paid real money for dashboard themes, for they are now useless. Microsoft has made a passing effort to make them work, but they’re mostly obscured by the new menu and a really boring bit of floor, which is basically only there for your Avatar to stand on. Furthermore, what little you can see is now stretched out almost beyond recognition.

It’s a woefully inelegant solution and now that the change has been made permanent, there’s not really much hope that you’ll be able to get your themes back. There is still space for some personalisation though and we’ve no doubt that more NXE compatible themes are on their way. We do feel that those who bought Themes before, albeit naively, should get some kind of recompense.

3.) Control freak - The old Blade menu didn’t really have much in the way of customisation options and neither does NXE. This time however, Microsoft has added two full menu items that are basically only there for advertising stuff to you. On the one hand it’s a way for Xbox to showcase its latest and greatest wares, but on the other, it’s just forcing you to look at ads, when actually all you want to do is get straight into you games, video or music library. Adding to the problem is the fact you can’t set which menu you’d like to start on. We just want to head straight to My Xbox, thanks very much, and we can find the latest LIVE goodies quite easily, with instantly being bogged down with Spotlight or Inside Xbox.

4.) Faster, please - Tying into the complaint above is the speed of the new interface. Now, just to be clear, the overall performance of the new system is way better than the old blades, and for everything involved with the normal offline running of the console, it’s considerably faster. However, for better or worse, LIVE content is now more intermingled than ever with the main menu. That means that when there’s heavy traffic on LIVE or if you have a slowish internet connection, navigation around the menu can be reduced to a crawl or, worse still, be met with error messages. Hopefully things will stabilise, but otherwise, Microsoft will have to somehow improve the performance for those not lucky enough to have US-style lightning fast broadband speeds.

5. )The pirate connection - The Xbox 360 itself now has a pretty decent array video codec support that will tackle most *ahem* downloaded content you throw at it. The same wealth of support has not quite carried across to the Media Center Extender, so if you’re networking the console up to a PC, you’re more likely to be met with compatibility issues. More worryingly, the PS3 has overtaken the Xbox in this regard and that’s not on at all. Throw in the full range of Xbox 360 codecs to the MCX and we’ll be very happy. Chuck in a few newer formats like .MKV and we may not be able to leave the house again.

6.) Underachiever - A new addition to the NXE is the chance to delete games from your achievements list, as long as you haven’t acquired a gamer score from those games. That means you can delete any reference to that rubbish demo you rented then took back after ten minutes.

However, even if you have acquired just a single measly point then that’s it, you’re stuck with it forever. Surely there’s space for use to erase more embarrassing titles from our record? Seriously though, we’re not sure we can live with the shame of having that Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 permanently associated with our gamertag. Look, it was a review copy, honest. We absolutely did not rent it just to look at perfectly animated high definition bazookas.

7.) Quicker launcher - At the moment, the Quick Launch Bar feels a little like it was designed a bit before the realities of game installations were considered. For example, you can opt to jump straight from game to game via the quick launch bar. If you pick an Xbox LIVE Arcade game it goes right into it. If you choose an Installed game, it prompts you to insert the disc before taking you there. However, at the same time, when you pop the disc tray, it immediately has to dump you back into the main dashboard, which then has to spend time loading itself. The same applies when you want to ‘Quick’ launch a game from disc, only it takes a fair bit longer.

8.) Netflix for US - Not for the U.S., but for us, here in the UK. Yes, folks across yonder pond are having a bloody street party over the new Xbox Netflix streaming system. But where the hell is ours? Last we heard, we had a load of disc rental companies, and we’re sure they’d love a big cash injection from Microsoft to install some fancy new movie streaming servers. And anyway, America already loves the Xbox. Netflix isn’t really going to win many more sales. But here in the UK, it’s that nasty old PS3 that’s winning. And it doesn’t have any sort of movie streaming (in the UK), the cheapskate.

Oh sure, we’ve got Xbox LIVE video market place. Let’s have a quick breeze through... ooh, we’ve got ‘Shark in Venice’, ‘Sands of Oblivion’ and ‘National Lampoon’s Bagboy’. Not exactly a stellar line-up there. C’mon guys, don’t forget us lot.