GFWL is Microsoft at its finest

[Goose]

Games For Windows Live, go fuck yourself with a rusty spork.

My buddy Achærn was generous enough to buy me a copy of Bulletstorm when it went on sale on Steam a while back.  Finally got around to attempting to play it tonight.  I say "attempt" because 40 minutes were spent trying to log in (and apply updates) to this godforsaken shithole of a game networking service with no luck.

First, Bulletstorm asked me to log in to the thing before even presenting me the option to choose a single-player offline game.  Fine, whatever.  I click through a couple screens of "Look how awesome GFWL is!", and get to a login screen.  Its asking for a Windows Live ID.  Ok, I have one of those, only ever really used it for MSN (or Windows Live Chat or whatever the fuck its called now), and signed up for it back when it was called a "Microsoft Passport", but hey, the thing has worked so far for every thing I tried to use it for.  Plugged in those credentials, hit login, downloaded an update very slowly, then got asked to close the game so that another ream of updates for GFWL could run.  Seriously?  Steam auto-updates games for a reason.  This shit couldn't have been included in a Steam update so I didn't have to deal with this shit?

Fine, whatever.  Close the game, one updater runs, then another, then another, each one of them triggering Windows' UAC prompt IN THE BACKGROUND, so unless I hit the glowing yellow icon that magically appears on my taskbar and allow the update to perform its update, the thing would've hung there indefinitely.  Oi.  Ok, updates applied, restart the game.

Get asked to log in to GFWL again.  Provide the same credentials again, it "downloads my profile" for a couple minutes, then prompts me for the "CD Key" for the game.  Steam gives this to you in a nice little window you can copy-paste in, so no issues there.  Hit Submit, wait more for my "profile to download" whatever that means, then get booted out of GFWL with an error message about LIVE being unaccessible, and possibly being down in my region.  Yeah right, that's not actually the case, and we all know it.

I hit a couple other buttons on the login screen, and get sent to a browser window at live.xbox.com.  Ok, maybe there's some jazz there to get this working.  Log in seems to go ok, and the site give me a "Manage Account Region" page, which will allow me to "upgrade to an Xbox LIVE free account".  Sure, whatever, GIVE ME MY FUCKING GAME.  Next, next, I Accept, "Uh oh, it appears you've found a glitch in the system", and it gives me five fields of debugging jibberish. WTF?

If I've deciphered this abstract business process correctly, there's a bug in the system that's preventing me from setting a region for my Windows Live ID to link it with GFWL through Xbox LIVE, meaning that when I try to log in to my game, I get booted because there's an invalid region associated with my account.  Ok, fine, fuck this shit, lets try a new account.  Signup is pretty painless with a different e-mail address, set a non-stupid Gamertag name, it logs in to GFWL in Bulletstorm... but the CD Key is used by my other account, so GFWL tells me to cram it with walnuts.

So, now my options are to try and e-mail Microsoft and maybe they can sort out my account, assuming whatever script monkey they've got working tech support could actually read an e-mail.  Or, I could sit on hold for an hour waiting for one of their reps to show up on live chat.  Or I could download a pirated copy of the game in about the same amount of time that WOULD ACTUALLY FUCKING WORK!!

Bulletstorm 2 was a possibility, but was cancelled early on.  One of the reasons cited was a high piracy rate.  WOW, I WONDER WHY THAT WAS?!