Jonathan's Universe

So, NXE has been out a few days now.  For those that live under a rock, NXE stands for “New X-box Experience.”  It is a huge software update to the xbox, mainly focusing on the xbox-live interface. My favorite feature is definitely the NetFlix feature, because I like lying down when watching films, not sitting with a brik on my lap.. plus having a laptop open is a distraction, and I tend not to watch the film.

Netflix
Fricken sweet! Any (well, maybe not any) watch-instantly film can be streamed on your xbox, thus watchable on TV. I say maybe not every film because any film that is produced by sony is not available to be viewed on xbox 360. This is because Sony is a little whiney baby who wishes to control their license with netflix a little too overzealously. Jerks. One small caveat, in order to add films to to your instant queue is through your computer.  You can’t (yet) add stuff to your queue by navigating through the catalog via your xbox. Maybe soon.

Avatars
Hmm. This is a cool but unnescessary part of NXE. It’s kind of (well, completely) like the Wii’s Mii system. Basically you create a figure using a few preset figures, then you can modify the shape and features of this person through a set of sliders. It’s a lot more indepth than the Mii, you can barely modify your Mii besides a few features, and it’s not detailed at all. Your avatar also has clothing that you can modify. The point of this? Not really sure yet, besides it appears to your friends and in your gamerpicture.

Download Game to Console
This is a feature I haven’t really tried. But I will explain my understanding of it. Basically, this allows you to download your games that you have on disc to your harddrive. Whoa. I can rent a game, download it, then return it? That’s kind of.. odd that this is allowed. People like me (20 Gig harddrive) probably wouldn’t use this feature much, but I’m sure those with 120 GIGs could do this a lot. Though, Halo 3 gives you a funny message saying something like [paraphrase] “this game was written to be loaded from a disc, thus downoading to your console WILL cause problems, glitches, freezes, latent load times and other stuff. DONT DO IT!” Well, I guess that’s that.

Revamped Market Place
This feature is something that doesn’t affect me. I’m poor. I’m not going to spend my money fruitlessly buying “Microsoft Points” so I can get music videos and stuff. But apparently the entire system has been completely revamped. It also allows you to edit your download queue online. So let’s say you wanna download something but you’re at your friends house. You can queue it from a computer and the next time the machine is turned on, it’ll start the download. That’s pretty cool. Ohhhh… you have to download a plugin from Microsoft to do this? That’s not cool.

Party!
Basically, this allows you and your friends (and random people that you cross in games )to group up and go from game to game and match to match together. This makes sure you’re always playing together. It’s cool! In Halo 3, i meet some cool people that I wouldn’t mind playing with again. So instead of going to a new match, inviting all of them, etc, it just groups us together and the system finds a new match that can accomodate the size of my group. Nice.

That’s really all the notable features. I’m sure that microsoft has a few more surprises coming up, so I look forward to that.

So, I’m going back to watching NCIS on my xbox.

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