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The GFWL curse has been defeated.

morPR

PRmeister
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Games For Windows Live.

Two years back Game Fly had just purchased Direct2Drive whom I previously bought Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy and a collection of Final Fantasy XI expansions.

I bought several games from them... including Batman: Akrham Ayslum (B:AA) Game of the Year edition (GOTY) , Batman: Arkham City (B:AC) regular version, Torchlight, and Lord of the Rings: War in the North. (All for about five bucks each.) Anyway, I was happy to find out WitN and Torchlight were Steam games so they were quick to download over there.

From Amazon, I purchased boxed copies of Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition (SSFIV:AE), Dead Rising 2, and Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. Again for 5 bucks each.

This was during a phase called "Games for Windows Live" (GFWL) which was the worst kinda Digital Rights Management thingies I ever came across. You'd buy a game and there were several digital hoops you had to jump through to get the game to activate properly. One such piece of idiocy is that you had to login on GFWL to play with the complete roster of SSFIV:AE. If you weren't (the program meant to determine you being online and for connecting to their server often wouldn't work) you had to pick only about eight characters in a trial mode.

For the Dead Rising games, the problem was something called "Zero Day" something or other designed as an attempt to verify you were playing the game AFTER the release date and hadn't pirated it ahead of time. I had the impression the games were at least a year old but this precaution was still in effect. You would install the games, and one lousy windows popped up saying it had to verify something with the GFWL servers. Most of the time this windows blinked once without bothering checking anything and then the next screen said it doubted you were connected to the internet because it couldn't connect to GFWL servers.

Try and look up a website for this service and you are refered to Xbox.com. I'm not kidding. Microsoft got lazy and merged their PC download service with an Xbox website for purpose I dont' know. The phone number for tech support was very well hidden online. If you did manage to call, you were lucky to find a tech support agent who understood your problem was with a PC game not an Xbox 360 one.

So anyway, I got fed up. I haven't bothered counting how many emails I had to send around to Gamefly, to Warner Bros, and to Microsoft. I'm cutting this one short here.

Anyway, huzzah, GFWL is shutting down. Capcom very kindly allowed a "Redemption" of old SSFIV:AE registration codes onto Steam BUT none of their other GFWL games. :( Square Enix also redeemed the two Batman games I purchased on Steam as well, even being generous enough to upgrade vanilla B:AC into GOTY version!


Oh well, as for the two DR2 games, I managed to get past the zero day crud while installing DR2 (maybe because I have a fresh install of XP???) but it won't sync with my Windows handle because I let my friend register it to his instead. Guess I'm going on Amazon and seeing if they come up dirt cheap again... sighs....
 
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