New Xbox Experience

One thing developers and publishers won't have to worry about is compatibility with the new Party or install-to-HD options. The latter allows you to copy the contents of a disc to your drive, hopefully to speed up load times, although you will need the disc in the drive to authenticate. We haven't had long enough with NXE to gauge how much of an improvement installation is over playing off the disc, but we'll take a look in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we can say that installing Quantum of Solace (look how we sacrifice ourselves) took 12 minutes. Fortunately it's optional, and excellently, this doesn't preclude you from accessing the Guide.

You'd almost forgotten about the Guide, hadn't you? Jerry Johnson told us that getting new gamers to understand the Guide button was one of the most difficult challenges the designers of Xbox 360 faced, but for those of us in the know - and particularly for anyone who has yet to be sold on the New Xbox Experience as a whole - the Guide is a lifeline. Hit it and instead of a grey layer on the left, a navy rectangle pops up and dominates the screen. And as far as you'll be concerned, it's the old dashboard.

It's got blades. It's got the old Friends list, and the old Achievements lists. It shows you Active Downloads and allows you to redeem product codes without leaving your game. Heading off to Marketplace, or game or media libraries, system settings or account management, means navigating away from whatever the Guide currently overlays, but thanks to a Quick Launch page, it's also a gateway to other games, allowing you to hotswap Xbox Live Arcade titles and even disc-based games. You'll have to put discs in the tray if they're not already, but otherwise it's a couple of clicks and you're suddenly skipping through the new game's intro screens to your destination. There are none of the old dashboard interstitials, either - those flashes of green between hitting "Play" on a finished download and getting into the game. NXE never seems to be confused about what you want to do; it's been designed, not hacked, to do the things it offers.

The Guide is also your access point to the new Party system, where you can gather eight of your friends together in a voice-chat channel and move the group between games. You don't even have to be doing the same thing: you can just chat along regardless. And because it's a service layer, it automatically works with all your existing games. Gears of War treats it like it's always been there. Instead of inviting a player, you invite the group; instead of ending a session and having to reassemble for another, you stay together. You can open it up to friends or set it to be invite-only, and while it's one of NXE's quieter additions, it's also its most authoritative statement: this is Microsoft saying, "We figured we might need to do something like this, so we made sure we could."

It's a fitting place to end our tour of the New Xbox Experience, because, as a whole, it demonstrates that while Microsoft did not anticipate the demand for platform-level grouping, visual social features like Avatars, nor the sheer volume of content Xbox Live Marketplace would come to host, it set in place foundations as best it could, and is now reaping the rewards. By compartmentalising common functionality, it's been able to introduce features that not only improve future Xbox games, but improve old ones too.

"Serendipitous discovery of content" rings a little hollow - right, thanks for all the new ads - but, as Parties demonstrate, there will be headroom into which to manoeuvre, and we wouldn't be surprised if one of next year's iterations introduces something like Digg spliced with Major Nelson's blog to really empower the community Microsoft professes to love and live up to the serendipity mantra. As Community Games shower from the XNA heavens (or bedrooms), it'll be interesting to see how the Marketplace functionality evolves.

For now though it's smoother and easier than ever, and concerns we had beforehand about that 90MB first-in-first-out cache and the chances of staring at screens waiting for stuff to load in prove to have been misplaced. The background downloads are quick, quiet and have no impact on performance, which is brisk throughout, and whichever of the Live team's programmers spent weeks optimising the new Guide to make the most of its slender resource deserves a pat on the back.

If the Party system is NXE's biggest chest-puff, then the Guide is its smartest flourish, replicating the old dash almost to the word, and thereby giving hardcore users with no need for a flashy UI the means to resist NXE's charms almost permanently, and giving those who find it all slightly overwhelming a stable, familiar core around which to plan their forays into the new functionality. And once they get past that initial feeling of a world turned upside down, the Guide panel resumes its periphery role.

It's a great progression, topping off a great dashboard reboot, and in light of Sony's recent struggles - endless Trophy patches with no retroaction, most notably - it reinforces the widely held view that Microsoft is winning in software and will continue to do so. All that remains, following NXE's 19th November launch, is whether the Xbox 360 hardware now holds up for as long as the guts of Kutaragi's swansong, and how much of the New Xbox Experience's progressive thinking Sony will discover it needs to incorporate in the months and years to come. By then, expect Microsoft's software engineers to be well into the next New Xbox Experience, because as this one demonstrates, they're well aware that needs change and how to prepare for them.