Seems weird to be writing about the Xbox New Xbox Experience because, after all, I don’t have an Xbox… but my son does 🙂 And when he returned home from college last night for Thanksgiving, he came toting his 360. And so I got my first look at the NXE.
First off — he complained that he couldn’t find ANYTHING any more. We eventually got the thing hooked up to the home network again, but what once was a simple switch between wired and wireless was something that he instead struggled with for an hour — before it suddenly started working. No idea why.
His avatar was… well, I could never have picked him out of the crowd just going by his avatar. I had to help him redesign it because he didn’t know how he looked. It might be impossible for someone to do their own avatar. Andy doesn’t realize how SKINNY he is, and though he has tight, curly hair, the buzz cut is NOT the closest analogue to it. Plus, he didn’t want to add glasses like he actually wears, but glasses like he would like to wear.
Whatever, his avatar, after all.
We tried out the Nex Xbox Netflix Experience (NXNE), as I’m a Netflix subscriber. Having to add things to the “watch it now” queue on the laptop and then see them pop onto the screen on the Xbox was kinda weird. Movie browsing should be integrated into the Xbox, imo.
So quick review from my son: He hates the NXE, liked it back when everything was simple. I think he may grow to tolerate it. He called the NXE avatars total ripoffs of the Wii’s Miis, and of course, everyone is saying that and he is totally right about that. We couldn’t believe how Mii-like the avatars were.
Also, the clothing and color choices really suck. As an attempt to make an avatar that looks at all like you and wears clothes you might wear, it’s kind of a fail.
13 thoughts on “The Xbox NXE”
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My suggestion to him would be to just focus on the ‘mini-interface’ that you get from hitting the XBox button on the controller. It’s a lot cleaner, IMO. Really it’s basically a smaller version of the old ‘blade’ interface.
@Pete
Agree. My son did the same thing, and uses the small interface to travel the menus.
Then for the old folks (myself, and the wife) we enjoy that big text on our 1080p screen. Also, since we have a computer hooked up to the same TV, it was as simple as switching back and forth for movie queues.
We just went in, played on the computer for an hour adding movies, then we went and watched..(when we could, stupid cable).
And yes, hopefully they fix the queue system later on…oh that, and hopefully Sony quits being whiny babies and give back their movies.
Funny how each of us see everything differently. But, always good to get other opinions also.
Wait a sec… the NXE touts how you can play Netflix movies.. and you have to go to your computer, queue up a movie and then go back to your XBox to watch it?
Give me a frickin break.
Talk about LAZY ASSES. I suppose maybe it was a last minute thing, maybe they are working on letting you browse inside the system. Still though, for trying to give everyone a ‘better experience’ this sure sounds like one hell of a step back.
@Robert…
I would agree if it was not for the fact that the “Live Stream” was a PC based tool originally.
Basically it is like…
“Hey you know those movies you pick on your PC to stream? Well those same movies you just picked can ALSO be streamed on your xbox”
Of course…it still sucks…but, if we look at it in the manner noted above, well, we can see how that works out.
In so many words, I can be at work, and browse some movies, get home that evening and watch them on the Xbox in HD.
Devil’s Advocate here ya know?
The company I work for just released a game that uses the new avatars. I’ve blogged about it here:
A Kingdom for Keflings
The avatars might just be a Mii riff, but it’s something the console didn’t have before, and it makes for some new options for gameplay. I don’t mind when companies copy good ideas. (Copying dumb ideas, on the other hand, is setting yourself up for mocking.)
I’m glad that the netflix stuff is queued on the PC. Trying to find things in the xbox store was always a pain and slow so it was a nice move I think to keep it on the PC. The NXE is so much faster loading than the old dashboard was as well. Maybe its just me but I like it better.
I really like it, the 8 person chat is nice. I had never used netflix before so I’m getting a real kick out of it. I do agree it’s kind of a hassle to go from pc to the xbox, but oh well… my tv is 4 times the size of my monitor. My biggest complaint is that the old themes look really really bad.
I just want to weigh in on how much I loathe the Mii’s. I hate making mii’s. I hate the way I look, so why would I want to spend 30 minutes trying to make a character that looks like me. Do they honestly think anybody playing Gears 2 and primarily enjoys sawing other players in half wants to make a Mii?
I’m really surprised and disappointed that, (try as a might) there was no “opt out” button. I made a stark white featureless mii with a frowny face in protest.
I LOVE the NXE for one reason alone: It is faster. My games list comes up nearly instantaneously now. Despite it being pretty much a text list before, it would take an annoying number of seconds for it to pop into existence. Overall things just seem more responsive for me.
I also love that as you browse the games in the store, you see cover art. I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but there IS a reason that all books HAVE covers, right?
Navigating it is different than it was before, but I am already used to it. All in all I have nothing bad to say about the NXE.
Enjoying some aspects on hte NXE and other aspects, well, nobodies dies really.
The avatars are a bit too ‘plastic’ for my liking and the choice of clothes / colours is really poor.
Nintendo’s Miis win hands down when it comes to facial customisation. Being able to tilt and resize features opens up a LOT of scope. In fact, so much so that there’s a Wii channel just for ‘celebrity look alike’ avatars
Leaving aside the avatars and the Netflix issues, I’m definitely finding NXE faster to get up and running and the ability to copy a disk onto my HD for playing and thus cutting down on the racket the DVD drive makes is a major benefit.
On using the PC to manage your Netflix queue…
I have to defend MS on this one (waits for lightning to strike him dead). The Netflix streaming thing isn’t new, it’s just new to the 360. It works the same way on the Roku box or the handful of Blu-Ray players that stream Netflix.
So really I think its Netflix who you need to be angry at.
OTOH, I have something like 400 items in my Netflix queue. 🙂 And Netflix as a DVD rental service requires a computer with a net connection so I guess they figure it was safe to run things this way. Just load up the queue with any and everything you think you might ever want to watch. Then pop in every so often to ‘top it off’.
Well, on the balance, the Netflix integration with NXE is a Good Thing. The movies look fine and are very watchable, and are certainly a big improvement over the Playstation 3, which doesn’t have anything like it. The movies SOE offers cost money. As a Netflix subscriber, I am already paying for one source of movies, I’m not going to be paying for two, so they automatically lose my business.
I haven’t actually tried the Netflix integration on the XBox 360 NXE yet, but I think it could potentially be pretty awesome, but I just guess it depends on the prices and how well its does it. I like the avatar ideas, brings a bit more personality to the XBox, even though admittedly it is a bit of a Wii Mii rip off, but it’s pretty cool… it shouldn’t effect you that much if you don’t like it anyway.
I think people expected too much of the NXE to be honest, it’s a gaming console at the end of the day, if I wanted a whole entertainment thing I would have bought a PS3 by now, but this is why I love the XBox 360.
All in all, I think it was a pretty decent move! 🙂