Details on the New Xbox Experience: search, hard drive play, alerts, themes, pics

by Christopher Grant on Jul 17th 2008 10:28PM

click to view the entire gallery

Here are a couple interesting takeaways from our tour of the New Xbox Experience:

"There's nothing to announce" right now regarding a keyword search for the Marketplace. Let's hope they either a) add one in or b) drastically improve how we find things
Playing games from the hard drive will work fine for multi-disc games; in fact, you can pick which discs you want to rip (for example, we're superstitious and we'd only rip odd-numbered discs).
As an example, we were told that Devil May Cry 4 is approximately a 4 or 5GB installation and took about ten minutes.
You'll need to keep the disc in the drive the entire time. This is about speeding up load times (and hey, bonus tip: no more noisy DVD drive while you're playing!)
The alerts look the same – actually, like the entire interface, they look sharper, cleaner. Oh, and the sound is the same.
Yes, you can still use your gamertag pics and your themes (in fact, they look a lot better now!)

New Xbox Experience

Tags: New-Xbox-Experience, Xbox-360

Reader Comments (95)

Mii's were a nice little novelty, but weren't really used for anything. Here, they basically replace the gamerpic function. Instead of everyone having a generic little picture to represent themselves online, they have a full avatar, which in my opinion, makes them a lot more personal.

And I quite like the style. It isn't really very similar to the Mii's, but not as realisitc as the Home avatars, I think they got it just right.

Just stop posting retard.

notice the gamertag is NEWTON spelled backwards, perhaps a hint for the future?

Nice catch :)

Yeah I noticed that too, what gives?

That is actually his gamertag. He said it on Major Nelson's podcast before.

http://live.xbox.com/en-US/profile/profile.aspx?GamerTag=notwen

1 more thing. Since NO 1 here likes Wiis, what do you actually think of the MS avatars.

I personally dont see anything or notice in anyway how Miis contributed to the success of Wii. Wiimote is what made the gamecu...Wii.

MS are obviously intrigued by Wii success, but obviously think avatars were apart of it. WRONG (imo)

Could have at least had its OWN style, (keep it fresh and genuine) perhaps a bit more cooler and styling......or lego like??? Something to set 360 apart from Wii and PSN. Im sure many of u's are put off by this "in your face" kinda happy childish approach. 360 is a f*cking hardcore machine. not a Wii wannabe!

Isn't Uncharted made by Naughty Dog though? Naughty Dog needs to eat too. They want more money as much as the next company. Sell a share of the publishing rights. MS could publish it on 360 hehe.

I'll assume that's in reply to my earlier comment, Naughty Dog is owned by Sony Computer Entertainment; that makes it fairly unlikely it'll ever come to 360.

Can we rip Xbox 1 games to HDD?

Uncharted is an amazing game. Story is great fun, and enemies are a pain to shoot when they wriggle about. Lovely humour and great music.

Would've been the best trade with Bioshock

Does anyone else hear the alert sound even when your not playing? haha

Carmine, that's an excellent question. You should be game journalist.

Na2ru1, I'm a huge Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider fan. I love all that exploration, tomb and temples, treasure hunting stuff. I wanna play Uncharted so bad, so here's to wishful thinking. Uncharted on 360! Oh and Tekken 6 hehe.

Haha omg yes Rofl Waffle. I swear i'm not kidding. I think I hear it everywhere and i'll be like, did I leave the 360 on? I think too much XBL has be hearing things haha

Haha good.
I'm not the only one hearing things haha

Here's the dealio with installing games: The reason why the disc is still in the drive is for verification that you own said game. Like they said, disc drive won't be spinning, yo. It's entirely played off the HD.

http://img123.imageshack.us/img123/7253/2674486108e1bb0a4947hk7.jpg

So nobody hates the UI its just the Avatar based things and the ulgyass background?

I believe MS was smart for the redesign just that LOl you have Rare of all people design human characters rather they had Carbonated games or what ever there casual studio is called design them Rare is just not the right people right?

gray background that looks like there is no color changes but knowing MS they'll probably include them.

The themes still work.

Where's the part about how we can add our own HDD and not have to buy microsoft's ridiculously overpriced one?

Especially with the install feature, I would love for that to happen.

Since the Avatars are exposed to developers, you probably will see them go totally different from what Nintendo has done with the Miis. First and formost, I can see you gaining items like a chainsaw from Resident Evil 5. I can also see you gaining different outfits like armor from Gears of War 2, or a new Ninja suit from Ninja Gaiden.

If you think about it, you probably can get a completly different Avatar then what you see right now. These could be the base models and developers are free to create whatever they want. If this is the case, I can definitely see myself using the avatars over the gamer pics.

Oh, I do not know why Joystiq does no have the pics where you have the themes integrated with the new dashboard but it looks better than the blads so far.

Hang on, you bunch of morons were ranting that HDD installs sucked less than a couple of weeks back, what's changed?

Hypocrites...

Just like the Sony fans were moaning about achievements, yeah? There has been quite a turn around with HDD installs, since MS announced this, but the difference here, than with the Playstation, is that they're totally optional.

You can have the benefits of installs, without being forced into it by every game.

Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. All of a sudden when installs are on the 360 they're a great thing.

I predict mandatory installs for the 360 in the future as games are forced to go multidisk but the game's structure isn't linear enough for disk swapping to be feasible. I think that's the true reason for this feature.

@Nate
false. if that were the case MS would have gotten rid of the arcade sku that does NOT come with a hard drive. thanks for playing though.

@paul
You already can't play Burnout Paradise online without a harddrive, or play original Xbox games without a hard drive. There's really no way you can get all the necessary updates or map packs for Gears and Halo for online play on a memory card.

Since this IS the case, MS obviously doesn't give two shits about arcade owners. Expect games with installs.

LIVE is definitely different than PSN, but I still don't see why some say it is better, even with what they are doing now.

I like the Netflix option, but its only value is being able to manage the account of live. You can have Netflix on PS3, but you have to stream through the computer. That's only a small inconvenience.

The avatars look like Miis with arms, and the community room looks static. Make them move around and interact for me.

Primetime is an excellent idea. I hope this takes off. I think this could be a system seller for gameshow lovers.

so we are having a combined vertical/horizontal menu starting from the left instead of the middle...

Does this means the live service is starting to rip the PSN ???

Nope. Again, it looks and works very similar to Windows Media Center.

.. i'm just trying to do some trolling here .. but with no good effect :) .. actually it looks great!

but did you guys check out the new home walk-through

http://www.ps3fanboy.com/2008/07/17/developer-walkthrough-on-home-shows-off-neat-diversions/

when you see this it's kind of sad the 360 goes with retarded wii style avatars ..

Okay, I just thought about something. MS's HDDs are specially made and installed with some type of firmware/software to combat piracy and what not, right?

How come they can not start allowing us to use regular hard drives, BUT forcing the installation of the firmware/software that is on the current HDDs. Therefore, the reasoning behing having to use their expensive drives would go away. If they make it where the system recognizes a regular hard drive, and the crap they pre-install on their hard drives is automatically installed on regular drives, then problem solved.

Everyone could be happy. WE can purcahse our own hard drives with much bigger capacities at a fraction of the cost. MS could be happy because we now have tons a room to purchase movies, games, etc

Thoughts?

Yuu acually CAN you your own 120GB HDD, but it has to be a specific kind. I saw a guide on t3h internets demonstrating

New interface looks okay but what's with that silly looking Mii rip off?

this is because on ps3 it's using a slower spinning and reading bluray drive, whereas on 360 it's using a 12x dvd drive.

don't read too much into it.

I might buy a xbox 360 please help..........

Ok i thought about getting an xbox 360 again, i sold mine last summer for the ps3. I am keeping my ps3. I looked at the games coming out in the next 4 months for xbox 360(ones which are not releasing on ps3) and so far I havent found a definitive answer to make me buy one. I really like online games like call of duty, battlefield, racing games and some games on ps3 which i loved are uncharted, resistance, motorstorm. I just havent seen anything on xbox 360 that is coming soon which interests me, what are some must have titles coming out that can help me decide to get a 360 again??

John , what the hell are you talking about? I asked a serious question if you dont want to help dont, someone who knows how to socialize with others will.

XBOX provides you a wonderful gaming experience.It is the most latest mode of video games and proves to be the best among all.So. I can say a very good experience for me.........
pathogen007
Debt Consolidation

Question
MS avatar being made by Rare is a bad thing.

Well, Rare isn't technically making the avatars, the person making them is /spoiler /plottwist YOU!!!

Haha

Well, personally, I like Rare's character design, and they need to keep the system looking attractive to all ages, so as much as I would like to make a zombie avatar covered in blood, it'll scare the lil kiddies

Wait I meant Is MS still having Avatars being made Rare is a bad.

Why is Rare making the Avatars?

I'll tell you what this new dashboard ACTUALLY is.

It's what Microsoft gleefully calls "3d flip" from Vista! Noooooooooooo! (Darth style)

i feel that they are shunning their established fan base to replace them with wii gamers who want to feel hardcore because they have a proper console

personaly i think the newdashboard is brilliant but in all of this its just going to give microsoft another bad name for the avatars because the wii also can any one reply back to this as will the netflix they have added to the dashboard will you need to pay for that?

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Details on the New Xbox Experience: search, hard drive play, alerts, themes, pics

New Xbox Experience

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