I know this guy via the internet (okay, my Warcraft guild, commence "lol warcraft") who works for Microsoft. Nice guy, has a wife and kid, seems happy enough with his job that he's moving to Redmont to be "closer to the mothership" and cement his career with the company.

However, on the few occasions we chat about his job, I do get the impression that Microsoft is the victim of some serious managerial blunders simply because all the factions within the company are not communicating as well as they should be about things they should be.

I don't think this is exclusive to Microsoft or any kind of proof that the voodoo workings of various Open Source Shamans are finally bringing the company spiritually to its knees from within or anything; name me a giant monolithic company and I'll give you a minor planet's worth of people who can tell you how dicked over the whole thing is from the inside out. Still, the problem seems to be particularly rampant in Microsoft (as opposed to, say, Google) as they have a history of releasing a lot of stuff that either doesn't work, or only works by crippling half a dozen other things until the masses bang on pots and pans long enough to annoy them into fixing it via patch.

Add another one to the list.

See, apparently someone at Microsoft's Not-Gaming division saw how well this whole Xbox Live thing was going over at the Gaming Division and decided that hey, since some Xbox games were also coming out for windows, maybe we should have a Windows Live! You know, it'll be like the same thing where gamers can take their games on the internet and track each other's progress and stuff, and can act as an anti-piracy measure in the meantime! Even better, they can charge for it, just like an Xbox Live Gold Account!

That's right kids. Pay $60 a year to take your PC games online.

Yeah that's gonna go over real well with management who will surely catch the giant fucking flaw in the logic there right? I mean come on. The kids are gonna jump all over that one.

Apparently I'm just retarded for being sarcastic there however, as some cockwheel who probably makes more in one paycheck than I do in a year decided this was a fucking brilliant idea and the company went ahead with it. Now a bunch of PC games require it to run, even in Single Player -- Kane and Lynch and Gears of War immediately spring to mind.

Personally, while I think this is stupid as all fuck, I also sort of don't care. If some dude in MS got a paycheck because now I have to log into some other special account to play Xbox games on my PC, well, honestly? Whatever. As long as I can do it once, it never gets in my way, and I don't have to pay for it (and the paying part appears to be optional) I could honestly not care less.

People don't generally write blog entires about transparent things that work exactly as they should, though, so you can probably guess where I'm going with this!

I bought Gears of War PC yesterday, and returned it a couple hours later.

Do a Google search right now on "Gears of War" and "Crashes to Desktop". Or even better, check out the forums for the PC version of the game. Guess what totally-unnecessary-and-blatantly-money-grubbing program that Microsoft required Epic to include with the game prevents it from working at all?

That's right. Unless you fall into a veeeeeery narrow specification with your PC (such as using nVidia drivers that aren't even on nVidia's site for download anyone), congratulations! Windows Live will promptly crash your shiny new game to the desktop within a few seconds of starting a level. This is, of course, after the game itself loads and installs fine, and the only thing causing it is the Windows Live wrapper you're forced to install afterwards and load each time the game runs.

What the fuck, Microsoft.

This is a brutal failure on more levels than I have fingers to count them on, so fuck you! Make me load a staggeringly unnecessary program, and the watch with glee as that same program prevents me from playing the game I just bought. Awesome.

Last laugh's on me, though.

See this?



Yep, that's Gears of War, running A-OK.

All I had to do (and I shit you not) was track down a "patch" that was apparently coded by a Russian hacker, trust that it wasn't going to hijack my PC, steal my credit card number, and give me AIDS just for opening the .zip file, and then dump it in my Gears of War folder, which I hadn't bothered to delete yet.

Guess what? It worked! It completely crippled Windows Live and allowed the game to run perfectly without it. I just sailed through the first chapter and while things are a bit choppy, a fast scan of the reviews for the game say this is pretty common, and luckily the actual gameplay portion of it works fine.

After poking around the internet, it looks like a vast majority of the people who got the game were able to get it working by basically cracking it to run with no DVD, and this is despite a patch from Epic that was supposed to fix the problem.

So the best way to get Gears of War to work is effectively the same method one would use to steal it. Yay irony! Even better, the program that's basically there to (let's be honest here) prevent people from stealing the game is really only preventing people who actually paid for the game from playing it. Double Irony! Ultra Combo!