GOONL!NE

Tomorrow (November 19th), the Xbox 360 will get a serious makeover and I mean serious.

The New Xbox Experience isn’t just a software update like your old annual updates for the Xbox 360 or Firmware updates for the PLAYSTATION 3, this is a brand new UI to the Xbox 360.

On Wednesday, all Xbox 360’s (pending they have broadband of course but don’t worry, if you dont have BB, the update will come in various games) will be booting up around the world to say goodbye to the Dashboard and say hello to the New Xbox Experience.

The download will come up to you instantly once you sign into Xbox Live so take one last look at the Dashboard before updating. After that, the update will begin and will take just a couple of seconds depending on your broadband speed. Once it’s done, the Xbox 360 will boot up again but this time, it will download a remainder of the NXE.

Once that is finished, your Xbox 360 will reboot and your finished, you have the new Xbox Live Experience, congratulations.

You will then have a introduction video which welcomes you to the NXE before taking you forward to creating an Avatar.

Just incase you don’t know what an Avatar is, an Avatar is sorta of like a Mii rip-off if you wanna look at it from that kind of perspective.It is your unique personalty in the NXE, you can customise your Avatar the way you see fit so it can be shaped to be like you (Like what I am gonna do tomorrow to my Avatar) or you can shape it to be somebody else.

After you’ve done that, you’ll land on the Welcome page on the NXE which shows you how to get the best out of your new experience. Once your done with welcome, take a nosy around the NXE. In it, you get 4 things which are important to your entertainment on your 360 and they are Games, Video, Music and Photos, pretty much like the Old Dashboard.

In Spotlight, you get to see what game is in your tray like Fable II or Gears of War 2, a short overview of your gamercard with your achievement score, your Avatar and the last 4 games you’ve played followed then by a couple of windows which advertises stuff from Xbox Live Marketplace.

Go into your profile and you’ll see your profile in more detail, showing your last played games in sequence amongist one another (EG Gears 2, Halo 3, Fable II, The Orange Box etc etc showing the whole list of games you’ve played in your 360’s lifetime) followed then by your most recently unlocked achievements in those games.

Go onto Game Marketplace and you’ll see stuff there available to buy or download for free as well as something else there called Community Games. These are games made by gamers for gamers to play thanks to the XNA development tools available from Microsoft at a premium cost. You can buy these type games for pretty much cheap like roughly 200 MS points on average compared to 800MS points or 1200 MS points for an Arcade game.

In Games Library, you see a mightly big collection of games which are on your Xbox 360, everything from your disc based 360 games, Arcade titles, XNA games, Xbox Originals and Demos. And yes, I did say 360 titles but why?

You can install titles on to your Xbox 360 so the game make’s very little noise whatsoever when the disc is running in the Xbox 360 like for example. You have Fable II in the disc tray so you wanna install it to your HDD.

Just go to Xbox 360 in your Games Library, make sure Fable II is in your disc tray first and once that is done, go into Fable II. There, it will show you your achievements for it, related Marketplace stuff for the game, a description of the game followed then by the cover art and the players description like is it 1 player or in is it 16 player (obviously, in Fable II’s case, a single player and 2 player XBL co-op)

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In part 2 later on tonight, we’ll be discussing your Friends, the Xbox Guide, Marketplace in more detail and Avatars in more detail.

Stay tuned.