The New 360 Dashboard and What it Means for Us

The additional entertainment content in the form of new media services is a boon to gamers who also think of their console as the pathway to movies, TV shows, and music, and being able to watch YouTube on the big screen is a nice addition to the services that the 360 provides, but in the end it is the gaming related additions that we find to be the most compelling and useful of the new additions.

Beacons, while at first they appeared to be only marginally useful, in the end turned out to be an incredibly useful feature that in the end all by themselves justify any inconvenience that swotching to and learning a new interface might have presented. The ability to not only see what your mates have been playing but when they last played the games and in an easy to spot collected location? Bloody priceless!

When you combine the new services with the Kinect-centric interface you end up with a new Xbox interface that makes you feel rather smug about having purchased a Kinect -- bearing in mind that when you work in the game industry where you write about games and gaming it is not like you actually had a choice in the matter, but still, smug can be good.