RCM Productions: Steam summer sale, DRM, and Games for Windows Live

As most PC gamers know the steam summer sale is now on providing most of us on the PC genre with a host of deals and goodies to take away. Me myself getting in on the action picking up the sequel to Bioshock (one of my all time favourite games).

This should be a tale of joy, me excitedly telling you of my joys of returning to that fabled place Rapture. But alas, all I have here for you is a tale of woe and Windows.

Hope you enjoy it....


Today was gunna be a good day

So after installing this puppy as soon as possible I sat down to play it, eager beaver status was achieved and I fired up Bioshock 2. Only to bear witness to one of the gaming worlds biggest nightmares rearing its ugly head once more...


Oh, shit...

DRM in singleplayer games on steam is bad enough, not being able to play any of the games I've paid for when my Virgin internet decides to shut down is already a punishment in itself. But nothing can truly compare to the horror of Games for Windows.

This client is something personally I cant stand, the clunkiness and the time spent literally going around in circles to do the simplest things such as trying to invite friends to a game or look at your achievements made me want to ram my face into a wall until the stupid stopped. But having not tangled with it since my Dawn of War 2 early days (before THANKFULLY, the franchise moved onto being hosted by steam) I thought.

"Ok, you wanna dance? Lets do this".

Knowing I have an account, I made sure to log in to the Windows live website first to check it was working and attempted to access my account through the ingame login screen only to first be met with. "Unable to download account, windows live service may be down".

"Ok, well its not, you know what nevermind. Run as administator!"

*log in again, same message*.

"Look Games for windows, I've just bought this please dont makes this Age of Empires: Online, hmmm, alright I've added your client to my firewall, and steam thus giving you both full access to my machine"

*Click, "Windows Live is unable to download your profile, please check the network status of Games for Windows Live".*

"SONOVA..., OK ok ok, I read somewhere that you can launch game for windows games through thier client marketplace program, I'll just download that mofo, launch it, log-in from there and hey presto!"

Easy.... or so I thought.

After fighting with the installation of the client and trying to boot it, only to be met with errors the first few times, I had managed to sell my soul to the devil to somehow help me and after some light swearing and a few admin rule changes we were back on track!