My Xbox

The "My Xbox" section offers easy access to your profile, game library, media library, and settings. Again, NXE taps into Marketplace content by displaying a large preview of the game sitting in your Xbox 360's disc drive, and also displaying box art representations of games in your game library - even Xbox Live Arcade releases. Unfortunately, previous-generation Xbox games aren't so lucky in this regard.

Profile and Achievements

NXE offers a new way to visualize your profile and game achievements. It's an absolute breeze flicking through the list... unlike the previous interface, which was a pain to navigate.

Oh, and you know those Xbox Live Arcade titles that you downloaded, but never ended up purchasing? There's now a way to purge them from your history, resulting in a cleaner and more accurate portrayal of the games that you own.

Game Installations

Microsoft has added support for optional game installations. This new feature copies the contents of your game discs to your HDD and allows you to play games entirely off the HDD to help reduce noise levels, load times, and pop-ins during gameplay (Halo 3 is an exception); although, the Xbox 360 still performs a disc check at the start of each gaming session - so, no, you can't pick up a game from your friend or your local rental store, install it, return it, and then play to your heart's content.

Most titles require 6-7GB. Multi-disc titles such as Lost Odyssey easily edge over the 20GB mark. If you have one of the old 20GB HDDs, then you may have room for one single-disc installation, depending on the amount of free space available. Otherwise, you'll probably want to acquire one of the bigger 60GB and 120GB HDDs, which I ended up doing recently with absolutely no regrets.