Xbox 360 Spring Update Launches

Microsoft has announced the release of their spring updates for the Xbox 360 console and Live service. Saying it’s just for Xbox 360 though would be not quite accurate.

With their latest release, anyone with a Windows Vista PC can sign onto Live and play the same games you’ve been falling in love with through the Xbox Live service.

Also included in this release is the ability to chat with friends with Windows Live Messenger through your 360 console. I’m not sure how much that intrigues me though as typing out messages via the provided interface is just to cumbersome for me. If I want to type messages to my friends, I’ll just move over to the computer and communicate that way. I consider the Xbox console to be used for gaming and live chatting with my friends.

Live members should also notice faster download speeds for the marketplace items they purchase and the free demos they try out. This was a real pain for me as one Saturday I pretty much queued up a few gigs of stuff to download and it took a number of hours to complete. A number of other dashboard feature updates are coming as well.

Lastly, they say they’ve enhanced the family settings. Things like who can contact who and defaults for safer communication is what they mention. The biggest family friendly enhancement they could make for me though is to strongly encourage game developers to enable a game’s setting feature to eliminate swearing and reduce or eliminate the amount of blood, gore and half-naked people that’s shown. I think it would be great for my son not to have the opportunity to have a very attractive, half-dressed snowboarder as his character for Amped.

Then again, it might be easier for them to just develop and release more family friendly games in the first place.