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The new Xbox 360 Experience was released yesterday and I got to spend a little bit of time playing with it. Overall I think the new look is OK, but it seems harder to get to important things like the DVD tray and XBL profile information. In place of that easy access are a bunch of ads trying to peddle marketplace wares. Pretty crappy trade off.

Don’t get me started about how lame the new avatar system is either. In a blatant ripoff of the Wii’s Mii feature, the 360 now makes us setup an avatar to be associated with our XBL account. If I wanted to play a cutesie, made-for-4th-graders console I’d had bought a Wii already.

IANster's Xbox 360 avatar

The only thing that saves the new Xbox 360 Experience from being a total waste is that we can now stream Netflix Watch Instantly content to our 360. I tested this with a couple of different shows and had mixed results. First I watched the movie Enchanted, and was disappointed to see that it was presented in 4:3 Full Screen mode, and was only in 2 channel stereo. Yuck. The second title I watched was the first episode of Jericho. Thankfully this was at least in wide screen, but again it was only in 2 channel stereo. Both titles were noticeably compressed and looked worse than even watching them on a bad satellite TV channel.

While this probably isn’t the fault of the Xbox 360 or Microsoft, it still isn’t the best experience, and I doubt that I will be paying for XBL Gold Membership if this is the only feature worth using and it remains half-baked.

UPDATE: Here is more info on the Netflix stream encoding process.

Ugh!!! My stupid Xbox 360 just started throwing out the red ring of death on me again. This is my 3rd dead Xbox 360. At least this time it’s still under warranty so it won’t cost me anything to replace. Well, except 3 weeks of no Rock Band

Sorry to all my friends and family that wanted to play this game with me. I guess it will be 3-4 weeks before we can plan another Rock Band party

Stupid Microsoft.

Holy cow. There is a Guitar Hero III demo that you can grab on torrent sites in ISO format. Just burn to a CD-R (Yeppo, a normal CD-R) and pop it in the 360, and it will just work. Sweet!

The few tracks they have are a lot of fun. They’re pretty hard though, harder then GH2. I’m more excited about Rock Band though

Phew! This game is awesome! It’s been talking up almost all of my time recently. I’m about 20% of the way through the game and probably 40% through the career mode. There’s just something about taking a car and customizing it to the point that it only resembles the original car in its body shape. Take my Turbo IS350 for example. I’ve ramped it up from it’s default class C482 to a class U999, which means its higher ranked than just about anything on the street.

That’s what happens though when you can upgrade everything from the engine block to the width of the tires. I love it!

Update: This car is rated U999 with the following stats:

• Top Speed 7.3
• Acceleration 7.0
• Braking 6.1
• Handling 5.8
• Rarity 9.4

Here are some specs:

• Turbo charged 6-cylinder, V6, producing 685 hp @ 7,300 RPM
• K&N Intake
• Magnaflow Exhaust
• XS Engineering Race Turbo
• OMP America racing seat, harness, and roll cage

Update: You can follow my Forza 2 photostream at Flickr!

My favorite games on Xbox are either baseball or racing. I’ve been playing MLB 2K7 since it came out, but I’m ready for something new. Luckily Forza Motorsport 2 comes out tomorrow and it should be a great one!

So far I’ve been playing the demo and these are my best lap times:
0:52.804 – #4 Corvette C6.R
1:01.645 – Ferrari F430

Two weeks ago my Xbox 360 broke. One month out of repair! $105, a few hours on the phone fighting about the cost, and nine work days later, I have the same serial number Xbox back and everything seems cool. My friend even thought it was cool that I got the same box back. Until today! I go to start playing some MLB 2K7 and poof! The Xbox freezes and I’m left with three red lights again. Piece of junk! Why didn’t they fix it correctly the first time? Typical Microsoft to screw it up. Ugh.