Belated Xbox 360 Winter Dashboard Update Review

See this face? This Is "AceyBongos" - Microsoft's new corporate shill and face of their new "Inside Xbox" function, on the dashboard's front page.

And I already want to punch him repeatedly in his smug, hamster-like, achingly lifestyle face.

You see... If I want to know what's coming out and when, and all the news, I have this wonderful thing called "The Internet". It uses exactly the same technology as the 360 does to display its "News", but I don't have to look at Aceybongos telling me how "great" everything by Microsoft is, and I can choose to get my info from somewhere a little more nonpartisan, with a nice sprinkle of cynicism thrown in.

He's also got a link to his site on UK:R, which means Zorg's reputation is falling even lower by the day.

This is not the only annoying thing about the new update, either. There seems to be a few things here or there that are just far more "niggly" than they used to be.

The separate Game Demo section of the dash has now been integrated with XBLA and the new Xbox Classics downloads, and redubbed "Games Library" - Not a bad thing but poorly implemented. After entering the library you now are faced with a huge unfiltered list of everything playable you have ever downloaded onto your hard drive, which you then have to manually filter using what could be almost narrowly described as a "Cross Media Bar Rip-Off".

On the bright side, it now has DivX, support, so we can all stream pirate videos we've downloaded off the Internet.