New Xbox Experience review

Radical redesign or polished poo?

Unless you've just come staggering out into the daylight from a nuclear bunker, chances are you'll have heard of Microsoft's latest Xbox 360 update, the New Xbox Experience. Unlike Sony, Microsoft doesn't like chucking out updates willy-nilly. Instead it savours them, storing up new software goodies and unleashing them in one giant surge.

This one, however, has blown all previous updates out of the water. It's far bigger and more ambitious than ever. Turn on your Xbox now and you actually won't recognise it. For at least a minute, you've going to think some crafty thief has nicked your Xbox 360's innards and replaced them with a Wii.

Your first task on completing the update process (which was fast and painless for us; surprising given the volume of traffic now on the Xbox LIVE network) will be to create your new Avatar. Yes, Microsoft has gone all casual on us and introduced customisable family-friendly characters.

Imagine the fun you can have playing dress up with your own ker-azy little person. Yeah, that much.

The cutesy creations are about as appealing to the core gamer demographic as a dessert made of rabbit semen. If the background music shrieked 'Wii-knockoff' any louder, our ears would bleed. The only good thing about the whole experience is that you can flick the thumbstick back and forward to batter your avatar's pointless head against the screen. Despite a good ten minutes of trying this, however, we didn't seem to have achieved any permanent mental impairment.

The meat of the NXE is the radically altered layout of, well, everything. The blades are gone, utterly. Instead, pretty much every essential task can now be found using the Guide button. This bit actually resembles the old blade system the most, but it's a lot easier to find your way around.

Meanwhile, the main menu, if you can really call it that any more, is much more geared towards Xbox LIVE content. Microsoft has been struggling with the fact its original menu layout wasn't really designed to cope with the huge amount of content now available.

The result is that loading up the dashboard now takes a little bit longer than it used to, presumably because the system is now pulling info from the network before booting. It's also going to be exacerbated by the sheer volume of traffic on Xbox LIVE now trying out the download.

More pleasingly, the general operation of standard menu functions feels a good deal quicker than it was before. The new option to install games to hard disc also speeds up game start times, however, when we tried it with Guitar Hero: World Tour and Gears of War 2, we didn't notice any significant reduction in normal in-game load times. It's a slight disappointment, but the blissful silence from the disc tray makes up for it a bit.

There's been one casualty in the update: themes. Yeah, you can still use them. Sort of. Hey, you can see nearly half of them being drowned out in the background there! People who paid for themes are going to be miffed, but then they did pay money for a small set of graphics, so arguably they had it coming.

Link: New Xbox Experience

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