The Super Elite 6-Days-Early NXE Post – Part 1
That’s right! We were chosen as part of the third-string wave of users to get “early” access to the New Xbox Experience and for a whole evening I did nothing else but fiddle with the 360’s menus. I was pretty excited about the NXE and put a personal boycott on many of the details, but I know coverage has been excessive. I’m not going to rewrite an FAQ or go all in-depth here, I just wanted to pop in with a few thoughts of my own.
After downloading and installing the NXe for the first time the familiar chrome-sphere-gets-melted-by-a-big-green-X animation is replaced with an ego-spastic, “wahoo! look at us”, minutes-long video that, thankfully, only plays once. I turned on the Xbox just now to make sure and though I was hoping for a new boot up animation, good ol’ Chrome Sphere is still in effect.
Once the rebranding propaganda finished it was time to reinvent the phrase Wii60. What was once an unexpected alliance between Nintendo and Microsoft fans in the face of the monolithic PlayStation 3 has now become a blatant “wow, what a great idea Nintendo, thanks for the inspiration” moment; the Avatar Creation Menu. They can explain away the similarities between Nintendo’s Mii characters and their Avatars all they want but that menu and even its music are irrefutably inspired by The Big N.
Not that it’s a bad thing. Nintendo is obviously onto something and though not many Xbox games are going to incorporate the family friendly Avatars, you’ll still come to identify yourself and your friends by the slick cartoony doppelgangers. And bonus props to the Dashboard team for including a few unwritten tricks to change facial expressions and even belch out loud. Those simple expressions come in handy in the Gamer Picture menu where you size up your Avatar with a viewfinder and snap a new pic that represents you across Xbox.com and the rest of the internet.
The process is simple and there’s enough freedom in the zoom, angle, and expressions that I could see myself changing my pic nearly as often as I change my social status on sites like Facebook and Twitter. At least, until I get tired of loading up the Avatar menu. The design is similar to the new dashboard but it takes a few seconds to load and kicks you offline until you’re done playing dress-up. It kinda tarnishes the whole point of the fancy new NXE — to be expressive and online at all times — but it’s a minor gripe.
This is getting longer than I expected so consider this Part 1 that will, with all luck, continue tomorrow. I promise I’m done talking about CG puppets… for now.
