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A common complaint about the Xbox 360 dashboard is the lack of the multi-person chats that were available on the original Xbox. Microsoft says it comes down to how the available bandwidth is allocated. Despite assurances that the Xbox team is "listening", nothing much has changed since the launch of the console. This has led to pretty sad how-to articles like this one, which describes how to use Xbox Live to provide chat capability for Super Smash Bros. Brawl - with the caveat that you actually need a game like Halo 3 to establish a multi-person chat environment.
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Look, games are getting longer these days. Some games let you save at any time, some do not. Some have frequent checkpoints that you can use to resume the game when you come back to it, some handle this much less gracefully. Even Arcade games like Commanders: Attack of the Genos now have levels that can last 30-45 minutes.
On the other side of the coin, gamers have less and less time these days. They have jobs, families, responsibilities. The casual folks are looking for bite-sized game experiences, and even the hardcore sometimes just have to go do something else. You know, to an event with the spouse, to feed the kids, to run out when somebody calls. Life sometimes cuts in, and in a lot of cases the next save location or checkpoint is just too far away.
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Another day, another story about a kid experiencing something inappropriate over Xbox Live. Sadly, these things will happen and Microsoft can't do all that much about it. The Xbox 360 already has a fairly robust system of parental controls, and Microsoft recently even launched a family timer to physically limit play times.
In a way, Xbox Live is a victim of its own success. The Wii has such restricted online features that nothing too offensive can physically be done at all, and because of the limited functionality, not all that many people play any given game online to begin with. Sony's console had (and still does to a lesser extent) a high price tag, so its adoption rate into families was much slower. Also, the online network isn't quite polished yet, so again, you have fewer people using it.
However, Xbox Live is not only the most popular online system on consoles today, but it is also the most full-featured one, so the millions of active users have many ways to send something inappropriate through the network. Microsoft is trying to push it as a family console, it has good brand recognition and a reasonable price. As a result, a lot of families and kids play games on the console and on Xbox Live. And again, Microsoft can't do much more than the user reporting/banning that they take care of already.
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Ever since the recent announcement of the Xbox Live Community Games initiative , I have actually motivated myself enough to download XNA Game Studio 2.0 and start looking at the integration between the development tools and the console. Sure, local connectivity...
I really don't know what to say about this one. The Auto Downloads feature has been in the Dashboard over the last few updates, originally in the Xbox Live Arcade section, now in the new Games Library.
The way it was supposed to work is that once you were in the Arcade (and I guess now in the Games Library?), new trials of Arcade Games would automatically start downloading from the Marketplace. So let's say on Wednesday morning you could go into the Arcade, and new trials would get queued for download.
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I love Mass Effect. Sure, it has a vast universe to explore, a great story, lesbian sex, witty dialog, but there is one thing it doesn't have: incessant prompts about where to save my game every time I start playing. Back in the old days, when I had...
Over the course of its dashboard updates the Xbox 360 changed what it can do when it first starts up. Initially it would always start the game in the tray. Later an option was added to go to the Dashboard, and recently another choice to open up the Media...
Apart from the horizontal movement through the dashboard blades, navigating the Xbox 360 really comes down to scrolling up and down through lists. Lists of games, videos, movies. Lists of settings. Lists of songs from a PC. Lists of gamer profile options...
Xbox Live Gold members frequently gripe about the fact that they are paying for a service that still shoves advertising in their face. Me, not so much. In fact, I like that most of the ads alert me to new content or even events that I may have not noticed otherwise.
What's really annoying about some of these ads is that they are totally useless as a way to get me to actually do something. There are several sizes of ads in the dashboard. The narrow sliver ads and the very large one seen within the Marketplace blades can be highlighted and then followed to whatever content they are promoting.
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One of the biggest money-making schemes on the Marketplace is the theme and gamer picture racket. At this point - over two years since the launch of the Xbox 360 - there are probably hundreds of themes and gamer picture packs, representing everything from games, movies, TV shows, anime, cartoon characters and more. Some are good, some are slutty, some of them make Monica frown when my profile loads. Many are badly designed, ugly, too expensive, too full of advertising, or just plain old weird. At any rate, there is a lot of choice.
Over time, you tend to accumulate a lot of these themes and gamer picture packs, since there are a lot of free ones, and who doesn't like to download something for free. I have a ton of these, many of which I never use, but I am too lazy to go and sort through them to clean them up. That and it takes way too much time to do anything that deals with themes or gamer pictures in the dashboard.
There are two main problems with both the theme and gamer picture sections of the dashboard: overall slowness and a lack of previews and metadata.
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Over the course of past dashboard updates Microsoft has made it much easier to work with the video section on the media blade of the dashboard. It used be a long and arduous process just to get into and out of that area, but that has since been simplified...
While it wasn't present when the Xbox 360 launched, the download queue in the dashboard did eventually make an appearance after a dashboard update, delighting many a fan. The problem is that a year or so later, the tool is in dire need of yet another...