Yesterday the guys over at Bethesda threw up this screenshot and a little bit of knowledge. Bethsoft is dropping a premium theme for Fallout 3 thanks to a few artists throwing down a lot of effort. If you are a fan of the wasteland you can make your NXE look like a bomb dropped on it for a mere 240 MS buckaroos. If you are a REAL Fallout 3 fanboy and buy all the DLC / expansion packs (or whatever you kids are calling them these days) before 22-Sept, you can get this theme for FREE! Free is great, but it comes at the price of 5 more adventures in the wasteland which translates to many many many more hours of Fallout… almost too much for me to bear, but I’ll try anyway. Kudos to Bethesda for getting Microsoft to give something away for free! Sort of anyway.
For most of us gamers out there, updates to the 360 come to us as we awake from our afternoon nap, throw off the loose Cheetos that hang on to our sweatpants, and boot up the console, only to see what looks like an error message. We rub our eyes sleepily to get the goop out and hope to goodness that Xbox Live isn’t down.
Coming soon though is an NXE update that I think everyone will benefit from in some way. I was lucky enough to send in my survey and be selected for the second wave of NXE preview program invites. Over the past week or so I have been able to put the NXE update through its paces (minus the Netflix updates which I don’t have) and will give my impressions so far on the update coming August 11th.
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The NXE, whether you love it, hate it, or are pretty much indifferent like rest of us, is requiring that new themes and such be in the NXE format (Premium Themes). Some themes are free, most are not, but again, no one really buys them so who cares. Apparently, Jonathan Blow, the guy behind one of the best XBLA games does. So much so, that he wrote about it on the Braid blog. Check it out:
Unfortunately, we had to charge the standard Premium Theme price of 250 Microsoft Points (which is about $3.10 in American money). We want to make it free, but Microsoft doesn’t like giving things out for free. But if you do buy it, you can be secure in the knowledge that you own one of the few Premium Themes that is not an advertisement — there is no text in the Braid theme anywhere. (Seriously, Microsoft, what is with the Subway: Eat Fresh Theme?)
Yeah. That just happened. Take it as you want, but the way I see it, this is an utter call out to Microsoft that they are foolish to charge for themes and especially charge for themes with ads in them. Am I going to buy a Subway sandwich because my video games told me? No. I am going to buy a sandwich from a real deli that will give me more than 4 measly slices of meat for my Italian. Capicolla? In your fucking dreams. You get “spicy Italian ham” instead. Take that $5 foot-long and stick it in your ass.
I am certain you are all well aware that you can access your friends list anywhere at anytime from your iPhone but navigating the xbox.com site takes way too much time. 1337pwn.com has you covered. With their new App Store application iNXES, you can access your friends list as long as you have a wireless connection and the best part is it looks just like the NXE friends list.
A few downsides exist yet for this absolutely free application. It doesn’t support jailbroken devices and the friends list has to be manually populated. The application itself is a little pokey but version 1.1 will soon be on it’s way. If you can handle all of that, go download this application immediately.
Always up for spreading some holiday cheer, NXE has released a free holiday theme for all users. To top that, they have enabled a snow globe where you can bounce around your friends’ avatars. This snow globe serves absolutely no functional purpose, but gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling only 7 glasses of egg nog can bring. Confused? Me too. Here is an explanation:
Earlier this week, we delivered the free Holiday Theme for Xbox LIVE members, If you missed go ahead and grab it but keep an eye out for the Xbox LIVE Holiday Snow Globe, which has just released in many regions. When you launch the snow globe, it will automatically populate with your friends avatars. You can shake the globe with A or press X to stir in another random set of friends. You don’t have to download it, it will just appear in the Spotlight channel* when you are connected to Xbox LIVE. With Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa just around the corner, this will give you a chance to enjoy a little Holiday spirit with your Xbox LIVE friends in very NXE way.
There have been grumblings that people do not like the NXE. There have also been reports of people saying it’s a bust and will kowtow to the wonderment that is PS Home. Well, 2 things. Home just hit open beta with a lot of issues and people are not exactly shitting themselves with excitement over Home. Furthermore, here are some factoids that show the NXE is anything but a bust.
- If LIVE were a U.S. city, it would be the largest city with over 14-million members. The equivalent of New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago combined.
- Since the New Xbox Experience launched on Nov. 19 the number of new friends added per Xbox LIVE member has risen by 33%.
- Xbox LIVE is not just games: With more than 45 global network and studio partners, and Netflix in the U.S., we offer more than 30,000 movies, TV episodes and music videos in both high and standard definition.
- In the past year the average number of unique visitors to Xbox LIVE each day has risen 66%
- Movie downloads increased 49% and TV episode downloads were up 30% the week after launch
- Xbox LIVE Arcade sales almost tripled in the first week after the New Xbox Experience launched
- Avatar-specific titles like A Kingdom for Keflings registered the second-best first week of performance ever
- UNO which was updated to include in-game Avatars, saw a 650% increase in sales in just one day
Video games are quite expensive these days so it is of utter importance to try to keep the game disk in immaculate condition. I have been doing a fine job of this, that is until a few days ago. This is a story of how my pesky feline friend almost ruined my Gears of War 2 disk and how the New Xbox Experience was there to save the day.
I was minding my own business, playing Gears of War 2 multiplayer online like any other weekday evening. The game was about to end, it was down to a sudden death standoff between me and some random player. My 2 year old cat Powder decided to jump up on my gaming desk like he has done in the past. He started rubbing his furry face all over my upright standing Xbox 360. I yelled at him but was unable to remove him from the desk, I was in the middle of a standoff after all. He proceeded to rub his stupid face all over the Xbox and inevitably ended up tipping the machine over while the game disk was still spinning. The machine slammed down against the desk but to my amazement the game continued to play on. The match ended with my victory and everything seemed to be fine.
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Is your avatar freezing his virtual balls off? What is a horseshoe? Are there any horse socks? Is anyone listening? Does anyone care? Movie…? Anyway, go download some winter duds for your avatar. They are free so why the hell not? Amount of questions allowed in one post exceeded.
Are you tired of seeing old demos and games you played for 7 seconds show up in your Achievement list? With the NXE, you can go through and delete them. Finally!
All you have to do is hit the Xbox 360 Guide button, move left to the Games tab and select Achievements. Once there, scroll down to anything with a zero Gamerscore and hit X to the delete the game from the list. It’s that simple.
I went through and got rid of a bunch of older Arcade demos and a few retail games that I tried out for about 2 minutes. Now I don’t have to see them as part of my Achievement lists anymore. Go do the same and thank me later.
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