Japan Gaming Guide

Oh dear, oh dear.

You know how the Xbox 360 let’s you change the interface language? Well now it doesn’t – at least not fully. Although some marketplace content and advertising was in Japanese prior to this update, it’s almost all been switched to Japanese. More worryingly, some of the guidance text that tells you which buttons do what has also been changed, leaving non-Japanese speakers potentially unable to download and use the marketplace entirely.

Language settings are of critical importance to foreign gamers in Japan and the new Xbox experience leaves the Playstation 3 as the only real choice for anyone wanting an English friendly console. Let’s hope this isn’t a taste of things to come, and is fixed in future updates.

The headline feature of the update is the new avatars. Like Nintendo’s Mii’s, the avatars allow you to create a little cartoon persona to represent you in games that support the feature. Unlike the Mii’s, however, the avatars are rather charmless. It’s a blatant lift of Nintendo’s concept and has been executed with no real skill. You can almost see the team of marketing men ticking boxes at the design meeting – desperate to capture a slice of the ‘casual’ game market, but the result seems clumsy and uninspired. Nintendo still rules the roost when it comes to cuteness and accessibility. If Microsoft wants to expand into that territory it needs to do much better than this.

On a more positive note the interface is a little streamlined, the new party feature is good, allowing you to move between games with friends more easily. Games can be installed to the hard drive making things much quieter and reducing loading times in most cases – something that should become more pronounced as developers take advantage of the feature. There’s also a quick-launch feature that allows you to switch between games with a few button presses. Great for those with attention spans as short as ours.

There were some connection troubles as the update was roled out but those seem to have resolved now – not so those poor gamers who found the update bricked their console and gave them the all too familiar three red rings. The Japan Gaming Guide 360 was spared that, at least, although since it’s third breakage was only a couple of months ago we’re still keeping our fingers crossed.

All in all we’re quite dissapointed by the update. It seems to have been designed by the Microsoft suits rather than by gamers and takes away almost as much as it offers.

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