I’ve had the Xbox 360 for a little while now, and what was once a marvel is still impressive and lots of fun, but has started to show small kinks in the armor. Luckily, most of this stuff can most likely be fixed by software updates, so it’s not as bad as it would seem, but there are things that should have been thought out better than they were.
Chat
The private chat channels are cool, but quite limited. Yes, you can talk to another 360 player regardless of which game either of you are in, but you can’t talk to any original Xbox players with it, nor can you create a chat room for multiple people. It’s one on one only.
If both my brother and another of my friends are online, I have to choose who I want to talk to, or jump between private channels. On the original ‘box, there was a party chat option in the dashboard. It was an easy way to congregate with friends and decide on what to play. On the 360, the option simply isn’t there.
Messages
Sending messages between the two systems can apparently only be done within backwards compatible games. Not so long ago, I was online, and saw that Matt was on. He’s still on the original Xbox, so I figured I’d throw in Rainbow Six 3:Black Arrow, and start a game so that we could play together. I sent him a game invite, and all I got back was an invite to the Xbox Dashboard. I couldn’t accept that as I was on a 360, so I send him another game invite. He sent me another dashboard invite, etc. etc.
This goes on until my phone rings. It’s Matt, saying that he can’t join my game, because he doesn’t have (and I should have known this) Black Arrow, only RS3. End result: we’ve wasted 20 minutes because we couldn’t talk to each other directly over the same network, just because we were using different clients. Makes no sense at all.
Auto Play
Right now, I only have one Xbox 360 game that’s not part of Live Arcade, Call of Duty 2. So, I leave it in the CD tray. When the 360 starts up, it auto plays whatever is in the tray, so you have to wait a little bit for the game to load before you can escape to the dashboard using the guide button. What I’d like is a configurable option to always start the system in the dashboard. From there, there’s already a “Play Game” option to play whatever’s in the tray, so you’d still be covered there.
And the biggest one of them all…
No Bookworm
What the hell? Where’s Bookworm on the 360 Live Arcade?! When I took out the Xbox to replace it with the 360, we lost our little buddy. To the powers that be in Redmond: You’ve made my wife very upset!
I’m sure I’ve forgotten some points, but apart from these nagging nits, there really isn’t all that much fundamentally wrong with the system. Truly, my biggest problem with the thing is that I don’t get to play it as much as I’d like, but I don’t expect that to get fixed by a software patch.
todd January 20th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
I’ve heard multi-chat is disabled if you have IM blocked.
m13b January 20th, 2006 at 3:05 pm
Aaah. I’ll have to stop bringing my 360 to work then.