The Examiner has gone through the new Xbox 360 Dashboard, pointing out the good and the bad in a rather compressed way.
I miss some more details, but atleast they had a comment about the prices for the Games on Demand – which clearly shows that the overpricing on games is not just a phenomenon for the local markets as they have previously tried to point out.
Second, how useful are the new features? Games on Demand, while it sounds like a good idea, usually features games that are well over their retail price point. For example, Bioshock and Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga both sell for $29.99 on Games on Demand. These two games sell at (most) retailers for $19.99. Users won’t receive a physical disc and must use 4-8 gigabytes of their 360 hard drive’s space to download the game. If this makes it sound like an almost entirely useless feature, I apologize – it’s actually entirely useless.
As the internets reported last week, the much anticipated Twitter and Facebook functionality for the Xbox 360 is not included in the upcoming dashboard update. But now we have information on when to expect such features to arrive.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Microsoft’s James Halton revealed that the company plans to release the Twitter and Facebook applications as standalone downloads instead of including them with this dashboard update. The Microsoft executive said that the company is targeting a Fall date for the integration of Twitter and Facebook to the Xbox 360.
This morning Microsoft sent the much-anticipated Xbox 360 dashboard update to a group of game writers to check out before it hits officially on Aug. 11.
In this video, kotaku.com gives you a quick overview of the dashboard’s main screen, looking the new look for achievements and the ability to drop into a Xbox Live Arcade game directly from the achievement screen.
We also get a taste of load times and how little much of the service has changed.
