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Why Robin Makes Batman Better The New Xbox Experience lets you install 360 games onto your HDD. Great news for anyone – like myself – who gets DISC READ ERRORS as often as the sun both rises and sets. But chances are, unless you splurged and bought yourself an Elite, or are new to the 360 world and own a 60GB unit, you have a 20GB HDD. And for you, space is at a premium. So you need to know how much room the installs actually take up, so you can get prioritising.
Speaking with dreisechzig.net, Microsoft Europe’s Boris Schneider-Johne has said that – at least for the first few weeks of the NXE’s life – there’ll be regular clothing updates for your avatars. And, more importantly, that they’ll be free. But after that? “It has not been announced”. It’s OK, Boris, we get what you mean. The shitty t-shirts and “grunge” hi-tops, they’ll be free, but the Marcus Fenix scowl and Bomberman Zero outfit, they’ll cost us. After all, we can’t take our Microsoft Points to the grave.
NXE Fragen und Antworten, Teil Eins [dreisechzig, via X3F]
Of course you do. Fortunately, there’s wacky Manic Panic hued ‘dos hidden away in the New Xbox Experience, giving you the option to create a more accurate Rei Ayanami or Maximilian Jenius or blue-haired senior citizen. It was discovered — as far as we know, by reader Samuel who told us that if you rotate the right analogue stick for about a minute or so, you’ll unlock a suite of new garish hair colors.
To go along with the launch of the New Xbox Experience, Microsoft and their valued publishing partners have released a range of premium themes. The word “premium” comes in when you consider they cost 250 MS points each. Anyway, in typical Xbox Live style, when Microsoft’s Larry Hryb pointed the themes out earlier today on his blog, there was no way to actually preview what they looked like. Gah. Not to worry – some kids over on GAF have done the next best thing, and are taking screengrabs like it’s going out of style, snapping pics of almost every theme.
Now that you’ve created your first — and possibly last — Xbox 360 Avatar in the New Xbox Experience, you’re most likely thinking “What kind of digital crap can I now purchase to make this thing look less horrid?” The answer is new Ninja Blade themed Avatar parts. If you’re in Japan, you can purchase the new premium theme designed to promote From Software’s upcoming Xbox 360 cinematic action game, netting you five new ninja parts for your virtual self. You knew this was coming, right?
The NXE didn’t just hit in the US and Europe. It hit the world over. How’s the rest of the world taking things? Well, if Jamzy’s any indication, the rest of the world is doing just fine, thank you very much. As you can see by our favourite Japanese Xbox 360 fanboy’s eerily life-like avatar.
While the NXE’s ability to let you install 360 games to your HDD is mostly a good thing (no more disc read errors at my house), it’s been revealed that there’s a few hiccups. You’d think that copying a game to your 360′s hard drive would speed things up. Faster load times, that kind of thing. But in some cases it doesn’t. Especially when it comes to Halo 3. Tests have already shown the game runs faster on disc than it does on HDD, and today Bungie have come out and confirmed this. Confirmed it, and explained it.
Considering the scale of the operation, the roll-out of the New Xbox Experience went pretty damn well. Didn’t, however, go perfectly. There were a few glitches here and there. Netflix took a while to get going (though that problem was likely to have been on Netflix’s end of things), but more pressingly, the XBL Marketplace has been patchy ever since launch. For a lot of people, either you can access it and it’s really, really slow, or you can’t access it at all. If it’s any comfort, Microsoft know it’s broken, Larry Hryb writing on his blog:
Now that the New Xbox Experience has been globally launched, it’s time to brace for the impact. Outside of a few error reports, things appear to have gone smoothly. One of the minor bumps that we know of, thanks to OXM, is that some Xbox 360 themes don’t quite jibe with the NXE’s new layout. Microsoft touted that old themes would look “beautiful” with the new look and feel, but perhaps the better descriptor is “beautiful but largely obscured.”
Seems like the New Xbox Experience isn’t rolling out quite as smoothly as one would have hoped. Reports are trickling in about sporadic issues accessing content via the Xbox Live Marketplace. Currently on my end, accessing anything on marketplace is running incredibly slow, erroring out at times with various numerical error codes. Just a moment ago the new Fable II theme appeared on the service with a date of 11/20 attached, only to error out when trying to access it, which is probably good seeing as breaking the laws of space and time totally voids your warranty.
