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The Bad.
Gamer Pictures and Dashboard themes: Gamer pictures, which are ironically called avatars if on a internet message board, are virtually useless now. Sure, they currently display in some of the games still to represent you, or on when you press in the guide button but what is the point? You can take a picture of your Avatar in any way you want, and always use a custom gamer picture with an Xbox Live vision camera. So if you are one of the suckers that actually bought a gamer picture pack well tough luck buddy, your uniqueness with those prepackaged pictures is nothing compared to the uniqueness of the avatar.
There are plenty of dashboard themes that were designed just for the past dashboard in mind but guess what? Most of those themes are ugly on this new update. The NXE update also seems to stretch or even degrade quality of pictures that would look fine on a computer in both HD and standard definition in many cases. In addition, the background picture doesn't change until you click into that menu, so you are stuck looking at the main picture almost all the time. If that wasn't bad enough, the entire bottom half of your theme's one main picture will be cut off by the gray reflective blob on the bottom that all new dashboard themes sport. This truly renders your old themes useless.
The Navigation: The navigation is slick, clean, and awesome to look at but sometimes it is more work than it is worth. The NXE seems like it was made so that if the only book you have ever read was “Where’s Waldo?” then you shouldn’t have any problem with this. The bad part of that is, is using the new dashboard can add some extra steps where there weren’t any before.
So in some ways, it could be so dumbed down that it could be a worse experience for many people. These extra steps extend further when you take into account that some options are only available on the dashboard and others only available through the guide button. One example of this is deleting 0 point games from your games list. While it would make sense to be able to do this under your list of games on the dashboard, you actually must be accessing your games list through the Guide's Achievement menu instead. The problem here is that now you have to memorize where each function is available.
Netflix: Netflix is a great addition but one key feature that was removed from the new update was the ability to watch Netflix movies at the same time with your friends over Xbox Live. The feature will make it in sometime early next year, but in classic Microsoft fashion, they counted all their hens before the eggs hatched. In other words, a major feature and draw of the NXE was axed from the beginning of it.
Also, Netflix streaming is great, but there is a serious lack of HD movies, and a serious lack of movies to stream in the first place. This isn’t Microsoft’s fault and Netflix is adding more every month but where in the hell is Back to the Future and Gremlins?
Xbox Live Video Marketplace: Let’s see, I could rent one standard definition movie on XBLM for 320 Microsoft points ($4.00) or I could get a couple dozen seasons of TV shows and movies for about nine bucks a month. A large part of Xbox Live Marketplace is made useless, unless you really don’t want to use your credit card on it and want to keep buying points. Even so, chances are Netflix will make it so that you can buy a yearly subscription on Xbox 360 with Microsoft points in the future, and thus we have two compelling and competing services on the same system.
To Microsoft’s and XBLM credit though, there are more HD rental option on XBLM, and you can get some newer content such as Iron Man, but hundreds of the movies that are available on XBLM are on Netflix as well, and this gap of HD content and newer content will only narrow as time goes by.
Bad voice quality: We all have those times when people cut in and out because of bad connections, but the connection and voice problems on the NXE are inexcusable. It seems that for every twenty people I conversed with in game or otherwise before I might have had this problem, but now it seems to be every ten—and there are about 21 million more people to receive the update so it can only get worse. Hopefully Microsoft solves this problem in the very near future.
No Xbox Live Primetime: What happened? Another major feature cut from the NXE update until next year, Primetime allowed you to compete with a lot of people in virtual game shows for real prizes. In game shows such as one based off of the TV show “1 vs. 100”. Microsoft was incredibly vague about it to begin with and probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it would have definitely been nice to have it.
Installing Games to the Hard Drive: Most of the time installing games to the hard drive makes for a smoother experience but major games Halo 3 and Gears of War 2 not only don’t benefit from them but it makes load times longer, and creates some in game issues along the way. Microsoft really dropped the ball on this one, especially since their two prize dogs can’t even utilize the feature correctly.
What’s worse than bad? Crappy things you will only find on 360 on the next page...
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