..and it’s cool enough. Gaming is fun, it plays great, eh maybe it’s a little on the noisy side, but its been a good experience. Well.. as long as I’m not using the interface. ‘Cuz my oh my does the 360 interface ever suck?
In my opinion it’s way too complicated and heavy handed for the intended purpose of a console. Let me explain: Sure it has color coded tabs and stuff in an attempt to make things user friendly, but there’s too much textual information. Every page overflowing with lines upon lines of text. Some of the wordings are pretty identical between pages too, making it difficult to navigate at a glance.. But even worse: It’s boring to use! Downloading a trailer doesn’t feel good, it’s not a slick procedure that my parents could ever figure out, much less enjoy. It’s just a silvery interface with too much text.
No one around me seems to agree though, apparently once you get used to the interface it makes sense. But as a bit of an outsider, not owning a 360 myself and all that, it just comes off as a mess. Watching a trailer was literally a chore, first I downloaded it, which wasn’t pretty or exciting but at least reasonably easy. But then I had to go back, back, back, back, back, view content, view trailers, and.. uh.. now to remember which trailer I just downloaded… then select it, and hit Play. Bah. A thousand times bah. And I can’t even forward through it once I got it playing, jeez.
It’s not that the interface is outright impossible to figure out, especially not for for tech people like us. But seriously, enjoyable, it’s not slick, there’s no sexiness to the process. And as such I deem the 360 interface a failure: It doesn’t make you want to use it. That’s good enough for an OS like Windows where you gotta do work, but it’s simply not good enough for a self-proclaimed entertainment hub. Microsoft should take a good long look at various interfaces from Apple and get inspired.