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On one hand I really like the convenience of digital content delivery through the Xbox Live Marketplace. A few button presses, and you have a new game available to play.
On the other hand, I am a big fan of Cheap Ass Gamer - a site that revolves around finding deals, steals, and all sorts of discounts. People discuss weekly retailer ads, post coupons, point to online sales and discounts, and generally talk about combining all these resources to make sure you get great deals on games. It's a fun "game" to play in real life, and the site has saved me a ton of money over the years. In fact, I hardly ever buy any game at its full retail price without at least getting some sort of freebie incentive. However, that habit hits a brick wall when it comes to purchasing content on the Marketplace.
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Every so often I get jealous of a specific game or feature that PS3 fans can enjoy. One of those games is Warhawk, a seemingly fun downloadable title that also demonstrates one thing that the PS3 currently has but the Xbox 360 does not: the availability of large original downloadable games.
The Xbox Live Marketplace offers original games, but just within the smaller Arcade size limits. There are also large pieces of new content like the Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion, and later this year GTA IV's expansion pieces. Then there were temporary large "games": the online beta programs for Halo 3, Shadowrun, and COD4. Finally, you can now download full copies of last-gen Xbox games. However, none of these channels of the Marketplace currently allow for something like Warhawk.
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As I already mentioned a few days ago, previewing gamer pictures and themes on the Xbox Live Marketplace isn't exactly a shining example of user friendly interfaces. Part of that problem is that there is no easy way to look at the plethora of Marketplace content on your computer when you are away from the console.
It's not that people aren't trying to fix this in different ways. For a while there was a site called Dashboard Themes which let you preview and comment on the various dashboard themes in the Marketplace. Unfortunately, it has since gone under due to a lack of resources. Individual content suppliers like Disruptive Publishers maintain their own preview sites, but they don't cover all the content. Microsoft also has a Marketplace section of Xbox.com, but that site isn't the easiest to navigate, and it also doesn't always include all the latest content that is available on the console.
What Microsoft really needs to do is launch a complete interface to the Marketplace which can be accessed through a browser on a computer.
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As the Arcade section of the Xbox 360 Dashboard slowly matured, it sprouted some pretty neat features that tied into the Xbox Live community. For instance, you could see leaderboards for your friends - outside of the game. You could also quickly send a message to a friend, telling them about the game or a feature of it, just by selecting a recipient and a message template. The new Games Library can even show you friends who are playing online right now. All those are good ideas that reinforce the fact that you are connected to a large network of other gamers, a number of whom you somehow know.
The last dashboard update also brought us the somewhat controversial Friends of Friends feature, which made a lot of secretive gamers scramble to change their settings, and restrict the traversal of their friends lists. These little touches show that Microsoft is embracing scary contemporary trends like Facebook and social networking features that seem to pervade every popular product these days. Fair enough. You've got 10 million users, so why not link them together and make the network more social. At the same time, there is one place where this type of social integration would make perfect sense, yet it it's present at the moment: the Xbox Live Marketplace.
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