[  1 | 2 | Next Page »  ]

image011111 - The Avatar army is coming

It seems bizarre to be writing a hands-on preview of a free console update, but we've never known one to change so significantly the way you interact with your games machine. Officially unveiled at E3 last July (but unceremoniously leaked to the internet a month earlier), the New Xbox Experience promises to make looking at, and using, your Xbox 360 a much quicker and dynamic experience.

The Avatars, created by Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts developer Rare, are undoubtedly the headline feature. Similar in style to Nintendo's Miis, your Avatar will be the virtual representation of your gaming self. It will be what people see when they want to interact with you pre-game. And it's also something you absolutely have to bother with.

When you turn your Xbox LIVE connected 360 on, on November 19, you'll be prompted to download an update. Once done, a short promotional movie will play that doesn't really have anything to do with anything except looking pretty. From there, you'll be asked to create an Avatar. This is something you have to do, but how long it takes is completely up to you.

image02111 - The NXE is designed to be nice to look at and easy to navigate

A dozen or so pre-made Avatars will pop up on screen, designed to form the base of your own Avatar. You can select one, or, if you don't like the look of any of them, press X and a new set of Avatars will trot on screen. Once you've found one you like, you can proceed to customise it, with a raft of outfits, facial features, height, build and hair types (ten pages of them) to choose from. If you can't be bothered with any of that customisation lark, you can simply use a base Avatar and skip customisation altogether. But if you want to, you can tweak your Avatar to your own design. We managed to create a red-bearded, milk white skinned man and dressed him in a suit and Jamiroquai hat. It's not customisation on a par with Saints Row 2, but you do have a lot more options than Nintendo offers when creating a Mii.

Once done, you can take a picture of your Avatar - positioning the head at whatever angle you want in an outlined mugshot square - and use it as your Gamer Picture, but you can carry on using any Gamer Picture you might have spent Microsoft Points on. From there, you're good to go and play about with the new and improved dashboard. It's been designed to be much more attractive to look at and much easier to find what you're after. The blades have been replaced by a vertical list that can be scrolled up and down, with things like My Xbox, Friends, Inside Xbox and Video Marketplace. Each item on the list has a number of visual options that can be scrolled through horizontally. My Xbox, for example, will have a large image of the box art of the game that's in the tray, your Gamer Card (itself significantly visually enhanced) and your Games Library, among other things. It looks and feels like a much more visual version of the PS3's XMB.

[  1 | 2 | Next Page »  ]