I’d been waiting for a sale on Soulja Boy’s favorite Xbox Live Arcade game, Braid, for some time. Fortunately, it finally went on sale for Gold Members in the final week of my Gold membership (gasp!). The game was well worth it at $15, but at $10 I can’t resist. Anyone else jumping on this? Anyone that has the game already want to share their thoughts on it?

Ray has posted his reviews of BOTH Sonic Unleashed versions in one MEGA-REVIEW!!! It’s a must-read, so read it!

That’s right folks, our very own Ray Hargreaves of 2P START! fame has taken the plunge and impulse-bought an Xbox 360 along with Sonic Unleashed (big surprise). Who knew that the horrible Wii version of Sonic Unleashed could drive him to such madness? Regardless, let’s welcome him with open arms to the ‘light side’ (as DJ puts it)! Ray’s gamertag is “Ray 2P START”, so go ahead and send him a friend request, and while you’re at it, send me one too if you haven’t done so (gamertag: wilef).

Your second task is to suggest some 360 games for Ray as I doubt Sonic Unleashed, Lego Indiana Jones, and Kung-Fu Panda will hold his attention for too long. Let’s focus on fun online multi-player titles (retail or arcade) to get him used to a REAL online gaming experience!

I promised first impressions, and as a man of my word, here they are! I got the New Xbox Experience (NXE) two days early, so I’ve had at least a couple days to check things out. I’ll probably have a better feel for this ‘experience’ in a month or so and might post something then too, but for now…

Dashboard
The ‘coverflow’ style layout of everything is nice enough, despite not utilizing screen real estate very well. My big problem here is that most of the information seen isn’t useful to me and I have no way to customize what’s there. A lot of the ‘channels’ are either advertising or not something I care about, so the ability to turn them off would make navigation easier for me. Everything does look much sharper than before though, so I’m sure once I get the navigation down I’ll like it even better.

Avatars
The first thing I did was create my Xbox Avatar as you see above. I’m relatively happy with it, although I’m not really sure it looks quite like me (that buzz cut looks more like a mini ‘fro). The choices for both facial features and for clothing options was very limited unfortunately. While there were lots of eyes and mouths, you couldn’t reposition them or tilt them or resize them like with Miis. The clothes were even more frustrating because putting on a ‘white longsleeve shirt’ meant just that, white. You can’t change the color of the clothes you wear, so even if you like the style of something, you might hate the color. A plain black t-shirt would have been nice, but there was no such option. They are promising TONS of news options each week, so it does have something going for it that the Wii doesn’t have. Another potentially huge problem I see is that there doesn’t appear to be any way to make more than one Avatar! The big draw with Miis was that you could make all your friends and family members and famous people too. Without that option the Avatars will just be a one-shot deal and never touched again. I did like the fact that you could take a picture of the Avatar for your gamer pic. All in all, it’s a nice addition that will need more options (I’m talking FREE options) in the future. A choice to make multiple Avatars is a MUST.

Netflix
The second thing I tried was the Netflix streaming movies. With a quick, free download I had it running in about a minute. It gave me an activation code to enter after logging into the Netflix account from a PC and then synced my Instant Queue to the Xbox. Everything was clean and smooth until I actually tried watching something. When you choose something to watch it runs a video quality check, basically seeing how fast your internet connection is and providing you with a resolution accordingly. Out of 4 ‘bars’, my connection rated a 1, so I knew I was in trouble. My internet is basic DSL at 1 Mbps download, so while it’s not lightning quick, it gets the job done. Unfortunately once the movie started playing, it was so blurry on my 50″ HDTV that it was unwatchable. When I switch to the native resolution, the size was reduced to maybe 10% of my TV. I’m curious to know what internet speed is required for just DVD quality streaming (not to mention the new HD streaming). I would really like an option to keep the quality high and just buffer for a longer period of time.

Games
The way game information is displayed has been improved as well. The Game Marketplace is much nicer now with arcade games getting virtual box art to flip through. When you look at your game library, each screen in the coverflow stack displays useful information and is easily accessible. You have a screen for achievements, downloads, details, etc. This big improvement in navigation makes the update worthwhile to me.

Verdict
I think the NXE is a good start to revamping the Dashboard and is a definite improvement. Not too many people will be complaining about it, except to say that they want more features. Microsoft did say that about half of the planned features were cut from the initial launch, so I guess we still have more to look forward to!

Woohoo! I’m getting the NXE 2 days early! I’m actually pretty excited to make my avatar, and to try out the game installations. Impressions will be posted tomorrow!