Recently, Microsoft released part one of their fall Xbox360 dashboard update preview to a limited group of gamers that applied for early access. I was lucky enough to get selected for what is ostensibly a two week jump on the rest of 360 owners. The update will hit for everyone else on August 11.

Before I delve into what this update includes, there are some notable features announced at E3 this year that the first half of the fall tweaks does not include. Most notably absent are Twitter, Facebook, and Last.fm compatibility along with the highly touted Zune-branded 1080p video streaming service. These are all set to be put into place in the second round up updates later this fall. I was pleased however, to find that many new features have already been implemented.

When I was a kid, I was never much into watching basketball, with football being the sport that captured my imagination. Sure, I was sort of into watching the Dallas Mavericks (I was living in Dallas during my formative years) but I was rarely more than a casual fan. So, when it came to a choice of what sports game to buy with my hard earned lawn mowing and chore money, it was a no brainer: Madden. But things changed when I played NBA Jam for the first time. I only understood the bare bones of the rules and strategies of basketball and knew very few of the players. Even at twelve years old, I knew that the craziness of breaking the backboard, heating up, and the general fast pace of the video game hardly resembled real basketball. But it didn’t matter, because as the casual fan I was, it was the gameplay, not the accuracy of the simulation, which grabbed me. So it was that NBA Jam has the distinction of being the only non-football sports game I’ve ever bought.