Ready to 
Today is NxE day (New Xbox Experience)
Brian Ambrozy
November 19, 2008 12:13 PM ET in Gaming
Well for those of us who didn’t get into the early test program, today is the day that we get access to the NxE. The NxE stands for “New Xbox Experience” and is the replacement for the venerable Dashboard interface that debuted with the Xbox 360 in 2005.
I fired up our 360 this morning at 7am and was greeted with the Dashboard, until I tried to sign in as myself. That’s when I was prompted with the system update window.
After a reboot or two, and a very fast download (I’m used to PS3 and Wii system updates taking 5-10 minutes), the NxE was ready in about one minute. I was prompted to accept a new EULA and then was greeted with the new Avatar creation tool.
If only I looked this cool in real life
Okay, I’ll just up and say it: They completely and boldly ripped off Nintendo with this. Let’s not mince words – these are Miis. This is just like two years ago when everyone said “Gee, Sony has completely ripped off Nintendo’s motion control idea for the SixAxis!” It’s true. Nintendo was revolutionary and now the others are playing catchup.
This isn’t a bad thing, however. You have the ability to customize your Avatar quite a bit, and they end up looking a little more hip than a Mii, and you can take a snapshot of your Avatar to use as a gamerpic. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?
Once you have an Avatar, you are greeted with the main interface for the NxE. Instead of blades, the interface works more like Sony’s XMB (see a pattern here?) , except it works vertically and is positioned on the left side of the screen. Immediately I recognized that this was a better way to browse the 360 than the Dashboard and the blades. There is so much content on the 360 that things got lost in the Dashboard. I don’t see this being a problem anymore.
The other big new feature is Netflix integration. I was anxious to see how this worked. There is a trial account, so I started the setup.
It told me to put my email address in, create a password, and then told me to go to a computer to finish WAIT WHAT?
Talk about interrupting an otherwise smooth experience! I’ve come to expect my time with Xbox Live to be seamless and perfect. It’s always been the best online console experience, but to tell me to go to another part of my house to get on my computer to complete my registration is just … weak. Hopefully they’ll enhance this with time.
I’m not quite sure how the Netflix integration works yet. I’m not sure if the cheapest plan will get you unlimited streaming movies on the Xbox. I haven’t gotten past the point of giving up for now to finish my trial account registration.
With the NxE, Microsoft has only improved upon their already stellar online experience. I’ve always maintained that the XBL service is the standard by which other online matchmaking and gaming services should be measured, and they’ve just upped the bar today. Hopefully we’ll see some more improvements to the Playstation Network to compete. Also, I dream of the day Nintendo has some sort of online experience to speak of.
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