Although it was available much earlier, I decided to wait til today to update my Xbox 360 with the New Xbox Experience. I’ve got to say, this NXE interface is incredibly slick. I created my avatar, fiddled around with the menu interface and installed Gears of War 2. Then I decided to sit down and share some of my thoughts on my Microsoft’s big revamp.

The download and installation was quick and painless. I thought it was going to be a 20 minute ordeal, but it was actually much less. The introduction movie encapsulated the feel of the NXE perfectly; it’s slick, it’s modern and it’s not something your mum would shut off within 10 seconds of looking at it.

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I could have been playing Dead Space in an attempt to celebrate this holiday for child molesters, but instead I’m playing through Fable II. It’s one of the tougher choices to make in order to keep my back log to a minimum and my wallet credit card happy.

I’ve heard many good things about Dead Space, but my efforts for trading SOCOM: Confrontation for it have been fruitless. Curse Sony and Slant Six and their release of subpar products.

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Ever since I upgraded my PS3’s hard drive from a paltry 60 GB to 320 GB, I’ve been getting these “Cannot Start. The correct hard disk was not found.” errors. Not every day, but at least twice per week. It’s quite annoying when you’re trying to activate Remote Play via the PSP and have it not connect because the PS3 encountered this error.

I had enough and decided to seek answers. After spending a few minutes with Google, it looks like I’ve found it.

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Update: Here’s part four.

Peter Moore is quite the storied individual. He was the head of Sega of America and responsible for the Dreamcast’s launch. He was head of Microsoft’s Xbox division and now he’s the head of EA Sports division.

Well he had quite an interview with the Guardian’s Games Blog. The interview was so grand, it was split into three parts, here, here and here. However, let’s just grab the quotesthat made headlines (again):

Dreamcast was a phenomenal 18 months of pain, heartache, euphoria… We thought we had it, but then Playstation came out, that infamous issue of Newsweek with the Emotion Engine on the cover… and of course, EA didn’t publish which left a big hole, not only in sports but in other genres. We ended up that Christmas period not being able to get to where we needed to be – we weren’t far short, we just couldn’t get that critical mass…

Bless the Dreamcast and its short, but awesome life.

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Unlike Microsoft and Nintendo, who chose not to go up on stage to sing and dance, Sony put on somewhat of an interesting press conference which included games and a fair bit of hardware announcements. And since anything SCEE said at Leipzig pertained to Europe alone, SCEA put up a blog post detailing the North American version.

Here’s the breakdown:

PlayStation 3 with 160 GB Hard Drive

• November for $499.99  USD/CAD
• Comes with Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune
• DualShock 3
• Voucher for PSN game PAIN

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Last weekend, I was busy playing SoulCalibur IV as a fighter. Starting Monday, however, my brother and I were busy with unlocking hats, boots and other accessories for the character creation system.

Since I am still playing through Persona 3 FES, I created my rendition of Mitsuru Kirijo:

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SoulCalibur IV almost didn’t make it for the long weekend, but it made it! Soul Calibur IV is here and so far we’ve unlocked all the significant characters. I’m enjoying the game, but I need to some more time to adjust to the reduced speed and other details.

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I love installs. They cut down load times and stop the disc from spinning. So how about giving that option to 360 owners? That’s what the new Xbox 360 experience will enable amongst other features. So awesome. Here’s the breakdown for the lazy

• Play from hard drive
• Access Xbox LIVE Marketplace on the Web.
• Dashboard built into the new Xbox Guide
• LIVE Party system
• Xbox LIVE Primetime.  
• Avatars
• New display support. Adding 16:10 resolution support over VGA or HDMI

The nitty gritty details can be found on the Gamerscoreblog.

My relationship with Western Digital has been shaky at best. Their “mainstream” line and I do not get along at all. Their high end Raptors and I, however have been great. It always impresses me when a new Raptor is released.

The latest release is pretty damn radical. They took a 2.5 inch hard drive, stuck it on a 3.5 inch sized heat sink so it could pass as a 3.5 inch desktop drive. It spins at 10K RPMs, delivers 300 GB of storage space and costs a hefty $300. The dollar per gigabyte ratio may not be great, but, it’s probably the fastest SATA desktop hard drive you can buy.

AnandTech has a preview, but Tech Report did an all out review on it.