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New Xbox Experience now available for previewers

Posted by Al Warmington on Tue 18 Nov 2008

The wait is (almost) over for the most ambitious Xbox 360 update yet

Keen Xbox 360 owners who signed up to the New Xbox Experience preview are now being invited en masse to join the service early. Xbox mouthpiece Major Nelson has announced that absolutely everyone who applied for an early preview is being invited to join the service today.

If you haven’t received your update yet, fear not – Microsoft is working through what is probably an extremely long list of applicants and will get you your update as soon as. And even if you didn’t manage to apply for the preview successfully, you still only have to wait a day for the official global rollout. There, that’s not so bad now, is it?

New Xbox Experience (NXE) is a very big development for the Xbox 360. That old blade menu system has been starting to look a little jaded of late and has been in need of a fresh lick of paint. NXE tightens the whole affair up into smoother list menu for a greater aesthetic appeal and to make it easier to find your way around.

On top of that, Microsoft has thrown a handful of major new features into the mix too. New Avatars, which absolutely do not look like Miis in any way, are arriving to make Xbox Live a bit more personal and will allow you to organise parties of players together to socialise, chat and then go and play together.

Our favourite new feature is the ability to install games to the console’s hard drive. This doesn’t mean you’ll be cheekily sharing games with your mates – the machine will run a check to see that the disc is in the drive before loading it up – but having the game data stored locally will mean faster load times and it will eliminate the deafening whirring of the disc tray. For that, Microsoft, we thank you.

American users get the best of the bunch (as per bloody usual), with the arrival of the new Netflix movie streaming service that gives Gold members the chance to view the sizeable Netflix online rental store as part of their subscription package.