New Xbox 360 Dashboard - Review
What's up guys and girls, John Retinger from Techno Buffalo here and I want to give you an overview of the new Xbox 360 Dashboard update that went live today August 11 and there’s a lot of very exciting things here so let me go ahead and walk you through some of the main ones. The first one that Microsoft announced is the Avatar marketplace. This will give you the ability to customize your digital self, so let me show you what that looks like. So there’s my avatar, you can see I’ve got the Nirvana look with the 70’s stash, pretty bad ass I know. I would go down to customize avatar and essentially what you can do here is you can customize your little digital person with apparel from fashion designers. You can also purchase interactive props like a little halo will spin around you and you can also earn avatar reward items from playing games.
So let me show you what this looks like, so you go down to marketplace and it loads up here and there you’ve got your marketplace. You can buy some Adidas stuff, Star Wars clone wars--I’m not even going to try that, lets go to most popular and see what we’ve got. Splinter cell outfit, you can look like a bad ass ninja, I can be Star Wars in a rebel assault here, give myself a little bit of a camera. You can see the cameras that are interactive kind of jump around and I can play with it. You can also buy some Kicks, got some Adidas there, lets say I want to be on Star Wars. Some of these things are going to cost you Microsoft points, some of them are not so you can see right here, this one is going to cost 80 Microsoft points, I have no idea what their weird conversion is but know that some of these things are going to cost you, some of them you can earn by playing games but definitely be aware that non of this is of course is free.
Lets take a look at some of the other things that we got here, there’s a bio shock helmet, Jedi shirt and you guys can see sort of what is here and what your choices are, so lets go back, check out some lifestyle collections and you can view some of the big brands here. Let’s check out Adidas and see some of the stuff they have, I can view Truckers shirts, Truckers hat and I can look a little tea baggy but if that’s your look and style then there you go. You can download it and you can play around with it, so lets go ahead and move right on to the other big update, we’ll go ahead and exit this and watch your little avatar will do a little dance figure done.
The next big updates are games on demand and these aren’t just demos or just old Xbox games for the original Xbox. These are full featured Xbox 360 games and this is actually really-really cool and Microsoft is the first company that’s actually allowed you to download full modern console new games. Let me show you what this looks like, so we go to game marketplace and we can scroll on up to this new games on demand and if you select it, you can pick from just a nice selection of Xbox 360 games, some of them are a little bit old, some of them you might not want to play. I like Star Wars the complete saga, the Lego edition. I think it’s a really fun game and I really liked it. Call of Duty 2, a great game, Bioshock, I haven’t played but I heard a lot of great things about it, you download this directly to your hard drive, so you might want to run out and update your hard drive if you got an older Xbox 360 with a smaller hard drive because this is going to take a decent amount of space. Let’s take a look at one of them, so I haven’t played Bioshock that would be a fun one to play, go ahead and click it.
So you can buy it, you can get demo and you can see that it cost just about $30.00 bucks for the game which is not bad. It does stay remotely on to your hard drive, so you know if you’re interested and you wanted games on demand and you’re sitting at home and you really want to play something that you haven’t played yet, for $30.00 you get a digital copy which is not bad considering most games you’re going to run around $50.00, always are a little bit older so maybe you can find them actually a physical disc for the same price but its nice to have the choice. And I assume that’s something like this is going to get updated much more regularly and I wouldn’t be surprised to see even new games be available for download on the date of release. That’s certainly nothing that’s been announced yet but will definitely seem like a more natural progression for things to follow. So let’s go ahead and check out some other things and next thing that we have now are user ratings.
You can rate games and features and you can make them about in a five star system and you can sort by ratings, so if you’re looking for five start games, you can search for five star games. So you can actually check out--we can go back to games on demand, you can see top rated, now you can see all these games are all rated here, you can see we’ve got the five star system, so lets go back to Bioshock and you can see that’s got a lot of ranking up there, right above the price. It got almost five stars so that’s kind of neat, so the next thing that they updated was improved party invites, now you can launch a party with just one click and you can pull up a game right from the achievements browser which is kind of neat and they also just increase a lot of speed so they claim and a lot of stability. You can now have I believe more than a 100 friends which is at limitation of the older architecture so that is quite nice as well.
Other that may not have been fully rolled out but that is in Microsoft’s plan, the next thing to know is and one of the things that I like about the 360, the one of the big reasons I got it was for Netflix on demand. If you’re holding out hope that Netflix on demand would come to the PS3, would come to the Wii, you are going to be waiting for a very long time because with this update and I’ll tell you that Netflix is exclusive to the Xbox 360 and un-exclusive like it was yesterday when it wasn’t on the console. Exclusive like Microsoft probably bought the rates to have the console of streaming ability for Netflix, something to keep in mind.
Anyways guys, wanted to give you a sort of short, sort of an in depth walk towards the new Xbox dashboard update. If you own Xbox, turn your console on, it will prompt you to download it, it would be worthwhile for the new features, hope you enjoyed. What do you guys think of the update, any features that you want that didn’t get, is it worthwhile for you, are you excited about anything, you know leave comments or a video response and for exclusive content, check me out at Twitter, Twitter.com/John4lakers, I do a ton of giveaways and exclusive content over there so check it out and to learn more Techno Buffalo check out TechnoBuffalo.com or Twitter.com/TechnoBuffalo. See you guys at the next video, bye-bye.
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