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Xbox LIVE’s Major Nelson recently posted the Xbox 360 Comic-Con press release to his Twitter feed, teasing that the release also reveals the date for the latest Dashboard update (which G4’s news blog The Feed had scooped him on by several hours, but I digress).

Coming in this latest update, which drops August 11, are several new features: 

  • The ability to watch Netflix movies in a party with your LIVE friends, which was initially announced to have already come with the "New Xbox Experience" update last November;
  • The ability to manage your Netflix Instant Queue from the 360 itself, as opposed to a PC;
  • The upgrading of picture quality of downloaded movies to 1080p;
  • The addition of Games On Demand, which adds a selection of full retail release 360 games as direct downloads;
  • And last but most pointless, an Avatar Marketplace where you can buy virtual clothes and toys for your Xbox LIVE Avatars.

 I’m not surprised that Microsoft has gone the route of selling things that people can use to play dress-up on their virtual dolls with – after all, as we have seen, us gamers will buy just about anything if we think it looks cool (*insert overused horse armor reference here*).  I can’t pretend to be immune to this sort of stuff myself – I bought a couple of gamer picture packs back in the day, pretty much because the default offerings MS gave us were absolute crap – but avatar clothing seems to have reached new heights of pointlessness.

See, before the NXE came along, expressing yourself over LIVE wasn’t as easy as it was now – all we had were our gamer pictures and mottos, and those were very limited (one of my friends’ mottos is "21 characters isn’t enou").  But with the introduction of avatars, not only could we express ourselves through the style of the clothing we chose to put on them, we also had a surprising amount of control over what they looked like, allowing for much greater individual expression.  Do you make yourself, do you make a character, or do you just make some weird-looking freak because you can?  Either way, I haven’t seen two identical avatars yet.

 Adding name-brand clothing just seems unnecessary, however.  It smacks of materialistic grandstanding (which I’ve never quite understood), and I sincerely doubt there’s anybody who looks at their avatar and thinks to themselves, "Man, this thing would be so much better if I could only buy some Ray-Bans!"

Backing off from the negativity for a second, I’m all for the addition of game-related avatar clothing as unlockable rewards – after all, I still proudly display the N7 logo I earned for beating Mass Effect on Insanity as my gamer picture.  And if the only way I can get a set of Onyx armor for my avatar is to buy it…well, let’s just say my righteous annoyance will be severely tested.

 

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