The New Xbox Experience is exactly what it says. It’s a total makeover of the xbox user interface, and you can as well say of the whole xbox system. All this to improve your gaming experience on the xbox 360. It is clear that they’ve looked at the points where other consoles seemed to surpass the xbox to achieve this. Nearly all changes are based on those points.  Two big changes of that kind are the possibility to install games and the the new avatars.

The first change, installing games, was needed because of the large loading times that some games had. In my opinion, nearly every xbox game has some loading times that are just to long, so I was really waiting for this new option. However, now it’s here, I have some doubts about it. First of all, the install system just seems to make a large copy of the game on your hard disk, so it fills up your disk incredibly fast. Second of all, the loading times don’t seem to become significantly smaller.

The second big change, the new avatars,  is a little mysterious one to me. First of all because it’s nearly a one on one copy from the Mii system from the Nintendo Wii, not very original. Second of all because you can’t use them in games, a possibility that the Wii does have.  Sure, you can use a “photo” of your avatar as your gamer picture, but it ain’t very useful. As a result, the avatar seems to be nothing more than a commercial tool for microsoft. You can actually buy clothes and accessories for it… A bit weird for something probably only you will see.

The third big change is the new look of the whole menu, a change that was really necessary. The marketplace of the old version didn’t had enough filter options, and the new menu just looks better. However, it must be said that it looks like it’s stolen from both the Wii and the PS3. It contains the little tv screen thingies from the Wii menu and the scrolling system from the PS3, whichlooks a lot like the scrolling system from windows media center.

A little downside, and a commercial upside, of this change seem to be that the old custom theme’s are useless now. Sure, you can still use them, but it results into a really ugly wallpaper.

With the new look of the menu, a new look was needed for the xbox guide. Not only was it restyled, it was also reorganised, and they did a pretty good job on that. A lot more options on your xbox are accessible through your xbox guide now, and it’s well organised in menus, so you can find everything you need without much trouble.

However, a big downside of this change is that the guide has become really slow. When somebody invites me to a game, and I accept, the guide seems to hang for a minute, and sometimes a bit longer.  It is at its worst when playing in an online game. One press on the Xbox guide button can lead to numerous deaths, just because the whole system hangs. It seems that not everyone is experiencing this, but to me it’s enough to make this new xbox experience a bad one.

Luckily there’s something that compensates it at all, and it secures xbox first place in the console battle for the best online experience: the party system. There is not a single console where it’s so incredible easy to play with your friends. You invite them to a single party so you can privately chat with everyone and start a game. Simple, but seemingly ingenious.

So on one side, there’s a new refreshing look and the useful new options like the party system and the possibility to install games on your hard disk drive. But on the other hand, microsoft shows how incredibly commercial they are with the coming of the Mii cloned avatars, not caring about the slow xbox guide, contributing to a little negative experience. But when summing up all those new experiences, the total new xbox experience surely  is a positive one.

Well, how slow is it… It’s really so slow that it can take longer to find a game than it takes to be defeated in that game, which is quite irritating. My average connection time is 5-10 minutes (this is contrast to the 2 minutes to find a game in CoD4 or Halo3), but there are cases where it just took me more than 15 minutes. I’ve even found some people on fora who claim it took more than 20 minutes to find a game. Just imagine how much you can play if you only have to play an hour a day… But even if you can play a little bit longer, it’s just screwing up your time waiting.

So, WHY ON EARTH IS IT SO SLOW!? Of course, it’s only guessing for the reasons, but the most likely case is that Epic has made an epic fail matchmaking system. At least, the claims that it would depend on your router/network configuration are falsified by people who report that it doesn’t matter if you enable DMZ (that’s opening all ports, and that should rule out any router influence) for your xbox360 or not. I’ve even tried it myself, and there’s no difference.

What did Epic do wrong? There are a few things that are unique to the GoW2 matchmaking system and could, in my opinion, slow down the matchmaking process. The first thing is that finding a match is splitted in two different phases: finding your own team and finding a team that would be a fair match for your team. This method can slow you down because of two reasons. First of all because it takes a while before you have a team because a lot of people leave before the process is finished, and this system starts over when someone leaves the team before the match starts. The second reason is that you need to search twice, and the second time you have a harder search because you need to find a match that suits the collection of matchmaking ranks of the teams, and not only that of individual players. In this view the system of Halo3 is much faster. You search 8 people, you split them into teams, and if somebody leaves the process isn’t stopped.

The second thing is the Trueskill ranking system. A lot of people get stuck with in the first rank, so there are a lot of teams with the same average Trueskill, but the are all a little bit different. So if you want to find the BEST match for your team, you need to compare all the Trueskill ranks of all different teams. If this is a large number, it can take a while.

There are a lot of other reasons that you can come up with, but I guess that we will never know (although someone came up with the plausible idea that someone is matching teams by hand… that would tell us why it is so slow). The only thing we can hope for is that they will find the mistake they’ve made (Epic seems to have noticed it according to this post), and will solve it, otherwise this good game is doomed, and we are forced to play GoW till GoW3 appears.

Some of the posts from the old layout are preserved, so there’s still some content. Nevertheless, I will be trying to keep this website regularly updated with some worthless opinions about games, consoles and other game-related content. On the other hand, I will try to make some games myself, and publish them on this website, although it’s very unclear when my first game will see the daylight.

have fun ^^