New 360 'Experience'

So I'm sure there have been a ton of blogs posting about their thoughts on the new dashboard update, so now you can have 1,000,001 thoughts...

After a full day to check it out, I have to say I like it, but I also don't like it. I find it far more cumbersome than the old dashboard and I have to go into far too many menus in order to achieve things I could do in 1 or 2...

I gave my avatar guy a beard...It is my odd nod to y0jimb0, and my avatar knows that there can never be a screwup where his beard comes off unintentionally. Even though my avatar has his awesome beard, the pickings for what to put on the virtual man or woman are really limited. I'm not a big dress-up fan, but I was thankful that they had a Timberland-ish boot, as that is my footwear of choice in any season...

Maybe I'm just becoming crotchety and am slowly feeling like change is bad...Unless it's Presidents...

There is an utter fuckload of potential though, unfortunately there is more potential for MS to micro-fuck users with the transactions that seem like they are becoming far more included than the 'free' DLC of old. If they honestly charge for avatar clothes, ones that didn't have a 'brand' name because wearing avatar-virtual-Gucci-shades is teh aw3s0m3z, it will be all downhill from there...And if you pay for the avatar clothing, you're a sucker.

The Netflix thing...meh...I stream videos from my PC, and I don't have to do anything but have them on my hdd, so that really wasn't a novel thing for me. I thought the party idea for the movies was a decent approach to putting the Live spin on it, but it didn't make the cut...Soon they say.

The one thing I've been looking forward to with this update was also not included in it on the 19th...I'll have to wait for spring...The gameshows that you can play...Since they released the 360, I always thought that gameshows over the arcade were a natural fit. Unfortunately the only gameshows they released have been "Wits &Wagers" (board game) and "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader" (also known as Redneck Jeopardy). The thought of playing 1 vs 100, with an actual 100 would be awesome...Even if the 100 weren't live, but randomly selected answers that owners of the game could give in order to deepen the experience. (Although 101 and players would surely be sweet), along with some staples of course like Jeopardy, WoF, Jokers Wild anyone? Card Sharks FTW? I mean, there are some seriously awesome game shows that could be put into this, and the 'real world prizes' thing is just an added bonus.

I can't say I've noticed much of a difference for installing games. I installed fallout 3 and GTA 4, 2 nicely long load timers....I can say that the opening sequence before your Niko loads up is quicker, but the saving and loading seem to take the same amount of time....With Fallout I notice it more when it pulls up my game saves....It used to take some time to get through the list of saves to get to the botoom to clean out 20 or so...Now it is quick, and I can appreciate it. I tried it on Fable 2, and oddly enough, it seemed like the between 'areas' loading took longer...So I don't get that.

I'm sure we will see a nicely streamlined dashboard experience by March....But overall I haven't really had any issues with the rollout, which was really shocking. OK, I'm off to be Dead in Space.