The Xbox 2008 fall update is now available and provides a number of new features including the New Xbox Experience (NXE) which is a complete redesign of the blade. I was glad to see it didn’t include some nonsensical virtual world that didn’t add anything worthwhile to the experience.

After the update which only takes a few short minutes to patch, you start by creating your own avatar, mine pictured below:

The process of creating an avatar involves choosing a model to begin with from a group and then customizing. It’s all point and click and a snap to do. This avatar is used in only three arcade games and doesn’t seem as central to the interface as Miis are on the Nintendo Wii.

After creating your avatar, you will immediately notice that windows for items now scroll from the right to left. It takes a few minutes to get used to, but seems to work alright. I need more time playing around with and getting used to it before I say if I like it better than the old dashboard.

Netflix streaming from thousands of titles

I briefly checked out the Netflix option. Since I don’t have an active Netflix subscription, I’m not on board with this yet, but likely will be trying this out very soon. We’re still wading our way through the $200 worth of movies that came with our Vudu. You can subscribe to Netflix through the Xbox, so no need to go to your computer. Handy.

obessable points out there are a couple gotchas making not all of the reported 12,000+ titles available:

Sony owned Columbia Pictures movies studio won’t license movies for playback on Xbox, and other movies face similar licensing restrictions.

Sony not on board with the Xbox? Makes sense. I wonder if/when this will change should the PS3 get similar functionality someday?

More descriptions of game features including resolution

Like that you can now tell what games are in 1080p (answer: not many). Wolf of the Battlefield Commando 3, Feeding Frenzy 2 and Portal are all 1080p and have been added to the Hmm Xbox 360 1080p games list.

 

Also, not every game has complete information. I went through 178 Xbox Arcade titles and found a dozen or so that didn’t have resolution information.

Xbox Live Parties

You can connect with other Xbox Live users in a party and then play games together without having to go through the old invite one at a time route.

Access to XNA Community created peer reviewed games

Games that pass peer review created with the XNA Developer studio can publish their games to the Xbox Live world at large. This is an immediate audience of millions of gamers.  A barrier still exists for you to be able to share something you created with me and vice versa regardless of peer review results, but hey, maybe we’ll get that in a future update.

Hey Dorothy, er Sony, when will we ever be able to see Home?

As a PS3 owner, I continue to wait, somewhat impatiently at this point, to see Home. I’d love to write about how cool this is — or isn’t, but I’m not worthy yet. And neither is anybody I know on the PS3. I fear that Home is going to go down like Spore did earlier this year: one gigantic disappointment.

But I’m holding out hope that Sony does something cool. If they add some of the goodies that Microsoft added in this update, I’ll be stoked.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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