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by kivlad 1250 days ago
This remains a hotly contested topic. Not the overall interface, because that seems to be well-liked. Rather, "Was the blades UI fast?" Some say yes. Others complain about the guide taking longer than 10 seconds to appear while in-game. It could be that there's a lot of conflicting opinion between those who view it through nostalgia and those who remember their experiences when it was the de facto UI. Sure NXE had areas where execution speed certainly wasn't fast, but in terms of perception I'd argue there could be something said about the UI elements being more spaced out and feeling "further away" with the paradigm they went with.

Oh, and the blades definitely had ads. Maybe not as many as future interfaces, but I'm not sure why people say it didn't.
2 comments
WorldMaker 1250 days ago
Beyond nostalgia, I do think the Blades were never quite as fast as people remember them being. They were designed extremely well including some brilliant flashy animations that I think were very cleverly designed to give the illusion of speed and fast movement in just the precise way to build a nostalgia for their "speed" after the fact. I think that's precisely why there are so many conflicting opinions between nostalgia goggles and people that remember real experiences on slow WiFi playing multiplayer Xbox Arcade games from full hard drives while streaming some music from a Windows Media Center somewhere else in the house. There were definitely all sorts of cases when you'd hit slowdowns and hiccups in the Blades UI and the animations just let you down at that point.

(ETA: Also, I think some of people's nostalgia is affected by they may not have even had the full hard drives of games and apps and huge active Xbox Live friend lists and such like that until the NXE or later anyway, which is another interesting bias to consider.)

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2OEH8eoCRo0 1250 days ago
Show them to me. I don't recall any.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxtMii5UKVQ

Notably, it doesn't launch you onto a screen with ads at boot. Marketplace is tucked to the furthest left so you'll only go there if you want to.

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kivlad 1249 days ago
The person in the video mentions it's not connected to Xbox Live. Here's an example I found that has 2 ads in the "Xbox Live" tab as well:

https://i.imgur.com/B983dJf.jpg

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WorldMaker 1250 days ago
Before you even get to the Marketplace blade, the Xbox Live blade was an entire upsell blade if you weren't paying for Live. Depending on your opinion of "ads", that counts for some people as a giant ad. (I don't entirely agree with that sentiment myself, but it is something I've been asked to train myself to see.)

(ETA: In a similar vein, the bright logo of Windows Media Center in the Media tab would look like an ad for an upsell to many.)

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