I decided to install Batman: AA this morning, figuring I'd start playing my massive backlog of games before I bought any more. To actually install the game took less than 10 minutes, to get it working took nearly 45 minutes of teeth-clenching annoyance and frustration- all thanks to GfWL. Bare in mind this is all on a fresh install of Win 7 Professional as well, supposedly the best OS for gaming ever.

To start with, it told me to sign in to GfWL otherwise I wouldn't be able to save my games; God knows why, this is a single player game. Anyway, I sign in with my Hotmail address, which I'm assuming is the one I'd previously used for GfWL games- it's been a while since I played one, thank God. It then tells me that it needs to download my profile- I don't care about my profile, my stupid fucking GamerScore or what arbitrary achievements I may or may not have for doing dull things within a game.

Anyway, it presumably finds my profile, then tells me it needs to update itself. Five minutes later, it dumps me back to the desktop where it patches my GfWL executable after I click through a few screens. The game comes back up and I have to sign in again, despite me telling it that I wanted to do so automatically when I originally signed in. This time, I get an error and I realise that, contrary to just about any other program going where you need to click in a textbox, merely moving the mouse over the password box makes it active and I typed my email address into it by mistake.

Anyway, it presumably finds my profile, then tells me it needs to update itself. Five minutes later, it dumps me back to the desktop where it patches my GfWL executable after I click through a few screens. The game comes back up and I have to sign in again, despite me telling it that I wanted to do so automatically when I originally signed in... wait a sec, I've just fucking done this. And yes, the exact same thing happens again.

This time I Alt-Tab out of the Loop of Doom and shut down the game. I go to here, where it tells me that if I have an XBox Live account, I can just download the GfWL software. Err, I don't have an XBox Live account or even an XBox, but I take a punt on it and download and install it.

Restart the game, sign in yet again as it still won't remember my email and password despite asking it to do so four times previously. Please wait while I download your profile... Aha, now the game needs an update, there's progress. Maybe I can just have a quick play without it and apply the update later. Nope, it threatens to sign me out of Live if I don't update. That's friendly. So I sit there for another ten minutes while the update progress bar creeps along the screen; it finally gets to the end and I lean forward ready to play.... no, fuck you, all it's actually done is download a patch not apply it, I need to wait even longer while it pitches me back to the desktop and I click through screens while it patches itself.

Finally, I'm in, aside from having to sign back in to Live of course, it'd be too much for it to remember me as I've only signed in and told it to remember five fucking times so far.

Now, I'm wondering what benefit has having GfWL on Batman: AA has given me? It couldn't update itself properly and I had to break out of a seemingly endless loop and download the update myself. It didn't auto-patch itself, as I had to click through a few screens. It's a single player game so it offers me no online functionality whatsoever. It just pops up within the game without me asking it to and is incredibly unfriendly and non-standard compared to other Windows software. I can't even launch games directly from the client and it has no record of what other games I've played that also use GfWL. The client does offer a marketplace, but there are very few games on there and they're very expensive.

Contrast this with Steam which keeps all my games and itself up to date with no fuss or drama, lets me use its overlay in-game or switch it off as I want and lets me play and, rather importantly save, my games offline, syncing them back to the cloud if necessary when I next go online.

Microsoft are light-years behind and falling further back every month. If they put as much effort into GfWL as they have into the XBox money pit, then they might stand a chance. As it is, I have absolutely no faith in their client or support and will actively avoid buying any further GfWL games, it's just not worth the hassle.