by HB

Created on: December 03, 2008

Microsoft has been heavily promoting its NXE or New Xbox Experience as something we should all get very excited about, now that it's here was it worth the wait?

The first thing you will notice when you have downloaded the NXE to your console, which will take around 5 minutes and requires you to have 128MB free space on either a memory unit or hard disk, you will be greeted with this all new and improved dashboard.

Its biggest new feature is made immediately obvious, Microsoft has taken a leaf from Nintendos book and allows you to create a little Mii, sorry avatar of yourself, there are a lot of things to customize here, height, weight, face and so on. You can even dress yourself up and they plan to have an avatar store available soon so you can pay to have new clothes and so on.

Now that you have an avatar you will find a few things to do with it, there are a few games that currently support it like Uno and Scene it but that list will probably grow. Your friends will now see your avatar on their friends list which is nice, you will see theirs too. You can also use the right stick to make your avatar look around and depending on what you do you can make him or her use different expressions.

The second main feature is obviously the whole new look to the Xbox interface, gone are the blades but you can use the guide button to pop them up if you must use them. The new look is very sleek and more modern looking, now it is easier to browse the content on offer. There is also alot more information available you can now see screenshots and a detailed overview of every game. You also see the box art of games instead of a list so it is much easier to find what you want. The only problem I've noticed is that the new friends list, while it looks good, is not very practical as it only fits three on screen at once.

There are also a couple of other additions like the ability to install your games to your hard drive, these take around 5-7GB of space so if you have an older 20GB model you may want to upgrade so you can have a few titles installed. Installing reduces the noise level of your console plus it makes games load faster, some games do have problems like in PGR4 the sound pops and Halo 3 will actually take longer to load but installing benefits 99% of games. You can now Party chat which means you can talk to up to 8 people at once, no matter what games you are all playing. If you are using a PC monitor you will now be able to display in the resolutions 1440x900 and 1650x1080 this means you will no longer get the annoying picture stretching.

Overall this is a really nice update to the Xbox 360, it's totally free and you must have it if you want to continue to use Xbox Live so download it today and enjoy the new features Microsoft have been cooking up.
Summary: A great update to the Xbox 360 dashboard.

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