Last night, Microsoft released their Winter Dashboard Update. Overall, I am impressed with most of the updates. I like some of the new features like more media format support. That’s always nice.
But the new dashboard also presents me with a bunch of things I don’t like as well. The first thing is that the whole dashboard has been completely changed. Many menu items are missing. Like demos. They are now under Games Library. Once you click there you see the general ads, where you see Microsoft’s attempt to show you the featured games (normally shows demos, and sometimes gamer pictures [gamer pictures don’t equal games]) in hopes you will download them. Not bad, until you click the My Games item. You then see the worst display in your life that is worse then the PS3 navigation. IT LOOKS SO UGLY! And doesn’t work at all. They should have left it be. But noooooooo.
The Xbox Live blade merges the messaging and friends items together. It now shows an item called Inside Xbox, somewhat cool feature that shows you the latest news with Xbox. It’s like a blog. And it features lots of corny videos with really bad quality. Mostly, it’s Major Nelson advertising Microsoft products. Okay, so it lacks in content for now.
The new Marketplace blade looked promising, but it’s navigation and odd way of showing content really really hurts (it’s just like the My Games). Why they had to change it this much doesn’t make much sense.
I am going to have a really hard time with the new update, and I don’t think I will be getting used to it any time soon.