Apparently I haven't spent as much time with this thing as I should because while I thought it was a decent update it seems most people have mostly negative things to say about it.
Listening to the CAGcast this morning and they were talking about how the Bing search is horrendous. Shipwreck kept trying to have it search Mortal Kombat and it would not only misinterpret what he was saying as "moral combat", thus bring up Dragon Age and such, but when it did understand him correctly it just found movies. How the fuck does a game machine suggest movies before actual games?!?
They were also talking about how much harder it is to find things, especially indie games, which I thought this new dash was supposed to make that easier. Wombat also theorized that the whole intention on this mew dash look was ad based. Not only are the ads more in your face but he suggested that they designed the dash with the standard 320x250 ad size. I have no idea what he means but he's a marketing guy so I would imagine he knows what he's talking about. It also wouldn't surprise me at all if M$ put marketing dollars way ahead of their actual paying customers.
The other major thing they had complaints about was finding actual content which I can attest to. Trying to find add ons and such, like the Back to Karkand pack yesterday, is a fucking chore. Why something like that wasn't prominently displayed is beyond me. My only guess is that because MS is in bed with Activision and the CoD series they purposely are trying to bury CoD's biggest competitor on their dash. I had to manually cearch by game title and then of course scroll over until I found Battlefield 3. Then when I did, the Karkand content and lates update, which is over 2GB's by the way (explains why PS3 had a such a big download as well), were the last possible items and on like the sixth page of content for the game. Of course it was behind themes and bullshit avatar items. Let's make sure that shit is up front!
Which brings me to one other thing that the CAG guys complained about. If you have wasted your money on "premium" themes or avatar items, you can barely see them now. Not only is half the tv screen just blank space but your theme takes up even less now. When you do actually click on your friend list your "premium" backgrounds and avatar items are about half the size of what they were before the update. I haven't paid for any of that shit but I do have a couple of premium themes I downloaded for free. If I had paid for that stuff I'd be pissed.
Does anyone remember when the dash went from the blades to the NXE? All those regular themes that you had, that made your dash look really cool and personalized, were basically rendered useless with the NXE update. Obviously because M$ wanted you to plunk down money to buy the stupid "premium" themes. But now the premium themes look stupid with this latest update. Are they trying to destroy their own marketing campaign for the themes just so they can bombard us with ads? Morons.
/End rant
The beacons seem cool though.
