Will These Justify The Price Change Of Xbox Live?

-ESPN

Quote :

With thousands of sporting events and the interactive social network of Xbox LIVE, ESPN on Xbox 360 brings the excitement of a stadium experience into your living room.** Access over 3500 live global events from ESPN3.com, including out-of-market programming plus fresh video clips from ESPN.com . Enjoy features like HD programming and on-demand viewing, participate in polls, predictions and trivia. See what the Xbox LIVE community is watching and declare what team you’re rooting for. With Kinect™ control the action right from your couch with just your voice or the wave of your hand. ESPN is the best way to watch and follow the sports you love while connecting with friends, fans and rivals on Xbox LIVE.

Screenshots: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/kinect/entertainment.htm

Shows avatar & Kinect functionality


-NEW AVATAR UPDATES

Quote :

The Xbox 360 Avatars will be getting a slightly different look when Kinect launches later this year.

Rare senior programmer Nick Burton told Official UK Xbox Magazine that the update will make the Avatars look slightly more realistic, nicknaming the change "Avatar 2.0."

The change is being made due to apparent difficulties players have had with hand-eye coordination when using Kinect with the current Avatars, which feature cartoonish proportions.

No word on when the update will be hitting. Kinect will be out November 4.

http://www.1up.com/news/microsoft-updating-avatars-kinect

-NEW DASHBOARD LAYOUT & KINECT FUNCTIONALITY

Quote :

We just got a look at the new Kinect Dashboard-lite for the Xbox 360. In some ways, it's pretty charming, with fun, jazzed up icons (when you hover over them they tilt and show off depth), a simplistic layout, and some great voice controls. The downside is this all comes at the cost of a brand new, fairly redundant interface for accessing functions that are already available with your Xbox 360 controller in the regular Dashboard. Still, there's no denying the joy of waving a hand to log in, hovering over icons to select channels (though the wait-to-click mechanism strikes us as eventually frustrating), and scrubbing through media with very intuitive gestures.

The best part is the voice control, however, allowing you to speak "Xbox" and then a command like play, pause, back, forward, stop, Zune, etc. It's ripe for abuse (pausing your S.O.'s seventh Netflix screening of The Constant Gardner ad nauseam), but Microsoft says it's working on eliminating random commands that might seep into conversation. Our biggest worry is that we're going to see confusion and fragmentation of functionality with the divergent UI requirements that Kinect apps and regular Dashboard apps require -- we can't imagine the Facebook or Last.fm folks being super thrilled at creating an all-new app just to support Microsoft's whims, but we're told just such apps are in the works. Is the existing Dashboard really so complicated that Kinect couldn't control it? Check out a video of this puzzling Kinectasticness after the break.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/15/kinect-optimized-xbox-360-dashboard-preview/

I think those are the only new upcoming features of Xbox Live. Expect more?

Short answer: No

Long answer: http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/

No, because Ireland won't see any of theses new features, but I still expect the XBL to increase in price here.

Fuck no.

Edit: Holy shit, I didn't see that it would have fun, jazzed up icons. It's worth it now I realise it has that.

Hell to the no.

It's all directed to the casuals. Notice, all these changes are coherent with Kinect's release.

Teckno wrote:

It's all directed to the casuals. Notice, all these changes are coherent with Kinect's release.

Exactly. So FUCK NO!

Well, of course not. Especially with ESPN, because Microsoft said it themselves at E3 "ESPN is available to all of our Xbox Live Gold members, at NO additional cost."

Lmao. Okay..... this topic was pointless

Guess it's time to lock it up xD