I've honestly never really cared about making my Xbox 360 my own technological mood ring, changing up the look to suit my mood or flavor of the week, but after receiving a limited edition Gears of War faceplate at E3, I soon found myself embracing this new look to my Xbox 360. Interestingly Nyko developed a Game Face kit, that allows you to create your own faceplates, so instead of having to wait around until someone gets around to making a faceplate you really want, now you can take the initiative and make it yourself.

The Nyko Game Face kit comes with a chrome-ish backing, a glossy and clear front, and between these two pieces you'll place your custom skins. The kit comes with six pre-done faceplate skins, consisting of one with red with white stripes, a targeted satellite map, a lava lamp, black with flames, a target, and camouflage; a few of the designs aren't too bad, but you'll probably want your own, which is where the fifteen blank templates come into play.

Before you get printing, you'll have to download the software from Nyko's website. The software presents to you what the shape and placement of the slots on the faceplate will be, and lets you add layers, clear layers, invert, blur, turn sepia, gray scale, transparent white, rotate, change the brightness and contrast, and scale up or down the picture so it better fits. Learning the ropes of the system takes a bit of getting used to, but what becomes the ultimate problem is all those stupid slots on the Xbox 360, as it is really hard to make something nice, whereas those slots won't get in your way and obscure your vision of your image. The program isn't too advanced, and is rather simple, but overall it is a good program with one major flaw – the image shifts from creation to printing. For instance, on the far left side of the faceplate on the side of the disc drive, I had it lined up perfectly so the image framed the disc drive, but after printing to paper everything had shifted and it wasn't exactly as I had put on the template. Printing an image that should be right but ends up wrong is a big problem.

The real problems, however, begin after the creation phase. For starters, it is almost impossible to print any real high quality image due to the limitations of your printer and the paper itself. The paper has a rough quality to it, and ends up leaving images dull and faded rather than popping like the ones people make for the system professionally. The paper does punch-out easily, but when trying to get it to fit in-between your sleeves it doesn't want to fit right and will instead bunch up. At this point, you just place the other layer on top and hope it flattens out, but I've had that process leave holes, tears, and warped wrinkles; from a distance the image doesn't look too bad, but when viewed up close you notice all the flaws.

Unlike the Gears of War faceplate I got, attaching the Game Face and removing it is a frustrating chore. For whatever reason the tabs don't want to grip onto the 360 in its proper place, and will usually require a hard shove or a lot pressure to get it firmly on. Removing it proves even more frustrating, as often times I ended up ripping off only the plastic cover and the skin, and would then have to try and pry my fingernails underneath the gray back, as it was usually gripped pretty tightly to my actual 360.

Nyko's Game Face is an interesting idea, but it needs some work done. Perhaps if you fiddled around with things you could produce a perfect faceplate, but it seemed like more work than one should have to put into the idea. For pure examination reasons, I worked a long time on finding pictures and centering them right so a Morgan Webb faceplate (viewable here) looked just right, which included scaling, proper placement, and even a bit of Microsoft Paint. After a good hour or two, it came time to printing, and the results looked terrible (fuzzy picture and such because of printing process) – the faceplate remained on the system long enough to take this picture. The Game Face does have a nice community on its site for people to share skins, but the actual product was ultimately too flawed for this wannabe faceplate designer to head that way for long. And what I hate most is I found this awesome faceplate on the site with a field of samurai swords stabbed into the ground, which would've looked amazing on my system, but I'm looking at it right now, and it looks so bad I don’t even want to bother with the hassle of putting it on. Ultimately, that is Nyko's Game Face problem.

Rating:
Our Scoring System