The Xbox 360 Dashboard received a makeover today in preparation for the upcoming Kinect release. Apart from the visual change, we’ve also been blessed with more Avatar-dressing options, cleaner voice chat and the Zune Marketplace for both music and video.
The main idea behind the new look is to give the Dashboard a more crisp and clean feel, with sharper edges and softer sound effects. There’s no arguing that the crisper boxes definitely give the interface a more bold and stand-out impression, but a more clean feel? We wouldn’t say so. The original smoother box edges were far more satisfying - this feels more like HD tweaked in an extreme level.
Of course, visual changes are always going to bring negative initial reactions - no-one likes change! - so perhaps we’ll warm to the new look over time. It may take longer to get used to the new sounds, however - the new Xbox button noises are far softer and pack less oomph than the original. We’d love to see an option to go back to the ‘classic’ sound effects added.
The Dashboard layout itself hasn’t actually changed much at all. Everything is still exactly where you’d expect it to be, and the menus fall into the same ordering. However, there are new additions to the usual suspects - the Zune Marketplace adds a music channel to the mix, and also now governs a wider video marketplace.
For £8.99 a month, gamers can use Zune Music to stream any music in the Zune catalogue from their TV. It’s questionable exactly how many people will be interested in using their television as a music system, although the Smart DJ feature may prove useful, as it makes auto-playlists from the kinds of music you usually listen to.
The Sky Player has also been given a complete overhaul, with a new menu system supplying more options and better channel integration. The streamed video quality appears to be slightly better now which is great news, and the system will now automatically match the optimization with your broadband speed. All good stuff if you’re well into your Sky viewing.
Avatar customization has been jiggled around a far bit. The new interface is designed to make for easier outfit selection and purchasing, and appears to do the job really well. We wouldn’t say it was particularly difficult to play around with your Avatar before, but the new system is still an improvement.
One particular element of the new Dashboard had us a little taken aback. After updating the console, a new tutorial window pops up, teaching you how to use the Dashboard. That’s right - it teaches you how to move up and down, left and right, and how to press the A button.
Clearly with the Kinect on the way, Microsoft is preparing for a wave of older (and younger) Xbox fans who it believes will need this kind of info which, to the average gamer, is seemingly obvious. It just feels a little silly to present gamers who have been using the Dashboard for years now with such a simple tutorial - perhaps it would have been best to show this information to new Xbox users rather than everyone?
Okay, so we might be going a little overboard - it’s only a short tutorial, and you can in fact skip it by pressing Y - but we find ourselves worrying that this is the beginning of something most Xbox gamers would not like to see. Making the Dashboard more family friendly is all well and good, but Microsoft should be wary of alienating its more hardcore players.
There is one good element to come out of all this family business, however - a new Xbox Live Gold Family Pack is available, offering four Xbox Live Gold accounts at a cut price. For £70, you’re getting four Gold accounts for the price of two - a rather huge saving, and pretty useful for a household of Xbox gamers.
The Kinect interface is in fact packed into this update as well, however you won’t be able to see it until the Kinect is released. The special interface is activated by waving your hand at the Kinect hardware - the current Dashboard then swoops off the screen and is replaced by a more motion-control friendly layout.
Rather than stacking sections one on top of the other, the Kinect Dashboard presents a separate screen for each different section, and gamers will be able to move between them by ‘grabbing’ the edges of the screen and moving it across. We’ll go into more detail regarding this new interface in our Kinect review later in the week.
Overall, it’s not exactly a huge change in scenery, but the new Sky Player layout is very much welcome and the Zune Marketplace may prove to be useful stuff. We’ll just have to get used to the new visuals, as it looks like we’re stuck with them!
