amers are a fickle lot. As good as things are now on the console front, there is definitely room for improvement. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of our biggest peeves, potential tweaks and suggestions for each of the three console manufacturers. From interface additions to in-game features, nothing was off limits. It’s not like we have to foot the bill, anyway. Read through them, think it over and then let us know what you’d like to see. Send us your suggestions, and we’ll incorporate them in a future readers’ wish-list feature.

We wrap up our three-part series with a look at Microsoft. The company recently released its fall update, which added a slew of changes to the Xbox 360. Best of all, several of the things it changed and added addressed complaints that users had been grumbling about for a long while. That’s not to say Microsoft can kick back and take it easy now—we have even more demands, including a couple that have been bugging us for nearly two years.

User customized blade
The current blade system is pretty slick, with each one representing a facet of Xbox Live—the Marketplace, Games, Media, etc. There’s one critical component missing, though: the user. We’d be pleased as punch to get our own individual blade, as kind of a home base for the entire Xbox Live experience. It would track played games and alert users when new DLC becomes available for those titles. A friends area would show what a few of your buddies are up to at any given time. The last game played or game currently in the drive would be given special attention, with the number of acquired achievements and icons for the last few displayed. Finally, a search bar would speed up Marketplace activity, so you could isolate every last bit of South Park content available on the site with a few button presses.

Here's what a user-customized blade might look like. 

Clan support, with chat
While the word “clan” might evoke images of hard-core FPS players, LAN parties and caffeine-fueled marathon sessions, adding clan support to Xbox Live would benefit gamers of every stripe. While players can easily keep track of their friends online, it gets trickier once more than a couple of friends log on together. The 360 supports one-on-one voice chat, but what happens when you have a group of friends on? Bouncing between channels gets real old, real quick. We’d like to see dedicated clan support, with the ability to have voicechat between multiple members, have easy-to-maintain messaging support and other goodies. While talking with random strangers is fine and dandy in games, sometimes you just want to chill with your friends and talk about your day. Clan support would be a much-needed step toward that goal. Supporting the Xbox Live Vision camera would be icing, as well.

Larger friends list
The 100-friend limit was already holding some users back, and with Microsoft’s recent fall update we can imagine it’s only going to get worse. Being able to browse through the profiles of friends of friends is a nice idea, but once you reach the cap you’re out of luck. Why not increase the number to 200 or more? If Microsoft is serious about its social-networking functionality, they need to give people the room to actually be sociable.

Get an Achievement, unlock its icon as a Gamerpic
While we don’t discount the difficulty of creating Gamerpics—pieces of already created concept art don’t crop themselves—we do have a few problems with the way Microsoft is nickel and diming its audience. If a person has to spend money for Gamerpics from a game they own, something’s very wrong. Those consumers are essentially advertising the game, and they’re paying for the privilege. When you buy a game, you should automatically unlock Gamerpics. If that’s too much work for developers, consider this—every Achievement you unlock has an icon. That icon is about the same size as a Gamerpic. Give gamers the ability to use those icons as their Gamerpics, Microsoft.

Let's see what the Achievement icon looks like when you unlock it, too.

Decent music player
The 360 is the only console that requires custom-soundtrack support, and it also has arguably the worst music player of the bunch. Apparently, Microsoft was too proud of its trippy music visualizer to notice that users can’t rewind or fast-forward tracks. Come on. While we’re tinkering around with the music player, why not allow users to listen to their DRM-protected tunes on the 360? It’s a drag when half of your iPod’s playlist vanishes because you bought music from iTunes.