After goofing around this morning with Microsoft's ballyhooed spring 2007 Xbox 360 update (released today), I'm pretty much equal parts impressed with and mystified by the team's design choices. The good: Tons of new features and enhancements, all necessary and appreciated. The not so good: Some interface redundancy, and a half-baked Messenger chat/IM interface.
The fuss this round boils down to a two-pronged retrofit: messaging and content management. Arguably the more important of those two (or at least the one Microsoft's tooting loudest) is the addition of Windows Live Messenger nee "Windows Messenger" support. Basically PC and mobile phone users can now add 360 gamers to their "Heyo, wussup?" friends list, see what they're doing in realtime (browsing the dashboard, playing Frogger, watching a South Park episode, etc.) and initiate text, video, or voice conversations. This now manifests as a "Chat and IM" option under "Friends" on your console's XBL tab or "blade." When either Messenger or XBL contacts are online, they're now tallied together under Friends.
Curiously, Chat and IM feels remarkably featureless. Oddly--and I think unwisely--you can't add new Messenger contacts from the 360 itself (there's no option to input an email address or search by name). Instead, you'll have to request that your friend add you to their PC or mobile client first. Even weirder, you can't see who's in your XBL contact list until you click "New Message." Basic chatting of course works as you'd expect it to, once you've set things up on both ends. Still, the interface feels only half to two-thirds complete...less proactive than reactive. Why shouldn't we be able to send Messenger-friend requests from the 360 itself? Cross your fingers someone will deem this update-worthy and fix it down the line.
The second significant feature is the addition of an entirely new ruby red "Marketplace" blade, which now precedes the XBL blade, left to right. Here you'll find buttons for games, media and entertainment, game demos, game videos, themes and gamer pictures, and featured downloads. In other words, consolidated store-driven content. Great idea, except for one thing: The "Games" blade (third from left) now feels slightly redundant. Yes, it's still handy for tracking achievements and played games, but "Demos and More" should probably be renamed "XNA Game Studio" to avoid confusion (you download regular demos in Marketplace now) and arcade games are already integrated with Marketplace, so the superfluous "Xbox Live Arcade" button should be dropped from Games entirely. All for one (access location) and one for all, I say.
Otherwise the list of enhancements is long and varied. A few of the more noteworthy:
- New achievement feature reveals what you unlocked and how many points it's worth while playing a game.
- Purportedly better looking VGA output if you use a VGA cable to connect your system to a display.
- Background downloads now allow you to continue downloading after the console has been "turned off." (If you shut it down while downloading, your 360 can be set to enter a "low power" mode and keep on keepin' on until the files have finished coming down.) Game and content details are now available while browsing content.
- You can now optionally hide restricted content while browsing XBLM, and privacy settings for video chat can now be set separately from voice/text chat.
- H.264 video support, up to 15 Mbps, baseline, main, and high (up to level 4.1) profiles with 2-channel AAC LC and main profiles. New MPEG-4 Part 2 video supports up to 8 Mbps, simple profiles with 2-channel AAC LC and main profiles. Translation: Somewhat better video support with updated codecs, but still only for WMV and MP4--not AVI or MKV--formats. (This may be of extra significance if you've been thinking about Apple TV as a video playback solution, since according to Slashdot, the Xbox 360 now technically beats it versatility-wise.)
- Windows Media protected content (WM-DRM) can now be streamed from PC to Xbox 360.
- Fast forward, rewind, chapter skip can now be used while downloading Video Marketplace content.
- The screensaver is now disabled when displaying pictures from any source.
- Hard drive content can now be sorted by size.
Minor quibble: The update includes a curious little video overview of the new features courtesy GameTrailers, except it's really just a bunch of one-way speeches by Microsoft designers patting themselves on the back about this or that decision. No QAs, no tough questions, no revelatory insights, just the usual "We wanted to achieve this, and we think we did" rhetoric. Why use GameTrailers, an ostensibly "journalistic" site which numbers among its own self-titled "dean of the gaming press" Geoff Keighley, to do what Microsoft could have easily done themselves?
Footnote: See Digital World's Cathy Lu on the forthcoming Xbox 360 gamepad with included mini-QWERTY keypad for thumb texting - I believe it's supposed to hit stores sometime this summer. (In the meantime, you can alternately plug in a standard USB keyboard.)
One of the greatest interface enhancements in this update is the fact that you no longer have to click the big xbox button when you get an achievement. Rather than just saying "achievement unlocked" it states the achievement itself and its corresponding point value. Can?t tell you how many times I?ve stopped a game to gawk at how many points I?ve gathered?
I think that still is better to have a nintendo wii than the 360, I dont care about graphics but about the game experience.