When i turned on my Xbox tonight, the Home screen greeted me with a banner for Super Bowl Ads with a picture of VW’s Beetle spot (which i had seen earlier on YouTube). I think, “cool, i’ll check it out and catch up on the ads that i missed.” So i click the banner.

Super Bowl Ads banner on Home screen.

The screen goes blank. And a popup says it is downloading some “app”. It’s the MSN app (or msnbc.com app, not really sure) which i had never downloaded or used before. Great, i was just hoodwinked into downloading a new app without consent, and i’m probably never going to use it again for anything else. So the app finishes downloading, and installs on my Xbox. Then i am told that:
“An update is available for this game from Xbox LIVE.”
And if i decline this update, that i will be signed out of Xbox LIVE.

Update for the app I just downloaded.

Huh?!

I just downloaded this for the first time ever 30 seconds ago. How can there be an update for it already? Oh, wait. I see. You sent me an older version of this “app”, and then waited until it was installed on my Xbox before forcing me to to download and install this updated version that you were too lazy and stupid to send me from the start. I get it. So where was i?

Oh yeah, i wanted to watch some Super Bowl ads. So after all that, the MSN app starts and i see another Home screen that looks just like the Xbox Live Home screen but with a different background. Tiles and banners in Microsoft’s new Metro-style interface. But no where does it say anything about Super Bowl Ads. I scroll to every screen, but no Super Bowl Ads. What gives?

Super Bowl Ads?

How insane is it that after clicking on a banner for Super Bowl ads that i am left at an unexpected update screen coercing me to install yet another bit of unwanted software at the threat of being signed out of the service if i decline? And then left on my own to find these ads i was promised back on the Home screen. This stuff is not hard to get right, Microsoft. But your Xbox Live team consistently screws up the user experience. I expect far more from a service that i have to pay for.

By the way, the only way i found to get to those ads was to exit the MSN app (once it was finally installed and updated), then click on the banner again from the Live Home screen. The Super Bowl Ads feature, as far as i can tell, is not accessible from inside the app itself.

This is what it looks like, if you can find it.

The game just came out last Tuesday, so i’ve been keeping an eye out for who has the best price. Buy.com has Forza 3 for only $52 with free shipping, which is 13% off the usual $60 (even more if you add in tax).

A masterpiece of game interface design. Simple, nearly invisible. Rewind is genius. And cockpit view—finally!

I’m also thinking about getting a steering wheel and pedals set. Unfortunately there’s only two options for full Forza 3 features with force feedback: the official Microsoft Wheel set, or the hardcore Fanatec set with Porsche steering wheel, pedals, and shifter that goes for $500. The going price for the Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel seems to be $90 everywhere, which is a little more than i’d like to spend. I’ve seen one or two used on craigslist for closer to $50, but that’s always hit-or-miss.

• Forza Motorsport 3, $51.99 at Buy.com
• Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel, $89.49 at Amazon.com

Next week i’ll be looking for the best deal on Modern Warfare 2.

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.

Right now PC Inspector File Recovery is scanning for lost files — it says it’ll be done by 12am Friday night. Hopefully i’ll be able to recover everything (important, at least). I poked around with TestDisk probably a little too much for my own good, and should have just started backing it up right away. All of this shouldn’t have been a problem, but i don’t have recent backups on my other external drive.

Normally, i copied files directly from memory cards to my main FireWire drive, did some rough date-based folder organizing, deleted obvious bad shots, then uploaded to Flickr from there. I had an automatic backup going to a second external drive, and i guess you could count Flickr as third backup. But things got unorganized as i borrowed cameras after mine died in January along with trying to work an Apple laptop into the workflow, and then getting a new 10MP camera this summer.

I’ve had my eye on something like NETGEAR’s ReadyNAS Duo (or Time Capsule?) for large, dumb storage of files (photos, videos, etc.). But i also still need a large working drive with a fast interface (eSATA or FireWire), because moving thousands of big files over a network is not fast enough. A NAS would also be great because it can feed media to my Xbox 360, and not have to tax my old Windows machine for streaming videos.

The frustrating thing is that i had just straightened out all my Philippines trip photos from July (they ended up being scattered across several memory cards and my laptop, and with messed up time stamps from different timezones). So we’ll see tomorrow night if i’ll have to do all that again. And now there’s wedding photos that everyone wants to see.

Hopefully i can decide on (and afford) some new hardware, recover and reorganize everything, and get back online quickly. Any suggestions?

YouTube – XBox 360 “Duke Controller.” I want this. Now.