Friends

Avatars are back to amuse (haunt?) you in the Friends section. Friends are now grouped by parties, and in each party, there's box art telling you what game is being played.

Parties themselves are new to the Xbox 360. If you've ever played through a series of games with a group of friends pre-NXE style, then you'd know just how painful it was maintaining an uninterrupted group chat and managing game invites. The parties feature alleviates the pain by allowing a party host to invite members, and then jump from game to game seamlessly, while chatting away without interruption. This feature happens to be the one I appreciate most out of all that NXE has to offer.

Game Marketplace

The old Xbox Live Marketplace interface simply could not sustain the growth in content over the past three years. Browsing through hundreds of games was nothing short of slow and frustrating. Fortunately, NXE offers a solution that is both graphically-rich and easy on the thumbs.

Browsing by letters? No problem.

Browsing by title and box art? Sure.

Full-screen eye-candy? Yes, please.

Video Marketplace

The Video Marketplace is much of the same story. If you want Bond in high-definition and in full-screen, you got it.