Inside the New Xbox Experience 50
Eurogamer has an in-depth look at the new Xbox Experience, which is coming on November 19th. They discuss the new interface and features, and their reaction is generally positive, citing graphical improvements, smooth file management, and better chat functionality.
"The Guide is also your access point to the new Party system, where you can gather eight of your friends together in a voice-chat channel and move the group between games. You don't even have to be doing the same thing: you can just chat along regardless. And because it's a service layer, it automatically works with all your existing games. Gears of War treats it like it's always been there. Instead of inviting a player, you invite the group; instead of ending a session and having to reassemble for another, you stay together. You can open it up to friends or set it to be invite-only, and while it's one of NXE's quieter additions, it's also its most authoritative statement: this is Microsoft saying, 'We figured we might need to do something like this, so we made sure we could.'"
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You know, I'm not going to take off points because a company is stealing a good idea and using it themselves rather than a worse idea. First of all, there are courts that take care of that. Second, innovation is good, but if one is clearly better than the other one, the worse one should go extinct. The next generation of consoles are probably all going to have motion controls, and there will be people who complain about ripping off the wii, but if we consumers get better games, better controls, better st
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You know, I'm not going to take off points because a user is posting a good idea and using it themselves rather than a worse idea.
I just had to hop on here as an Xbox user from the first gen consoles. I love my 360, it doesn't read any optical discs other than DVD movies, but it made one hell of a media extender with Windows Media Connect 2.0 on Windows XP professional... Then I took a raw copy of XP slipstreamed some updates and Windows Media Player 11, did a reinstall (hey it had been 13 months)... Now I can't see anything from my 360's other than the one Vista PC on my network (it should be noted that by slipstreaming WMP11 I upgra
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Get a Mac and install Connect360 [nullriver.com]. Works flawlessly. :)
For the fanboys - I'm not seriously recommending he buy a Mac. Just a tongue-in-cheek comment based on the irony that my Mac works better with my 360 than his XP box.
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I was hoping that we would get something more like the EyeToy, but that worked in a better range of situations. Maybe with multiple cameras? Then you could use it for cheap mocap :) Having controllers means you need either wires or batteries, and besides, you might break your tv :p
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Install to hard drive? (Score:5, Informative)
The *one* feature I was interested in, install to hard disk, they only mentioned in passing, saying that "We haven't had long enough with NXE to gauge how much of an improvement installation is over playing off the disc, but we'll take a look in the coming weeks."
Thanks, that was the whole reason I read the stupid article.
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Which us PC users have done for a couple of decades now. Let's see, Blu-Ray doesn't even come CLOSE to Hard Drive speeds.
The idiots that modded me down to zero are just that - idiots. There's not *ONE* consumer optical drive, hell there's not even ONE COMMERCIAL optical drive that can outperform a platter HDD in ANYTHING. HDDs have the higher throughput, better seek times, better random access times.
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First, while HDD's are indeed faster than optical media, there are a number of games for the 360 that already cache data onto the drive if it is present. In these cases, installing the game to the disk with NXE will actually result in -slower- performance than before, since the game will be recaching back to the same HDD, and thrashing like mad.
Second, your GTA4 comparison was
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What you call GTA4 and what I call GTA4 are different things. To me, GTA 4 is San Andreas, which is the true 4th version of the game.
Of course, you people pay attention to title, and never the true order in which games came out, I FORGOT.
Anyways, notwithstanding that argument, San Andreas, played on either PS3 or Xbox 360 (love backwards compatibility) STILL STUTTERS. PC, it doesn't.
THINK BEFORE YOU SPEAK.
Two Words. (Score:1)
Vice City.
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Also, in your haste to criticize me for my apparently nonstandard method of "reading the title on the box/disc/game itself" to determine the name of a game, you dodged the more relevant points I was making. Simply put, your comparison is inherently useless for determining the effect of HD
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Ironically, the PS3's Blu-Ray drive is slower than the Xbox360's DVD drive! That's partly why the drive is so
Re:Install to hard drive? (Score:5, Informative)
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And in true Microsoft fashion, the whole purpose of rip-tp-drive' here is to quiet down the stupid optical drive.
If you think that, you should think again. The hard disk is also faster than the optical drive, especially when it comes to seek times. I haven't played PS3 games, but on the Xbox and the PS2, most games seem to do a lot of seeking, and not so much streaming. The real tragedy is that a lot of these titles have enough free space on the disc (or would if they used a decent video codec, in other cases) to just replicate data to avoid long seeks... But that requires intelligence.
Anyway, enough of that, the poin
Re:Install to hard drive? (Score:4, Insightful)
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How much extra in-your-face advertising there's going to be is useful (albeit depressing) info, and that the guide is basically the old dashboard is also handy to know.
Installing to disc though; I just did the 120GB own-HDD hack in preparation. I'm not worried so much about loading speed, as making the goddamn DVD drive quieter when playing.
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I'm not worried so much about loading speed, as making the goddamn DVD drive quieter when playing.
I know exactly what you mean. my 360 is on the end of a 5M vga + 5M optical cable in order to get it out of the tv room, and even then you can hear the dvd drive whine if the door isnt shut.
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oh, and I didn't even last 24hours before I rushed out and did the 120 WD BEVS upgrade. with the installs being in the range ~4-7gb and a 20gb hdd only having 13gb free, i could see it was going to get frustrating shuffling data around very, very quickly.
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Other things I'm hoping is in this update:
XNA peer-created games.
Party options. Having a game-independent 8 player group-up is pretty nice for those of us scattered to the winds.
Hopes:
I'm hoping they cache the Xbox live arcade game list. The "Display 'em as you find 'em" current thing is pretty terrible.
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I guess the netflix streaming might interest some where it's available
You have to have broadband (ok) a Xbox 360 with HDMI (not so many) and a TV with HDMI (even less) to even get HD content. How many people does that cover? Can anyone explain why they even bothered?
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I have all of the above. 360's have been shipping with HDMI for what, over a year now? And what HDTV these days doesn't have HDMI?
And HDMI *isn't* necessary, people with the NXE Preview report you can stream Netflix HD over component on the 360 just fine.
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And HDMI *isn't* necessary, people with the NXE Preview report you can stream Netflix HD over component on the 360 just fine.
Whoops, looks like it was debunked after I read the announcement... On the other hand, they could easily change this later, so if it was a rumor and not an attack, it could still be true.
Regardless, you are way in the minority if you have all three of those things... I think it's a big waste of time. Only time itself will tell.
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And the Honda Civic experience will outsell the Dodge Ram experience so what's your point? They are two completely different audiences that have different gaming styles and preferences. I could care less about who's leading who. Any increase in gaming popularity benefits all gamers.
can you say.... (Score:1)
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Wow, your spelling is bad.
But ads aren't new. The 360 has bombarded you with ads for as long as I can remember.
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That name's gonna open some scars (Score:1)
I bet former SWG players cringe at that name.
Please... (Score:4, Insightful)
...just tell me I don't *have* to create, use, or look at one of those retarded-looking avatars.
Other than this, it really feels like the driving force behind this is that they want more space for advertising.
Jerry Johnson insisted that a central tenet of the New Xbox Experience is "serendipitous discovery of content" - in other words, giving you stuff to do rather than expecting you to fire up the box with a plan already in mind - but after a few hours' use it's hard to shake the feeling that, among the more useful rows of panels showcasing the latest and most popular downloads, the new channels are simply a new wave of adverts that push beyond the old dashboard's capacity.
I'm going to throw you a warning, Microsoft, and you can take this from someone who has enjoyed using your consoles so far. You start barraging your best customers with adverts, even more than you're already doing (which is bordering on obnoxious already), and you're going to risk killing the lead you currently enjoy with your online services.
Re:Please... (Score:4, Informative)
FTA, I think you're going to be disappointed on both counts I'm afraid. The first thing you have to do is create an avatar which is then used prominently on the 'my xbox' and 'friends' pages - the friends list is now replaced by a collection of avatars.
From the sounds of it, the advertising is going to get even worse and more pushy and in-your-face. I wish there was a 'xbox live' proxy we could install that would filter out the ad images from the rest of the content. Hmm. I might try forcing it through a proxy anyway to see what it's doing, but I bet it's done over https.
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I might try forcing it through a proxy anyway to see what it's doing, but I bet it's done over https.
If it's typical Microsoft, they're just accepting a certificate blindly... and you could use squid and packet mangling to find out anyway.
Clarification of party chat (Score:3, Interesting)
The new party chat seems great but at 8 people it seems limited. How does it interact when you play games with more than 8 people. Does it work concurrently with whatever chat implementation the game provides or is it an either/or prospect - game chat or group chat but not both?
HDD install will be welcome and Netflix streaming will be welcome if/when they improve the awful selection available for instant viewing.
The avatar friends list thing does not seem practical. Hopefully there will be sorting by online status as an option to the alphabetic order thing.
BTW, if you are 30+ or so and prefer not playing with timmies and griefers but with folks your age with lives, jobs and families check out GeezerGamers. For me, it totally changed XBL from painful to fun.
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Speed of Release (Score:2)
I'm not sold on the new avatar type stuff since I really just use the dashboard as a way to get into games or download content, not as a social networking site like MySpace or Facebook.
I do have to give Microsoft credit though for getting to market so quickly with what looks like a fairly large overhaul. Sony's Home make-over was announced in early 2007 and it is still in beta, while the new 360 experience will be out the middle of this month. Sony's setup may ultimately prove better - when it actually ma
I threw my xbox360 in the garbage (Score:1)
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Try it now (apparently) (Score:1)
Genius idea! Feasible? (Score:1)