So the Sony boys are excited about Home, well the Xbox 360 fans are now excited about the new look Xbox 360 Dashboard which has just been announced at E3 dubbed The New Xbox Experience. It will be hitting your consoles during the Fall 2008 update, that’s Spring 2008 for all of use southern hemisphere people.
Besides a whole new look, the update will introduce the new party system where you can put your friends into groups. Also included are avatars which was bound to appear after competing consoles added them.
For the Guitar Hero fans that prefer a bit more interaction with their consoles and those that like games like Singstar, the Xbox 360 will be getting Lips. Its a cool new game where you can choose your own music and go karaoke with it. And if using your own tunes wasn’t exciting enough, it will be coming with wireless microphones so no more irritating wires in the way.
For those that like trivia and good family entertainment, SceneIt 2 (Box Office Smash) was announced and I understand that South Africa will be getting it this time around.
A partnership with Netflix was announced where all Xbox LIVE subscribers, I’m assuming in the US only, will have access to over 10,000 movies and TV episodes online at no additional cost, however a Netflix account will be required.
On the community side of things the fall update will include the new community XNA games functionality where the community can easily publish their own creations through Xbox LIVE.
In terms of release dates the following dates were announced:
- Geometry Wars sequel coming to Xbox LIVE Arcade next month
- South Park coming to Xbox LIVE Arcade soon
- Uno Rush coming to Xbox LIVE Arcade before the end of the year
- Banjo Kazooie coming to Xbox LIVE Arcade this year
- Fable 2 in October 2008
- Gears of War 2 on 7th of November 2008
- Resident Evil 5 in March 2009
- Fallout 3
- Final Fantasy XIII to be released the same day on Xbox 360 and PS3
All in all some pretty cool announcements from Microsoft. I was hoping for more hardware and accessory announcements though. One cool fact is that the Xbox 360 coupled with the Xbox LIVE platform is an ideal media platform that publishers and content producers are targetting. Hopefully we’ll be getting some love in this regard sometime soon.
Super E3 MS!
And Banjo Kazooie = Arcade? Wow. How big is that DL going to be?
And to the SDF: FF13 – feel the burn! 🙂
Shouldn’t be too large. Its the port of the old Nintendo 64 game.