[360] Fall Dashboard Update -- October 31, 2006!

You chose to bold the wrong things.

1080p is extremely important and a HUGE plus for those with TVs that can support it. You think 1080i or 720p looks good? 1080p is like a giant kick in the teeth. I am glad the 360 has it and it has made me decide to get a 1080p set instead of a 1080i set when I splurge on one in the next year or so.

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Stream WMV video from a Windows PC running Windows Media Player 11, Zune software, or Windows Media Connect.

Putting this in the :noonecares: catagory for a few reasons. WMV video is almost compeltely useless and very few things worth streaming to one's TV is available only in this format.

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Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel support.

This should be bolded. Racing wheels are fun as hell and this could be rad for the likes of Forza 2.

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Set up automatic downloads of newly released Xbox Live Arcade trial games.

Dunno why this is bolded. Great, download crap like Totemball AUTOMATICALLY. If anything, it wastes the time it takes to delete this stuff. But I guess if you like to buy everything right away it's a different story.

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Support for upcoming release of XNA Game Studio Express (separate download and subscription required.)

This hsould be bolded because it's quite major. This has the chance to be supremely AWESOME. We'll have to wait and see though.

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Stream music, pictures and video from a Zune device.

Hard to tell if this should be bolded or not. Depends on how much one gives a shit about the Zune.

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Lightning-fast enumeration and listing of all Xbox Live® Arcade games on the console.

I don't like waiting for the list and I"ve only got 18. For people like you here who have 30+, it's gotta be brutal. Good to see this.

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Find games quickly with two new sort options: Recently Played and By Category.

Should also be bolded for those with a ton of games. I dunno how it'll look though. hopefully it won't take 5 or six menus and submenus to find the game you're looking for.

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Added zoom support for non-anamorphic content.

This should be bolded if you're a fan of zooming in on people's noses or something in the middle of a movie. The zoom feature is qutie fun to play with and any improvements to it are a plus.

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Added skip controls (forward approx. 30 seconds, back approx. 7 seconds).

Absolutely useless increments. 7 seconds backwards? What the hell? A shame you can't set these increments manually.

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Updated support for new Daylight Savings changes coming in 2007.

This should be bolded because we all like having the correct time display on our units.

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Improved visual display of text in themes.

I wish this meant we could alter the text colour so we don't have black on dark blue any more. I wonder what this entails, exactly.

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Improved voice chat quality in Xbox Dashboard and in-game chats.

What's this mean? More bandwidth is dedicated to the voice chat? Could that cut down on game performance if I'm VCing with someone and playing a game with someone else? Will it be variable?

I agree with most of your other decisions on what was and wasn't important, though.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Alright, some impressions.

Firstly, yeah, the arcade enumeration is great, that's a no brainer. It's still not nearly as instant as it should be. (It should do it once at console startup and never need to do it again unless the arcade list is altered.)

The reorganization of the Arcade is pretty good, browsing by catagory is nice.

I like that they removed the Videos Option from the second blade too, that was redundant. However, there's a large gap there now that could be filled up with something else. I was expecting XNA to go there, but the Demos menu option is apparently combined with XNA for now, so they aren't seperate. (That's a strange choice).

The organization for the Videos is a nice improvement, I like that. I don't have any videos on my 360 though so I wonder if it's possible to move somethings between catagories or if they are stuck in whatever one they get assigned to.

Now, the root menu of the arcade is ugly. Those large pictures that have replaced the small text only menu selections are ugly, clash with pretty much every theme that has a picture for a background, and are FAR too large for SD resolutions. They are HUGE and pointless.

The same goes for the Marketplace. Useless and ugly. And if you go one menu deeper in the marketplace, the text only menu options now have a lot of blank space between them, and are no longer a nice, tight, organized list that you can see on one screen, no sir. You have to SCROLL DOWN now, past all this unused screen space. Again, this is in SD and it might not be the case for HD, but it's a useless change, and actually makes getting around the marketplace harder. That fails.

Everything else though seems well enough.

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Wow, the voice quality is TERRIBLE. Why am I not surprised? It sounds on par with or worse than most bluetooth cell phone headsets. And it had a lot of feedback and basically was the biggest piece of shit EVER.

Glad I didn't buy it.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.