Experiencing the New Experience.

I got home and dashed right for the 360. Turned it on and got to building my avatar and playing around with the interface.

BUT FIRST! I asked the wife to write me an e-mail about her thoughts on the NXE. What I didn't tell her was I'd be posting that e-mail here. She's a little shy, and I like to mess around with her like this once in a while. Shocks to the system can be healthy. I found the e-mail sitting on my comp's screen at home, and I realized she's ranted and lost her nerve. I pressed the send button for her. Yeah, I'm an asshole. So she wrote:

And so xbox has jumped onto the avatar bandwagon..

I've seen many systems of avatar creation over the net, and I have to say that my 30 or so minutes of fiddling with the new xbox avatars, I was not impressed. Ok, so at least they're a step up from the Nintendo's Miis, but I still think they're ugly IMHO.

I understand that being the first release, there was a limit to what they could release. But I was a bit disappointed with a few things, like couldn't they at least include 1 long hairstyle? It seems like all female styles are reduced to the same hair length, while they have several patterns for balding men. Also the clothing selection consists of various t-shirts and shorts, with a few exceptions. But my biggest grievance is with the chin and nose features. Do people really look like that?

On the good side, the amount of colors for things like skin, eyes and makeup were nice, as well as eye and lip styles. Also a plus for me is the inclusion of the elven ears and vampire teeth.. lol.

In the end I managed to get my fairly decent avatar to look somewhat like me. And no I didn't end up keeping the elven ears or vampire teeth.. :P

As for the new interface.. I'm not really a big fan of the cascading tiles.. For certain sections of it I think it works really well, like the achievements section. It's much easier to just flip through, especially if you have a lot of games. As well as the market place, showing the top adds, and the friends list, although I can see it being a problem when you just want to see who's online quickly. I just hope they find a way to re-integrate our theme packs. And the party system sounds like a good idea, but I don't have that many people on my friend's list.

What point is there to these avatars anyways? Sure some games will incorporate them, but most of the games we play use they're own characters in online play. But would you really want to use your avatar to play horde on Gears of War 2? Although being able to equip the golden lancer to your avatar would be awesome!

Hopefully they'll take some lessons from the great avatar site out there like IMVU, Meez, There, or Second Life. Being able to change emotions, or the 'smile and wave' action, more customization, and cooler items, and maybe a reason to use it, like a good chat interface, and then it wouldn't be so bad.. maybe..

I'll give it a chance for now, but I think I'll stick to Gaia.

~Links~

There
IMVU
Second Life
Meez
Gaia

Good thoughts hun. I'm sure in 6 months most of those issues will be fixed, or at least more to your liking.

Honestly I'm a little unimpressed with the avatar creation system. i wanted to mess around with body types a little more then what they allowed, and the clothing selection could have been better.

The interface had a good layout and most things were easy to access. Cascading tiles are OK for me, though by pressing the player button you can bring up something resembling the old blades. I ended up clearing out my friends list, going from 49 to 26. I added CrazyKinux, and I'm hoping more EVEers interested in playing over Live with me send me their gamertags. During the mass exodus of friends, I actually had to restart my system a handful of times due to freezing.

I learned why two of my friends could not play with their 360s online. Apparently the Live service Rogers wireless routers don't like each other. Rogers position on it after 45 minutes on the phone is that it's a Microsoft issue. I hope someone is looking into fixing this.

Didn't play anything really last night, as playing around with the NXE took up most of my evening. Looking to get some Horde in tonight. I'm getting through the Gears of War novel quickly, and I'm finding it very enjoyable. I need to make sure I make my Amazon purchase soon so I can still have something to read on the bus.

On EVE, Empathy V and Presense III finish tomorrow. That only leaves Presense IV and I'm done with learning skills! I was thinking about the possibility of skill queuing last night, and the idea came to me of a skill continuing to train automatically past levels reached. For example, if I were to leave Weapon Upgrades III training, it would go to IV and automatically start training V. What do you think? What is the best way to possibly implement skill-queuing?

Ja.