I like to mix things up once in awhile. I change my desktop and other devices around often because I like something new and different. I also like the Avatar concept because you'll actually get a better idea of who you're dealing with. Yes, I know that people can make them any way they want, but I believe the trend will be to make them look like yourself. Even if they made themselves look completely retarded, that will tell you something about the gamer right there.
I do like the current "Blade" interface except for one, glaring exception. When looking at DLable content, the descriptions scroll slow as fuck. That really annoys the piss out of me when looking at Rock Band weekly DLs.
I think I'm most looking forwared to ripping certian games to the HD to decrease noise and loading times.
You've got a big screen and then these tiny windows taking up 1/2 to 2/3 of the screen.
The Avatars look pretty bland but the ability to group with friends easier is a nice feature. It might add some character to games by having your personalized avatar playing in the game itself.
My idea has always been to have a centralized Hub where you can meet friends with portals leading in and out of games. To give it some variety, your avatar would be dressed up in an outfit from the last game they played so you'd have a player in a GoW battle uniform while maybe someone else would be in beach clothes, coming from from DOAX 2, or walking around as a creature from Spore.
Watching movies together sounds cool but I don't like to talk while watching movies so that wouldn't be great for me although it would work well for Mystery Science Theater type stuff.
Features of the new dashboard seem positive and easy to access but without having actually used the dash yet, it looks like they could have used the space more visually appealing way.
Well the new Dash is publicly available. I downloaded it this morning and it's just fantastic. Seems more intuitive than the blades were and the new guide is just very very functionnal.
Overall I'm very impressed in what Microsofth as been able to pull off and deliver to everyone between when this was announced at E3 and what they delivered today.
I really like it. The men seem easy to customize, but it's a challange to make an avatar that looks like my wife!
The whole dashboard has a nice flow to it. I also like the enlarged photos for the game you have in the system. I'm going to load a game to the HD later and see how much of a difference that will really make in load times and such. I have a 120G Elite and I have only ever used 20G. It looks like I can fnally fill that space up!
I installed Gears 2 this morning and the biggest difference wasn't particularly the speed as it was the lack of noise that was present as I played the game. Silence is indeed golden!
I turned it on, downloaded, saw the absurd video, made my Mii-too, and started navigating.
It froze and needed to be shut down.
I haven't bothered since.
Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. - Douglas Adams
I think I preferred the old one. The interesting thing is that if you install it on a 360 Arcade your memory card is now down to 82 MB. Kinda sad really they only equip these with 258MB. Although I'm sure that's just to get people to spend money on an extra memory card or the HD. The only reason I installed the update was for the ability to copy games to HD. I'm not sure how effective it is but it has to be quicker on some things (and quieter) than loading everything from the DVD. Will probably pick up the 120 GB drive shortly. It will be worth it just to not have the DVD drive constantly spinning.
Aslanna wrote:I think I preferred the old one. The interesting thing is that if you install it on a 360 Arcade your memory card is now down to 82 MB. Kinda sad really they only equip these with 258MB. Although I'm sure that's just to get people to spend money on an extra memory card or the HD. The only reason I installed the update was for the ability to copy games to HD. I'm not sure how effective it is but it has to be quicker on some things (and quieter) than loading everything from the DVD. Will probably pick up the 120 GB drive shortly. It will be worth it just to not have the DVD drive constantly spinning.
Yeah if nothing else, running most of the games you play from the hard drive will prolong the life of your 360, which is always a good thing.
Aslanna wrote:I think I preferred the old one. The interesting thing is that if you install it on a 360 Arcade your memory card is now down to 82 MB. Kinda sad really they only equip these with 258MB. Although I'm sure that's just to get people to spend money on an extra memory card or the HD. The only reason I installed the update was for the ability to copy games to HD. I'm not sure how effective it is but it has to be quicker on some things (and quieter) than loading everything from the DVD. Will probably pick up the 120 GB drive shortly. It will be worth it just to not have the DVD drive constantly spinning.
I'm in love with my 120GB hdd.
Every game I play with some frequency is installed on the drive. The machine is whisper quiet when playing now as well (Then again I usually play with my Earforce X3's on so I wouldn't hear it anyways.)
I have 7-8 games on the HDD at the moment and all 2 seasons of The Guild and still have about 50GB left.
The only real was that MS could improve this would be to allow us to use standard 2.5" HDD's(like Sony does) instead of proprietary drives.
I went ahead and ordered the 120GB last night from buy.com. Couldn't help feel like I was being ripped off by spending 1 dollar a GB on a hard drive when I'm sure the whole thing cost MS less than $50 a unit to produce and market. Curious as to how it knows what to copy to the drive though. Sounds like it pretty much just copies over everything. Anyway, that's really the only reason I did the update since I knew I'd pick up a HD eventually and that would be a handy feature to have.
And the drives themselves aren't proprietary. You can pick up that particular WD model (BEVS or something) and upgrade the 20GB (or 60GB I would imagine) with a bit of messing about. Just need to basically hook it up to you PC and use a program in DOS to format it for the 360. If I had a 20GB model I probably would have done that but figured I didn't want to mess with the hassle of finding one, buying the new drive and swapping it in. But yeah I know what you mean. Would be nice just to be able to pull one out and put in something with more capacity. But then MS would be out of all that extra profit. And they can't have that happening!
