Can you speak to your friends even if the seven of you are all on different games?

I'm looking forward to the new look dashboard, looks kinda funky, not too sure bout the avitars though, Is there one for a scruffy bloke from Burnley?

He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy.

Should be good for games like Fuel: Frontlines of War, is that the right title? or is it Frontlines: Fuel of War? Which does have so restricting comms.

8 rooms of Revenge with the hosts comunicating with each other, owning all, while talking about cheese! 8 rooms of Rainbow, any game really! Clan matches of four over two rooms etc.

And yes you can make a scruffy Avatar. The only thing I thought was lacking with Avatars, was a Save function, that you could save 5 types of Avatars, for different moods, if you get me?

For you Kev, 1 for before, after and hangover. 1 for the killing machine in a shooter, and a race driver. ;), lol.

But since the NXE has so many other things going for it, we may no worry about that, for the time being, though changing your Avatar only takes 2 minutes, for a quick change, 10 for some real detail.

I wonder if nrop Avatars can be made, like the Wii ones?

Patience is something I taught myself, so I never know when it's going to run out?

OK, so I got my XBox 360 sent back (a nice shiny replacement actually)   one day after NXE came out so I get the DL and see whats what... hmmmmmmm I don't like it! The Avatars are not as customisable as I would have liked, you can't change the colours of the clothes, there are very limited options of things you can do to your face and body, and their isn't a lot of choice in the clothing department either. I guess they will sell us more accessories? but personally I would like to have to option to keep using my blades!

This whole avatar thing just seems to have slowed everything down!

Maybe when I get a party set up and stuff it will make more sense, but right now it just seems limited and kinda pointless.

I hate change! it takes soo long to get used to!! What does everyone else think about the NXE?

I like it...

Next time, if they add more stuff... I will make an Avatar of a bald-headed boy in some monk outfit with a stick in one hand and a flying lemur on the shoulder...

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"I Have Loved. I Have Suffered. Now, I Hate."

In my humble opinion I think the new NXE is pretty good, it still has all the functionality of the old dashboard but with added zing factor, we had a great evening last night, there were 8 of us in a party, first we all took the ssip out of each others av's (they are all gay and crap except for mine) then we all went on to photo share, where daylight and myself put pics of ourself up for everybody to ridicule, fortunately i have my external drive hooked up to my eggbox so i have 1000's of pics availble (mosty iffy ones) but a lot of me from being a youngster to being the grumpy old rekcuf i am today, and yes i was ridiculed, but it was all in good humour, at least evil omar didn't call me Boris Karloff pmsl, After that we all put r6v2 in and had a team deathmatch or ten, But the interesting thing was that we could still hear everybody even though we were on different teams, and abusing someone you just shot in the back is priceless, needless to say i was shot on a number of occasions and i went platinum, so the person who actually shot me got to hear the barrage of abuse i hurled at them.

All in all its quite a good idea and the party mode is great fun. And psyche you look like you need to eat some pies your avatar is positively anorexic, but you pigtails look the business.

He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy.

The update is pretty sweet i have to say. But like zombietron says the characters are not customizable enough.

Are both very cool features. I have wanted to have a group chat option for ages, so it is really cool to finally have one. Being able to have uninterupted chat with a group throughout changing games or changing levels where voice chat is normally interupted is really cool!

Photo Party is a great little app too! It is nice to be able to share pics while chatting over XBL.

I am getting a bit more used to the NXE interface, but I still think it is messier then the blades, and it does seem to take longer to navigate and I am still not sure where everything is... watching some of the vids online on Xbox.com helped, it would of been good for an introduction video to NXE to have been available over XBL as soon as you get the download, cos I was a bit confused by the whole thing at first (it doesn't take much)!

I'm hoping it will only get better, TBH tho what I have seen of PS3's HOME looks much more of an experience in itself... NXE just seems like Avatars and Premium Themes and a bigger advertising format for stuff I'm not really interested in.  Not that I'm really interested in anything I have seen about PS3's HOME either.  I am growing fond of my little Avatar tho.