Additional Fall Update details uncovered
Coming straight out of a Microsoft Japan held press conference are new details about what features will be included in the December 4th Fall Update. All the information is in Japanese (and we forgot our Japanese translator at home), but thanks to Engadget Japan's own Ittousai we've got all the goods. And yes, there's more to the Fall Update than just Xbox Originals and Friends of Friends. Click through to the break to get learnified ...
Among the new Fall Update features is new dashboard navigation (applause!). The 360's "Game" blade is seeing a mini-reworking removing the "Xbox Live Arcade" option and replacing it with "Game Library". Under the new "Game Library" option you'll be able to navigate all your XBLA games, demos and recently played games in "twist" navigation. If you aren't familiar, the twist navigation scheme can be seen on the current Video Marketplace (or in the screenshot above) and is basically horizontal scrolling that breaks down content by genre, categories, etc. And you better get used to the twisting scheme, because it'll be the navigation method of choice, especially in the XBLM.
Speaking of the Marketplace, it too will see a makeover with the top level's options being narrowed down to "Recommended Content", "What's New", "Game Store", and "Video Store". Under those categories, navigation of the XBLM will be laid out in the new twist format accordingly. See, twisting is all the rage!
Finally, two other features will go live when the Fall Update gets released including a new "Personal Profile" section. This new section will be viewable on a person's gamercard and will allow approximately 500-1000 text characters to write a mini-biography, favorite links or anything a person chooses. It's very MySpace-esque and is aimed at going hand-in-hand with the new Friends of Friends feature. And the very last (and possibly most exciting) feature that'll be coming next week is the ability to delete XBLA demos off of your games played list. W00t! We're not sure if it'll be a network wide deletion or if you'll have to select each demo to remove, but it's coming and we know a LOT of gamers wanted to erase those nasty XBLA demos from their games played history.
That's about it for new Fall Update features and if you're the adventurous type, make the jump to either Impress or Famitsu to read about their Fall Update experiences. That is, if you have the ability to read Japanese.
[Via Joystiq]
Read - Impress (Japanese)
Read - Famitsu (Japanese)
