Like the rest of the world, as soon as I fired up my 360 last night I downloaded the new dashboard. I was figuring the interwebs were going to be tangled by the time I tried, but the install was fast and smooth.

After a brief intro I dove straight in and started creating my Avatar. Not a very true-to-life resemblance, but I’ll tweak it when I get more time. After fooling around with avatar creating, I started to check out the new dash itself.

The thing is light years faster than the old blades, and snappier than a feisty turtle (not sure what that means). It’s going to take a little settling in to figure out where things are, and what new stuff the dash has to offer – but thankfully the guide button still brings up a bit of familiarity. I was surprised they didn’t change the look of the notifications however to match the NXE style.

I fumbled around with the party system for a few minutes, but I am truly going to have to RTFM on both it and the new dash. Once we were all in a party I wasn’t sure what the advantage was aside from having open chat. It was a comedy show to listen to however as a some of us in the party were playing Gears, others were customizing their avatars, and others still were exploring what the NXE had in store.

One side benefit to the party chat was being able to play ranked Gears of War without having to hear the other team (YOU NEED TO ADD A QUICK MUTE FUNCTION TO THAT GAME EPIC!!!!!!).

First impressions of the new dashboard are all good. Nothing seemed broken or worse off as I flipped my way through the tiles last night, and still having the mini guide makes settling in much easier.

I would like to take a moment to say goodbye to the Blades – they have served us well over the years, and while I can’t say they will be missed – I did appreciate their efforts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.