A Special Weekly Willy Update (WWU) for November 14, 2008

An early look at the New Xbox Experience by CE United.

So this came as a very big surprise to me as I stated in the LAN party recap WWU. 

“We walked into a living room full of fellow gamers.  What do I see? They are loading up the New Xbox Experience; Jalth got early access to it by signing up online.  I am so jealous I didn’t get picked and I signed up as well, oh well.”

Jalth being one of the members of the clan 8-Bit Brigade if you didn’t already know.

I got home today from visiting a friend and checked my E-mail, I got the E-mail a little before 3pm but I didn’t read it until about 6 or 7pm. 

Basically it said The Xbox 360 Fall Flash update will be available to me by 2pm PST on November 14th, we thank you for your participation and hope that you enjoy the New Xbox Experience.
See you online,

The Xbox 360 team

After reading the E-mail I had to read it again just to be sure I was reading it right, like I said before I had just gotten home and I hadn’t checked any gaming website to know that the early access was going to be sent in three waves.  That is why it was a complete surprise so anyway on with the early look at the New Xbox Experience complete with pictures and my first thoughts on it.

When you first boot up your Xbox it asks you to update and you better believe I hit the yes button.



It about 10 minutes to download maybe a little more then ten but no more then 15 minutes.  Then it gives you this nice welcome screen.



Then it plays a little intro video with some graphics and snazzy colors to please the eye.




After the intro video it goes directly to the avatar screen where they make you choose a premade avatar where you can choose one that sort of looks like you and modify it as you please.



I had a very hard time finding one that looked like me I must have hit the X button at least 10 times just to try and find one that looked a little like me, so I ended up picking this one.



They give you some weird options with the avatars like these two choices just to name a few.




In the end after spending what seemed like 30 minutes just on the avatars I came up with this creation that some what resembles me, Willy the gamer.



Hopefully in the final wide release they will have a better selection of things to pick from when making avatars.  The selection of glasses was a little slim and hopefully you can change to color of the t-shirts instead of picking from different colored t-shirts. Like the green shirt I picked they had a red one just like it.  Also the hair selection is a little plain, as for the gloves I wanted to be like Michael Jackson with one glove but you can’t choose weather you want one glove or two.  I personally don’t have a goatee but I thought it looked cool, like I said hopefully when they release it on November 19th they will be adding some more things to it.  One tiny note on the avatars, when you are creating them and also when you see yours in the dashboard you can move their heads by using the right analog stick and if you move it too much they get dizzy which is kind of cool but pointless.  Also if you move their head side to side they get an angry looking grin on their face.  As for now the Avatars don’t really serve a purpose except that you can see your friend’s avatars in the newly redesigned friends list.



Then here is a friend who does not have the update yet



Like I said as of right now there is not much you can do with the avatars besides seeing them on your friends list and seeing them in the newly added party system where up to eight people can be in a party and move from game to game without losing that party.  Also you can take a picture of your avatars face and use it as your gamertag picture.  You could always just take a real picture of yourself with the Xbox LIVE vision cam if that’s the case.  Later on I think they are going to incorporate the avatars in some games not sure which ones, I am thinking UNO is a good guess.  Hopefully later games will use the achievement system to unlock game related avatar items.

Enough about the avatars here are some of the features and changes; first here is the main dashboard screen.



This is one of the things I was afraid of for the new update, the dashboard backgrounds that most of us downloaded would be gone, not necessarily but they could have done a better way to display your old background on the new interface.  My Castle Crashers background is sort of useless now The Blue Knight is just out of view behind the green boxes, but when I changed to a different background it sort of works.



When you cycle through the different areas of the menu like the game library you see that background will show up like it did on the old dashboard.



When you start moving the different items in that menu the selection boxes get in the way your background again.  So hopefully they fix in the future so that all your Microsoft points you spent on these backgrounds won’t go to waste.
One really cool thing is when you hit the guide button on the controller it brings up this easy to navigate screen with all the important things you need.  It is reminiscing of the old dashboard but a lot faster and easier to navigate.





One thing that sounded like a good idea was installing games on your hard drive, when I saw this article by eurogamer showing the difference between loading from the disk and loading from the hard drive.
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=290745&page=1

I was shocked to actually see for myself that it took 6.7 GB to download Gears of War 2 to the hard drive.  I of course didn’t have enough space and wouldn’t unless I went on a massive deleting spree on my hard drive.  I only have 510 MB left, what can I say I am a content pack rat I still have the trial versions of Pac-man and Tony Hawk Project 8 which I don’t think I will ever play Pac-man again. But in my defense I still play the Project 8 demo when I get really bored.

Overall it is a nice update and a welcomed change which makes things on the dashboard run a lot smoother then before. It will take a little time to get used to it but once we do it will be worth it.   One thing I am dying to try out is the 8 person private chat; I am tired of switching between channels to talk people or to listen to voice messages.

So I hope you liked this early look at the New Xbox LIVE Experience because I think I am the only member of CE United that got early access to it.  See you online November 19th.

-Willy-

 

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