OMG, NXE OCD!

Obsessive. Compulsive. Dashboard.

It’s only been ten days since the New Xbox Experience was launched, and I’m hard pressed to remember the old dashboard. Okay, I’m not quite that hard-pressed, sure I can remember the old dash but by jiminy, the new one is good!

Almost everyone has had a chance, by now, to have a good old fiddle with it – crafting their avatars to look like whatever they want. In the case of a couple of my Xbox Live Friends the avatar is scarily lifelike, whereas Laura‘s, for example, is completely different almost every time she logs in. When I crafted mine, I tried to make it look a bit like me and then stuck it in a brown suit so I could pretend I was Doctor Who look sophisticated!

So, NXE launched last Wednesday. I went to work on Thursday and asked my mate James what he thought of it.

“Awesome,” he said. “We spent all night burping. We don’t play games anymore. We just burp.”
I won’t lie. A portion of my brain was worrying that too much work had addled the poor lad’s brain. “You did what?”
“Press the right thumbstick, you’ll see…”

The end of the work day couldn’t have come quick enough for me. I raced home (well, as much as a bus can race) and immediately set to work burping. And yes, if you’re editing your avatar, a quick press of the right stick does yield a burp. Push the stick up as you click and you get a higher pitch, pushing it down and clicking results in a good deep belch. Genius.

At work the next day I was asked if I had burped. I had indeed. But I’d also made my little Geo dizzy, smiley and angry. The avatar rocks. Shake his head while you’re on your profile and he’ll show you that no means no! Nod, and he’s happy. Spin his head frantically and he looks a bit ill – complete with spinning eyeballs. More genius.

But the thing I like best about the new look is that I get to keep it tidy. I spent a good portion of the evening cleaning up my games list – deleting zero point games is a nice touch. So, it was goodbye Crazy Mouse (hurrah!), goodbye Hellboy and, at long last, goodbye OXM demo discs. Hurrah. It was also a time to curse that I managed to squeeze a couple of achievements out of Bomberman Zero, as that shall now blight my list for all time but, hey, you can’t have it all.

It was while I was flicking through my games that the OCD really kicked in. The New Xbox Experience has adopted the sliding bar approach that xbox.com and gamercard.net use for showing you how you’re doing with your achievements. Get all the achievements and your bar is full, get only a few and your bar is all but empty. For some reason, seeing the games represented like this has made me want to neaten them all up. It’s absolutely ludicrous.

Now I’m finding that getting an achievement has nothing to do with scorewhoring, it’s all about making my little green bars neat. If, for example, the gamerscore bar is longer or shorter than the achievements earned bar (as it is for most games – unless it’s 50 achievements at 20 points each) I find myself wanting to even them out so that it doesn’t look higgledy-piggledy. In a way, this is good because the easiest way to neaten everything up is to try and get all the achievements meaning that I am spending more time playing a game, but it also means that if I’m playing something crap and pick up an achievement, I’ll then have to endure it a little bit more to tidy up my bars.

I’m hoping that this bout of OCD will fade once the new car smell of the NXE fades, and that I can just go back to playing whatever and not really caring what my gamercard looks like at the end of it (although I will, of course, always delete Crazy Mouse every time I play it!) but for now I find myself a slave to the sliders.

Maybe I should change my avatar to look like Adrian Monk, the Obsessive Compulsive Detective from the TV show, “Monk.”

Yes, I know… it looks quite a bit like him already!!


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6 responses to “OMG, NXE OCD!”

  1. Barry avatar
    Barry

    But can you make you avatar spin on the spot? 😛

    (hold down/left with your LS for about 2 seconds then quickly hold down/right, Voila!)

  2. Laura avatar
    Laura

    Yeah um I’m only trying to make my avatar ugly to compensate for the cheese honest, honest boo avatars R ghey, dressing up is for girlies!!
    Goddammit I gotta go pwn n00bz now on COD:WAW hoo rah!

  3. Michael avatar

    Oh God there’s bars now?! Ugh…

    I actually use my pinkie to open doors (like in public buildings) and wrap it round the tail of glasses or bottles when I’m drinking… why am I talking about that? Because of Monk’s hand. I’ve always meant to watch that show but have never got round to it. Any use?

  4. Lorna avatar
    Lorna

    I hate the avatars personally, I have a wii gathering dust for all that nonsense. I prefered the old blades, but there we are 🙂 As for neatening things up, I too am attempting to do that by finishing up those pesky Live games…I finally managed the Suicide mission difficulty on WOTB somehow so the worst is over. Now I need to complete the Marble Zone in Sonic in under 80 seconds…pah.

  5. Uzi avatar
    Uzi

    hehehe, neatening your green bars… that’s an evil trick for them to play.

  6. John avatar

    It might be a bit of a guilty pleasure for a tech-head like me, but I actually quite enjoyed giving Silesti (umm that’s my Live persona.. anyway..) a face. Previously she’d just been this notion and had somehow morphed into the games characters but now she’s real-ish. I’m not sure how much time I’ll spend in this place, but it’s been a bit of fun for now.
    I’ve heard various remarks fro ‘out there’ about NXE but as I said in my post on the subject, this is about opening up the box 360 audience, and we must remember that a bigger market means more longevity and more games for us all.
    I still couldn’t find a dress I liked though…

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