Breaking news: Microsoft shows competency (Re: Dashboard update)

by blazehedgehog

Ladies and gentlemen, I will just not shut the hell up about the Xbox 360 dashboard. There was an update yesterday morning, and I feel like I have to say something about it, given that my previous statements on the subject were, to quote, " this is bad enough that it almost seems like you're deliberately sabotaging yourselves, Microsoft."

Somebody out there was listening. To me specifically? Probably not. But I was hardly the only voice. While the display issues with certain apps does not seem to have been corrected, yesterday's Xbox Dashboard patch has seemingly redesigned a significant portion of the Game Marketplace.

The old dash (top) vs. the new dash (bottom).What a world of difference! One of my main complaints of the old game marketplace was the fact that icons were all a random jumble of unrelated garbage - you had some icons that were like Windows icons in green squares, you had some icons that were random unrelated clip-art, and there were too many "clicks" standing in the way of you getting to the categorization options you wanted to get to. Now, everything makes a lot more sense. We lose sorting options like "Most Popular" and sorting by Genre, but now Xbox Live Arcade, Games On Demand, and Xbox Indie games are out in the open, no longer held hostage by the weird Parkour Girl. When icons deviate from the standard Xbox "green background and white pictograph" image, they're showing the best-selling products in their section - Castle Crashers, Halo Reach, and (ugh) FortressCraft. It's smart, it's focused, and it's the way it should've been to begin with (though given Microsoft's deal with Mojang for Minecraft on Xbox Live Arcade, I have to wonder how they feel about FortressCraft getting billing like that). Similar improvements have been made across the rest of the Marketplace:

Holy organization, Batman.Unlike with the games tab, where we lost sorting options in favor of exposing certain game types better, the add-ons section loses nothing but gains a ton of readability. System functions are clearly identified and grouped together, though the "subscriptions" tab is still off by its little lonesome there on the right - but I can't imagine a good place to put that myself, so it's fine. Again, this is exactly the way the dashboard should have looked when the update launched. It finally makes the whole thing feel cohesive; there's no more stopping and having to think about what might be an advertisement or a promotion - it's all properly organized and completely obvious, even at a glance.

Of course, I don't have to go through every section of the game marketplace, because it's all like this now. Microsoft deserves at least a little pat on the back; they took what used to be a slight trainwreck and made it workable. It's still not quite as good as it could be, of course, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.