Microsoft’s New Xbox Experience summed up

Microsoft recently announced that the Xbox 360 Dashboard will be getting a makeover, with one of the new additions being the Avatars. If you’re wondering what other changes you can look forward to, then hit the jump for a brief overview.

• “There’s nothing to announce” right now regarding a keyword search for the Marketplace. Let’s hope they either a) add one in or b) drastically improve how we find things
• Playing games from the hard drive will work fine for multi-disc games; in fact, you can pick which discs you want to rip (for example, we’re superstitious and we’d only rip odd-numbered discs).
• As an example, we were told that Devil May Cry 4 is approximately a 4 or 5GB installation and took about ten minutes.
• You’ll need to keep the disc in the drive the entire time. This is about speeding up load times (and hey, bonus tip: no more noisy DVD drive while you’re playing!)
• The alerts look the same – actually, like the entire interface, they look sharper, cleaner. Oh, and the sound is the same.
• Yes, you can still use your gamertag pics and your themes (in fact, they look a lot better now!)

I find the idea of ripping your discs for the sake of load times to be rather interesting. I suppose that it might be nice to do on some games. However, unless you’ve upgraded to the 120GB drive or are purchasing a new 60GB console, don’t expect to be ripping very many games.

[via Joystiq]