Tech: The New Xbox Experience

There's a certain tinge of guilt I feel whenever I deride Microsoft, since some of my family and many of my friends work there. Despite my ties to Redmond, though, I think the "New Xbox Experience" isn't that great.

For those who might not know, the "New Xbox Experience" is really just a Dashboard update that Vista-fies the old "Blades" configuration that the 360 used. While I appreciate some of the usability enhancements (simple alphabetical sorting that replaces the long lists that plagued the old Dashboard, for instance), the added layer of graphical polish Microsoft has added makes the whole experience slower. Calling up my XBLA game library, which happened nearly instantaneously under the old Dashboard, now requires actual loading.

Perhaps most vexing is Microsoft's half-assed copying of the Nintendo "Mii" concept. The "Avatars" that you can create feel like shinier, but more hollow versions of Nintendo's avatars. As far as I could tell, you couldn't position and resize the facial features, meaning there won't be Avatars that look like Darth Vader or Cleopatra anytime soon.



The only thing about the NXE that directly affects actual gameplay is the ability to install games to the HDD of the 360, a la the PlayStation 3. This does decrease loading times slightly and saves wear and tear on your Xbox's disc drive, but it also requires huge chunks of hard drive space (~6 gigs for the typical game) and it also makes some games, like Halo 3, perform worse.