Hey everyone there is a new XBox Dashboard out and that means a number of things. Mostly it just means you can now flail wildly at your future Kinect device to navigate. The revamp also means that all those things you knew exactly how to find, are now somewhere else. But before I get too far into that, I’d like to take a second and complain about the actual interface.

First of all, aesthetically speaking, the user interface looks fine with one major acception, the cover flow. I’m sure the term coverflow is trademarked, so I’m probably wrong for calling it that. But you know whats not probably trademarked? Centering what you are currently looking at. I don’t really know whether it is just that the flattening of the objects in the line up is the major issue or what, but man it pains me to flip through it. It’s as if its motion tries to draw my eyes to multiple points at once and then induces projectile vomiting. Who knows, maybe projectile vomit will be how you select something with Kinect.

As big as my complaint is about the animations, the rest looks pretty good. I like the sharper edges, the new colors, and the new menu systems make the console feel a little less like a toy. All of which I think are some decent improvements. So now that we’ve got that out of the way, lets move on to whats really mathing wrong with this thing shall we?

Here is both literally and figuratively my biggest question:

Why does the dashboard look as it was designed from start to finish by a marketing department.

This thing is obviously rigged to sell you shit. It has even thrown out the window convenience in order to do so. Lets give an example. When you go to the Game Marketplace, what do you get? You definately don’t get a list of subcategories that let you hop right into Arcade Games, Digital Distributed Retail Games, Indie Games, or Avatar Games. The service, which you are paying for by the way, instead kicks elegance to the curb and tries to shove advertisements down your throat.

*takes off glasses dramatically*

“This post is supposed to be about XBLIG isn’t it?” You’re absolutely right, and I’m getting to that. The 800 pound pile of gorilla shit in the room is the XBLIG placement. This is the real reason I’m foaming at the mouth here people. Fine, Game Marketplace leads to ads, that then lead to a listing of Game Marketplace stuff. THe problem is now, “so where is the XBLIG Marketplace. It isn’t up with Arcade, On Demand, and Demo games in the no brainer location titled Games. Where did it go? Oh, it’s buried under the completely uninteresting and seemingly unrelated category title of “Specialty Shops.” Here it is nestled securely between the Avatar Marketplace(which shouldn’t exist) and the secondary marketplaces for specific games such as Lips and Rockband.

So I suppose now the main question is, why does Microsoft not want XBLIG to succeed? And what exactly do they mean when they say “Special.” I mean I’ve played one too many games based on firing babies out of vaginal cannons to think the XBLIG is fully competent in cognitive faculties. But there are some serious games in there that deserve to be placed in the Games section, where all games on Xbox should be.

I guess I should at least leave you on a fairly positive note, so I will mention that at least the Newest and Top Rated lists now extend for aproximately a mile. That will at least prolong some exposure for good games that seem to fall off them too fast. That is of course assuming anyone ever finds the marketplace again.