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     I definitely like the new avatars. They're clearly ripping off the Mii concept, but they do it so much better--the look of Avatars is better, the animation is more convincing, and overall, they're just more polished. (Of course, the XBox has better graphics capabilities and they've had a year to catch up.) Now, whether I'll get tired of the whole Avatar concept once the "new" has worn off, I don't know.

     Here's mine:
     www.dylanwolf.com/.../dylan-xbox-avatar.png

     I'm not quite sold on the new XBox interface yet. As I'm not a Netflix subscriber, I don't really see anything I couldn't do before. I'm going to have to get acclimated to where they've moved everything first.
  

     OMG! The first thing I thought when I saw the new set up is how did they get away with ripping off the WII!
     I have to say for that I am very disappointed in xbox. Addidionally, I think that with this new feature of being able to download games onto the HD we are going to experience a greater occurance of lag during Halo. I could be wrong, I haven't played enough to really know yet. And, I hate all the clutter I now see on my dashboard... despite the many new usefull featured added, but I think its just me. Tom and I totally look just like our avitars though and I will say it is fun to know the people on our friends list will be able to know what we look like.
  

     As for the new Xpereience, I have to say that I am pretty happy with it.  I know that it is a little more 3-D-ish, which does tend to make things look more cluttered.  However, it has alot more potential than the blade system.  For instance, what does XBox do if they want to add a new category (or even let you make custom categories) to your item groupings.  The blade system had very limited potential.  The new Xpereience reminds me quite a bit of the Vista / Media Center look and feel.  It takes a little getting used to, but I think it is a bit more intuitive once you get there.

     @Virginia - In regards to saving games to your HD, you will actually see better performance.  Typically, the read speed of a hard drive is much better than that of a disk.  Playstation realized this when they started making "disc installs" of core game features to the PS3 hard drive.  Looks like XBOX is ripping Sony off a bit here, but taking it to a higher level.  Check out:
     gizmodo.com/5060689/xbox-360-dvd-vs-hard-drive

     Now, will this increase / descrease lag time for Halo?  Probably not.  More often than not your bottleneck w/ Halo is your bandwidth.  I would be very surprised if you will see any difference in the lag, but load times could potentially be better, assuming that everyone is playing from HD.

     As for ripping off the Wii, yeah they did, lol.  But, if you have to rip someone off, you might as well make it much better.  So far, I feel that M$ has a much better redition of the Xii's and I am far happier w/ the look of my Xii than my Mii.  The interesting part is to see if XBOX will show the level of integration of the Xii's into the games. Already, you see some integration with their online games (such as UNO).

     All in all, I think it is an improvment, but something that many of us will have to get used to.

     Here's my Xii:
     avatar.xboxlive.com/.../avatar-body.png

  

     Well, since you asked . . .

     www.tnhunting.com/.../avatar.jpg
  

You're right it looks just like you.

creativity-online.com/work/view?seed=5e32d548

     sorry about that, the post posted before I was done typing ??
     Tom asked me to forward the link above, he thought youd get a kick out of it!