New Xbox Interface
Yesterday, at Microsoft’s E3 media briefing, they announced a completely new interface for the XBox 360. It’s a bit disappointing to me, actually. It seems a whole lot like the kind of unoriginal, “me too” crap I’d come to expect from Microsoft, but not Microsoft Games division. First of all, they’ve dropped the “blades” interface which I rather liked. They’ve also dropped the gamer image in favor of an “avatar.” The first thing that comes to mind is “what happens to the skins and gamer pictures that users have payed real money for?”
The new “avatars” feature sure seems a whole lot like Nintendo’s Mii functionality. The major difference is that Microsoft’s version seems to be much less flexible. It looks like you’ll be buying new outfits to customize your characters. So, the gamer pictures you just purchased are now unusable, but Microsoft is generously providing new worthless content for you to buy. I never actually spent money on this content, but it’s very upsetting to see Microsoft just nuke paid content without providing the user with any options.
The one feature I’m happy to see as part of the new update is integration with Netflix. It will be nice to have an easy way to use the Netflix streaming functionality on my TV.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Yuck, is the 360 update MANDATORY?