New Xbox Experience

Then again, the conflict between paid placement and promotional altruism is a difficult ethical balance for any entertainment service to strike, and smooth, intuitive navigation negates some of the criticism; you can slide on by if you don't need to be told what to do. The new Community Games area of the Game Marketplace is another weight on the right side of the scale. Although pre-launch it hosts just three basic games (Culture, Netters and Net Rumble) that feel like placeholders, it's clear that the fruits of all those amateur codeshops' toil with XNA Game Studio aren't being shunted aside. Each enjoys a healthy profile, with artwork and options equivalent to full-price product, and while the lack of standards-body ratings is firmly disclaimed, the product description explains the peer-review verdict that preceded each upload. In Netters' case, it's Violence 0/3, Sex 0/3, Mature Content 0/3 (which seems like a missed opportunity to us, but okay).

Away from the Marketplaces, there's the My Xbox series of panels, which is a more comprehensive suite of personalised panels closer to the old dashboard functions than Spotlight. There's tray management and your gamercard again, the game library (with its recent games list and options for deeper browsing), video, music and picture libraries (with a photo-sharing application scheduled for launch later), and Windows Media Center and System Settings access. Johnson (him again!) told us that NXE supports all the same video and audio codecs as its predecessor.

Viewing your gamercard and the profile options accessed within, you can head into the Avatar customisation suite (designed by Rare, remember), and it's about time to head that way before we move on to the new Friends street channel. Avatars have arguably overcome the "Mii too" stigma of their introduction at E3 this summer, and accusations of commercialisation are wide of the mark so far. Wardrobe options are relatively limited (for instance, you can't change the colour of clothing items), but if the goal there is to force you to go shopping with Microsoft Points then the shops are currently closed. Instead you can pick from reasonably varied options (and save off the ensemble), and play around with your face. Our experience here was mixed: Eurogamer designer Martin Taylor managed to capture his own likeness pretty quickly, but struggled to find the right combination of sleepy, crushed eyes, thick sloping brows and boring extremities that tell the story of my own decaying bonce, complaining that it's not possible to move individual facial features around (thanks), bemoaning the absence of stubble in the binary beards and wondering aloud whether the unisex catalogue of androgyny was the right call.

Then we settled upon some scary warpaint and all was well, and agreed there are some nice touches throughout. As well as previewing each option on the main character model - which takes up half the screen and can be spun and tilted with the right stick - as you manoeuvre through the catalogue of options for each feature the individual choices show how that crook of nose or bushiness of brow would appear on the face you've already composed. As you're probably tired of hearing, it's all very slick, and there's a breezy, affectionate sense of fun that these tools demand to evade sterility; taking a picture of your Avatar for a new gamerpic involves posing him or her for the camera, panning, zooming and snapping, and perhaps bonking its head on the lens or dizzying it with a few too many rotations beforehand. It's a pleasant experience.

The new dedicated Friends channel, though, is more likely to divide opinion, as individual friends appear in Avatar form in front of a 3D-esque background diorama informed by your choice of NXE Theme. The problem is that, while you can view and interact with friends easily enough, the immediacy of the old list format is lost and you're expected to gauge status based on physical demeanour, and navigate miles down to the road to reach those at the poor man's end of the alphabet.

Themes are also responsible for the graphical background to the whole NXE, with a few gentle starter themes to choose between along with the more imposing "Night". NXE is also compatible with existing themes, although their implementation varies. Some - generally those with a big, graphic centrepiece like Lara - are a satisfying presence beyond the main dash horizon, and their other graphics are pleasantly arranged around the various deep menus like the Marketplaces. Others, though, just look crap, as they struggle to wrap around interface decisions they were never designed to anticipate. We've been told by Microsoft that the old themes' original creators have the option of retrofitting them with appropriate updates, but how many publishers will agree to finance that when they can just churn out some new NXE themes instead and charge for them all over again remains to be seen. Although you can probably guess.