NXE - New Xbox Experience Preview

Due out in four days, the New Xbox Experience has come early to e-AAGH.net. I signed up for a preview/trial of the service, and got selected, so here's my preview.

As I said on my blog, I had low expectations for NXE. I really liked the old GUI, so this facelift started out in a hole. I must say, though, that I'm impressed. One of my expectations was that it would be allot slower from all of the art being loaded and used compared to the original dashboard, which was slow enough. To my surprise, though, it's actually faster then before. As for individual features, I like how you can select a game, either one you've played, an Xbox Arcade game, or an Xbox original and see not only it's available DLC but screenshots and all of the information you could get on it from Microsoft's Xbox site. One of my pet peeves from the old dashboard was how slowly information loaded when you were trying to see what a particular download was about. It would load very slowly and then scroll at it's pace, making it frustrating to read. Now it loads instantly and you can scroll through it at your leisure. Very nice.

As for the Avatars, which I call Microsoft Miis, they're better then I expected. For one thing, they seem - for some reason - more mature then Miis. I'm not sure how that works, but it's true. There's a ton of content to select from when creating your Mii - I mean avatar - so you can really customize your persona. You can then pose it  on for your gamer pic, which ensures that everyone's going to be able to see how good lookin' (or in my case, funny looking) you are. Of course, there's no reason not to cheat a little, so you can always give yourself movie-star good looks if you want. What you can't do is create a menagerie of avatars like on the Wii. It's kind of disappointing, but understandable.

As I said at the start, this will be available to everyone on November 19th, so there's not long for those not in the preview program to wait before they can get their hands on it. I hope my preview has helped stoke the fires. Alphasim out.

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