The New Xbox 360 Experience In-depth Review

Name: The New Xbox 360 Experience In-depth Review - Page 2
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by Devin Pastoor — Monday, December 01, 2008, 12:22 PM EDT

Navigation: My Xbox and Games Marketplace

Navigation
Navigation was clearly a priority in this update. The blades were completely dropped on the dashboard, in lieu of a more intuitive, interactive interface. The contrast between the two is quite clear...

Old vs. New

The new system has been designed for users that have never used an Xbox, in an effort to make it easier for them to find their way around easily. This caused Microsoft to move some things around, however. If you’ve spent a lot of time in the old dashboard, it might take you while to get acquainted, but it very quickly becomes evident how much more natural navigation has become.

There are eight vertical scrolling options, lets break those down and see what each has to offer...

My Xbox is your starting point, this section contains the areas to launch your games, your profile, and your game, video, music, and picture libraries, along with Windows Media Center and System Settings. Each of these has its own icon that you can pan through horizontally and is accompanied by a related icon, and a label.

Game Marketplace – The games marketplace offers you Xbox Arcade games, demos, add-ons to games, and your game library. In the old Marketplace organization was rather disjointed, this has been fixed.

Initially you can search alphabetically, by genre, or by the type of download – whether an expansion, full game, demo, or add-on. From there, when you get to a game you’re interested in, by selecting the game, you are greeted with information about the it, its cost, related content, and even screenshots.

This interface makes it much easier to locate the games you’re interested in, and find the related content. It also helps that your Games Library is synced with the Marketplace, allowing you to directly jump to the Marketplace from your library to find related content. Finding map packs or add-ons, instead of being a chore, is now incredibly easy to navigate. One thing to note, all these features are available in the new Xbox Guide, which will be covered later.