Xbox 360 Spring Update Impressions
By: Jared BlackMicrosoft has finally made good on its promise to enhance the Xbox 360/Live experience, today releasing its big Spring update. As we’ve covered before, this update brings a number of improvements to the service, including background downloading, streamlined Xbox Live menus, DVD bookmarking, and more.
Naturally, the first thing I did after downloading the mandatory update (you aren’t allowed to use Xbox Live without downloading it first) was check out the new background downloading feature. It really is as seamless as Microsoft claims, as you simply choose a demo or other piece of content to download and it’s added to your active downloads queue. Just to clarify, this does not allow you to download multiple items at the same time, simply to choose multiple items to download at the same time that are then downloaded in order.
To test it out, I queued up demos of Ridge Racer 6, Perfect Dark Zero, MotoGP ’06, and Condemned: Criminal Origins. The first one I chose, Ridge Racer 6, began downloading immediately. As promised I had no problems continuing to browse the dashboard while it downloaded, and selected the others that were then added to the list in the order I selected them. After I finished selecting these I chose to start downloading Perfect Dark Zero, and the Ridge Racer 6 demo stopped immediately to allow it to run instead. Once that demo finished downloading, the system automatically picked up where it left off with Ridge Racer 6. Simple and efficient, and browsing the dashboard was not hindered in any way by downloads running in the background. While I’d like the ability to download multiple items at the same time, it’s still a vastly improved setup to the “sit around and wait for something to download before you do anything else” setup of before.
The menu changes are also for the better, although there’s more work still to be done in this area. The Xbox Live Marketplace has seen the biggest overhaul. Now, the main menu is divided into Games, Media and Entertainment, Demos and Game Videos, Themes and Gamer Pictures, Redeem Code, Active Downloads, and Account Management. I won’t bore you with details on every specific option, but in general each allows you to further browse the category by specific genre, newly released content, or all content in one list.
This change is welcome, but still a little too sparse. In the future, I’d like to see additional options added in the future such as the ability to browse by publisher, developer, or simply a section for all the free stuff. The latter is most important to me; I’m not looking to purchase additional content for Xbox 360 games that I don’t own, I’m simply browsing them for freebies.
While the extra categorization is better, how they’re presented is still a little too rigid. By that, I mean that the only thing you’ll see in each list is whatever pertains to that specific category. For example, if you browse all of the newly released gamer pictures for Top Spin 2, it pulls up the list of them just as it should. Unfortunately, that’s all the content it shows for the game, with no indication that there’s also a demo and themes available for it as well. How about a simple link to the game’s entire content list from specific areas, just like it’s displayed in the Games section? If a game’s pictures inspire me to purchase more related content, it’s not exactly user-friendly to then force me to back all the way out to the main menu, and then go into another different section (wading through several menus in the process) to find the game all over again.
Although it’s certainly only a short-term problem while the update is being rolled out, the service is also very unstable at the moment. I expect this to be ironed out shortly, but it’s still an annoyance now and makes it even more difficult to browse content. I received the same generic error message (“Can’t retrieve information from Xbox Live…” with a meaningless status code at the end) on multiple occasions when trying to browse through several different content lists. Eventually I got to the menus I wanted, but it often took several frustrating attempts to do so.
Most of the rest of the Xbox 360 dashboard remains the same or has extremely minor changes to it, including virtually all of the games, media, and system blades. The primary change here is the addition of a new Xbox Live Vision option on the system blade. This option will allow you to adjust “Room” and “Lighting” settings for the upcoming camera peripheral, although what specific settings will be available are currently unknown since those are grayed out with no camera plugged in.
The other changes to the console, that I was able to test out at least, work pretty much as advertised. Downloaded videos now have better controls, allowing you to pause, rewind, and fast forward them. That should’ve been there from the start of course, but better late than never. DVD bookmarking works as advertised, and is a very nice addition for gamers also using their console as a DVD player. It’s completely seamless, with the console automatically remembering a couple of seconds behind where a movie was last stopped at should the movie be interrupted suddenly for any reason. The option to boot directly to the dashboard when a disc is in the system also works as advertised, and should be a very useful feature for Arcade addicts in particular.
There are a lot of other fixes and improvements that I haven’t been able to test yet (or don’t apply to my specific circumstances), the full list of which can be found here. It’s clear from what I have tested though that a lot of effort went into this update, and the result is a much improved experience overall. That being said, there’s still quite a lot of work that needs to be done to make it optimal, and Microsoft has a big challenge on its hands as it tries to efficiently organize the ever-growing amount of content on Xbox Live to please all gamers.
Posted: 06/06/2006