So i finally had some time to mess around in the new Dashboard for Xbox 360 and make an avatar. Why did everyone pick the white suit?

My initial opinion of the New Xbox Experience from a usability perspective is: FAIL. The wannabe Cover Flow effect looks okay, but is terribly flawed. You can only see the highlighted item and the ones behind it. You can’t see any of the previous items, as they are off the left side of the screen. Terrible for navigation, and terribly inefficient use of space — you can only see a few items on screen at once; not easily scannable. Instead of using the bumpers to switch menu “blades” as before, the new menu layout now depends on the d-pad for primary navigation which is super FAIL. The inaccurate d-pad easily skips up and down when trying to scroll left and right, which means it jumps to a different menu group when i’m flipping through my friends list. In fact, the bumpers and triggers are now inconsistently used for “paging” and jumping in different areas of the dashboard in ways that mostly clash with how it used to work. I guess it all doesn’t matter much to me because, i’ll be using the old-school menu brought up by the Guide button — simple is elegant. This kinda crap really annoys me, because big bad Microsoft has to have had some UI experts telling them this stuff. Or am i way off? Eye candy is generally worthless, but especially at the expense of functionality.

While installing the replacement lamp, i discovered that my TV’s HDMI inputs have video lag. I’ve had my Elite 360 hooked up via HDMI since i got it. And that explains why it seemed everyone else was in God mode on Call of Duty and Halo. I was always 5 frames behind (about .17 seconds), so they literally were shooting at me before i could even see them. Unfortunately the SXRD’s Game Mode which minimizes lag by turning off video processing is only available on analog inputs, which also means a slightly softer picture. So i switched to component cables with Game Mode on, and now i’m back in real time. I can finally keep up in Team Deathmatch. I knew i couldn’t be that bad.

I also discovered while digging in my Elite box that i never opened the Forza/Marvel game pack that came with the system. I have two games that i’ve never played yet. Happy Christmas.