People going in depth on reviews and every little feature are taking the fun of discovery that you get when you get the update. So below, I will give you my thoughts on this New Xbox Experience, deep thoughts that you make you re-think your whole stance on politics, religion, and etc. Seriously though, this is going to be a nice brief overview to give you a taste of what to expect before getting your update (tomorrow).

I wanted to hate this. Thinking about how many articles I have seen about every little facet of the “New Xbox Experience.” Right off the bat, the download and install for the upgrade is a few minutes and after that is done, they make you go right into create an avatar mode.

I have two stances on avatars 1) they are stupid, I don’t play video games to make my own characters, and 2) they are addictive, I must tweak every character I make in every game (my best so far has been from the Tony Hawk create a character mode). The avatars are extremely simple to make along with having a decent amount of features. As you can see, my new NXE Avatar blows my Mii out of the water (and took me less time to make).

One of my most antcipated features was Netflix, activation took literally a second. I see the videos in my instant queue match up with what I have on Netflix.com, so I pick out “Boiler Room” because I have seen it in a while. A 3:12am I hit start, video starts playing less than a minute later. Quality is not HD, but damn, this is ‘on demand’. No hiccups while the movie played, but to me it felt in between tv and dvd quality.

All the menus and everything is so damn quick. No lag when opening any program or just flying through the menus. I go back to the movies and the ultimate test while watching a movie, I start Bit Torrent up on my computer to see if I can eat up the bandwidth. Not knowing what to download, I grab the new latest Robot Chicken Star Wars Epsidoe II.

Going to Netflix and adding titles to instant queue is awesome and is literally instant (they named it well). From my computer to the 360, my list is refreshed with what i have added on their web page. I am sure you have heard it before, but the selection of movies and tv series is above average, but could be better. I am satisfied (I mean, hey, I haven’t seen Boiler Room in a while and it is still awesome).

All while typing, my Bit Torrent test results: No hiccups. I can’t believe this. No slow downs. Stops. I am going to have to do further testing based on the theorium of “no way.”

Time to install a game. I freed up as much memory on my hard drive as I can (I have a crapload of Rock Band songs and hold onto demos). Soulcalibur IV has bothered me when playing because of the disc drive noise, so I pick that. I started at 3:43am, and exactly 11 minutes later at 3:54am it was complete. This took longer than I thought it would take. Even after looking at the Game/Size chart I was surprised 5.9GB was that much of a time waster. Of course if you have a larger hard drive, this is no problem, but for me and my 20 gig, I had to really pick and choose what one game I want to install.

Jerry’s Final Thoughts: It blows my mind that PlayStation’s HOME doesn’t get this much attention. Maybe it is a Sims rip-off so people don’t care as much, but with the money Microsoft has put behind NXE as being a huge deal and it working on us consumers, Sony should really be doing the same.

No matter how much press the NXE gets, it needs absolutely none, as when people will be booting up thier Xbox, they too will just automatically have to do the upgrade (unless they don’t want to play on Live anymore).

A problem I have with NXE is so far, is how the gaming “journalists” are making it out to be ‘the next big thing’.. when in reality, c’mon, this is just our dashboard. Our menu system. Sure, it has a couple of improvements and looks a little better, but don’t get it twisted into thinking it is more than its not.

Popularity: unranked [?]