THA | Hamst3r.com

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the 2 week XBOX LIVE / Windows LIVE downtime. How it wouldn’t frequently become unavailable, not allowing people to connect and play their games. Yeah, that.

I signed up with Windows LIVE during this outage.

After several hours I was ready to uninstall Gears of War and bring it back as I couldn’t play the game every time I tried. It would never sign in, which meant it wouldn’t save my progress in the game. Great! Even once I finally got LIVE to sign in so I could play the game, it remained a pest.

Now that I’ve used it enough, I can see that LIVE is really just in-game IM chat. It has a message center, chat and your gamer stats profile. Woo Woo. It doesn’t even do anything cool like STEAM, such as allowing you to access your account and play your games from any PC…it’s not that kind of software…

…but here’s what it IS:

1. It’s an in-game chat program that prevents me from playing the game if it can’t sign in. Great.

2. It’s an in-game chat program that prevents me from playing online with my friends unless I pay a monthly subscription for a GOLD account. Fantastic.

3. It’s an in-game chat program that suffers from Consolitis, donning the XBOX gamepad buttons rather than a proper PC interface that utilizes the PC keyboard keys. The “Y” key creates a new message and “X” key will log me out of the LIVE service. That makes perfect sense on a PC…

As you can see, I’m using LIVE and dislike it greatly. I’m glad I only need to use it long enough to beat ACT 5 of Gears, then I can uninstall it and delete my account.