5 Tweaks Sony Should Make to the XMB
The XMB on the PS3 is a very different animal than the Xbox 360 Tabs or Avatar interface. The XMB is an entity of pure function. It’s easy to grasp and easy to navigate. At launch it was rather plain and feature lacking, but over the years Sony has steadily improved on it. They added themes, picture galleries, information bar, support for flash, the list goes on. There are a couple of minor features that are so obvious they just make you wonder why the hell Sony didn’t include them. Here they are in no particular order.
1. Launch straight into Home
All of home’s features are buried beneath a plethora of screens, menus, button clicks, and download wait times. You often cruise past a feature in the XMB on the way to the Home icon, just to use a slightly better version of that same feature in Home. Home would be more appealing to more gamers if you could set it to started loading, hands free, after the initial Sony screen.
2. Separate buttons, sounds and backgrounds
There are a ton of good themes for the XMB both free and for micro payments. Some have really nice buttons, or beautiful backgrounds, or audibly pleasant sounds. Unfortunately most themes don’t have a consistent quality across all three features. The Bioshock theme has some wonderful backgrounds, but the button noise is annoying. The Uncharted theme has some wonderful buttons but crappy backgrounds. Out of all the themes only Pixel Junk Monsters has a button noise that doesn’t grate the nerves after a couple weeks. It would be nice if Sony let us pick and chose what buttons, backgrounds, and sounds we wanted. Sure you can download them to a PC and recombine them if you wanted to but that is more effort than should be needed.
3. The ability to pick one of the backgrounds out of the rotating selection
Much like above, many themes come with rotating background images of varying quality. Take Overlord for example. It has a good 7 images to choose from, too bad only one or two of them are worth looking at for any amount of time. The Bioshock premium theme is another good example. All of the pictures are good, but it has one or two that are simply amazing. If we could just pull the image we like or at least stop the rotation it would take us a lot closer to full user customization.
4. Turn off game/movie backgrounds and music auto load
If we were to be putting these in order of least to most wanted, this one would be number one. What point is it to pay for a premium theme if 3/4 of the buttons on the XMB change the background? What’s worse is the music and/or sound effects. Take the office PS3. It has the following titles installed. Bionic Commando Rearmed, Puzzle Fighter, Warhawk, and Grand Turismo. Nothing makes us want this feature more than the piercing red background of Bionic Commando, the epileptic seizure inducing Puzzle Fighter, or the war cadence for every FPS out there. Grand Turismo wouldn’t be bad if it consisted of more than two notes. They are not all bad. Flow and Flower have very soothing backgrounds and sounds. Too bad we can’t keep them there permanently.
5. More Avatars
There simply isn’t enough images to choose from. Instead of finding that one crazy picture that makes you stand out on someones friends list, you instead have to find the lamest one. The ability to make your own avatar with your images, and not the crappy pictures from the PS Eye would be best. If Sony can’t give us that how bout a couple dozen every update? you would think this moot with the launch of Home, but you only have to read what we think about Home.
good points, the music onthe games u listed blares out of my surround sound so much i usually leave it down until i start to play a game. minor tweaks indeed but nice ones
6. A small mail notification icon on the bottom right corner of the screen if there is an unread message from someone on the friends list.
I think there needs to be a universal volume for Game background music. Like Spookula said, some are UNBELIEVABLY loud!
Fallout 3 for instance is about twice the volume of the actual game. That’s retarded. (typical of Bethesda, I know.)
Good list.
Another point on where you talked about picking an image out of rotating backgrounds, it would be good to make your own rotating background from your own pictures.
Number 2 and 5 would be really great!
you know what would be perfect.
if the ps3 booted into home instead of thr XMB and was just as fast.
that way you could use all of homes features stright away instead of wating 5 minutes.
and you can launch most games from there to.
another XMB feature we need is to take a in game photo and use it as your back ground.
and another use a theme for the icons but have the back ground seperate.
like the KZ2 themes ive downloaded have nice icons but crappy back grounds.
Nick,
You can already do that. After you apply the theme you like(for it’s buttons, sounds, etc) you can change the wall paper to any photo you have on the system.
I wish they move the controller battery gauge off the time and date, and instead of a battery gauge, show controller’s battery life in percent form.
That’s a picture of a psp XMB =\
I realize that. but it was bright blue, pretty, and close enough.
1. Haven’t played ‘Home’ yet, but mostly cuz I didn’t know where it was, I believe they should raise Home to a higher area on the XMB, If they want it to be used a bit more.
2. As Jeff stated above, can already change the wallpaper/theme separately. (I do this constantly, Resistance2 Chicago Theme, and whatever random background). Think you might be able to play with sounds as well, just haven’t tried.
3. Just avoiding this one all-together.
4. Agree totally.. Have you ever turned it on to ‘Snakeball’ Blasting.. -shudder-
5. I’ve had the same avatar since day on that suites me perfectly, though I’m not sure about ‘custom’ avatars. (How many twelve year olds would have indecent material?). Definitely a wider selection though, I’ve had to settle on ‘Clank’ since day one.
**Claus is a genius.. They should have a mail notification thing, rather then a message that I -always- miss while playing.