#FF00AA

Well, the new Xbox 360 interface is here, and it’s… horribly, literally painful. Not the installation — which was surprisingly quick and straightforward (I originally hesitated to rush and install it, but there have been so many people invited to the preview, with little or no complaints, I figured it must be reliable) — but the interface itself.

I don’t know if it’s my brain, or my screen (I’m using a 17-inch 1280x1024 computer monitor), or my sustained caffeine overdose, but I’m having a tough time with my console right now: Half-Life 2 already made me cower in the darkness and claw at my brain with an ice pick (that’s a known feature, apparently due to the game’s unusually narrow field of view), and now the 360’s interface itself makes me howl in terror.

Once again: literally.

Can’t describe what’s going on exactly, but when I’m scrolling horizontally through panes, there’s something in the way they move that my brain perceives as just wrong — it’s not so much seasickness, like in Half-Life 2, as witnessing a rip in the space-time continuum. Simply something that makes my eyes and brain explode. It’s most evident when scrolling through tall panes (e.g., paging through game details in the marketplace), and I have yet to find anyone having the same… eh, Experience in the blogs and messageboards.

So I’ll just move on to my other nitpicks.

Before I got to screaming and having to look away from the screen whenever I navigated through the interface, the first thing I encountered (dismissing the very pretty intro video that a menu item helpfully offers to replay at any time) was avatar customization… and that was also a disappointment. Or more like a return to my original impressions.

First, the music: considering how much Microsoft has been mocked for imitating Nintendo’s miis, you’d think they’d try to steer as far away from them as they could; instead, the music that plays when you’re customizing your avatar is blatantly, shockingly Wii-ish. I can’t imagine how anyone would have decided that was a good idea.

Second, customization: much more limited than I imagined. As low-tech as the system is, mii faces are almost infinitely customizable because you can move, resize and rotate each feature; no such thing on the 360. It makes sense for the nose and ears to be more limited, because they’re more complex 3D models, but you can’t modify the eye or mouth placement, and you can’t play with textures. Even hair colors are limited to natural hues (although that part will undoubtedly be “fixed” with marketplace downloads), and while you can change your avatar’s height and weight, you can’t make it more or less muscular — not that they could be any less muscular than they already are. And, yeah, that’s both the whole point of the idea, and the biggest flaw: they definitely don’t look Xbox-like at all.

I mean, they’re launching at the same time as Gears of War 2, for crying out loud.

Not to say that I don’t like the new interface: I always thought that it looked good, and I still do (here’s hoping my brain and eyes will eventually get used to it); it looks much more approchable and attractive, although it isn’t that much better organized than it used to be (but it’s more responsive, and you see more of what’s around at a glance, which is good).

I can’t say how good the new party system is, because I don’t play online that much; installing games to the hard drive doesn’t do much for loading times, but I already knew that from Eurogamer’s benchmarks (and at least that means I can be content with my 20GB hard drive); custom theme previews are still amazingly insufficient in the marketplace (the coolest feature is the special backdrops in the friends list, and they’re not previewed); and you’re now able to schedule marketplace downloads from the web, but it doesn’t work right now (and I’m not sure whether it’ll require Silverlight, or that’s just a home page animation).

In conclusion, the new dashboard may bring more disappointment than satisfaction for existing users; but I think it makes the Xbox prettier and friendlier to new users, by removing much of its computer-ness (now they only need to have a downloadable patch that makes the box nicer, too). A clear win.