Man, those things creep me out

Microsoft recently released the “new Xbox experience” to every online Xbox. First off let’s look at the structure.

Pros

· Quicker browsing through easy scrolling

· New big display panels for each task, such as edit profile or play current disc

· RB, RT, LB, LT buttons utilized for maneuvering through the menus

· Friends channel makes it easier to find those suckers (keep your friends close and your enemies closer)

· *double dragon Xbox theme still awesome looking

Cons

• New layout includes spotlight channel and other little tweaks to spurt advertising right into your face from your TV screen
• Your Xbox themes will not rotate through their pictures when you go through the new Xbox channels, only when you select something such as the video library or marketplace, unlike before when it changed while scrolling through menus.
• Big gray surface obstructing half your Xbox theme anyway
• You have to stare at your Xbox avatar abomination when you go to edit your profile

Now first off, Mii’s. Oh wait what’s that? That’s not a Mii? ‘Course not, it’s an “Xbox avatar” designed to be more realistic. Ultimately what happened is, take the bastard love child of cartoonish human personas and uncanny valley humanoids and make it into an avatar system. You are FORCED (curse the day we gave console’s sentient minds) to make one at the start of your Xbox online update that contains this ‘new experience’. These avatars although customizable in hip clothing and bling (yes they have bling, diamond rings and a chain etc., oh god) lack customization in physical feature placement. Yea you can chisel your jaw line but you can’t even move your eyebrows to their proper position. Maybe I’m just a bit biased against these things since, well they ripped off Nintendo, and that all my so-called ‘colleagues’ share my view and agree with me, thus only reinforcing my negativity, but I stand strong on my position against these little critters. I only hope that Microsoft doesn’t start charging people to customize these things, the next thing I want to hear in life is: “Hey bro, I just spent 500 MS points on a new hat and jacket combo for my Xbox avatar!” The best thing about these things is that you can put sunglasses on them, then zoom in real close, take a picture, and now you have a nice gamerpic of sunglasses.

That’s really all there is to this whole ‘new experience’ thing. Hopefully Microsoft will release some real nice homerun updates eventually. So what do you think? Good, bad, or just plain unnecessary? I’m going to go with unnecessary for now.

Since we were talking about the new experience, let’s go back to something old for just a minute, gamer pictures. This topic has made me considerably annoyed for a while now. Not only will Microsoft not let you simply make your own by using a custom uploaded image thumbnail (except for those dumb Xbox avatar photos) but they also nickel and dime you for their gamer picture designs and a lot of them aren’t even that good (here’s a nice marketing idea, give a gamer picture free with each Xbox360 game at least, maybe people will even buy the games then for picture collectability…if somebody would actually do that).