Games For Windows Live Rant

After setting up Dark Souls: Prepare To Die, which I am enjoying very much and will write about a little later after I die a few more dozen times, lol, and remember to get a screen shot.  I am making progress which is very satisfying.   Most of the early deaths were due to not being familiar with the gamepad after so many years of not using one, and luckily I already had a 360 gamepad that I bought last year for another game and never used so I didn't have to go out and buy one.

All the later deaths are because the game is brutally unforgiving, which I'm loving, the combat is awesome and I need to practice more.

BUT I'm about to have a raging apopleptic fit over Games For Windows Live.

GFWL...doesn't even deserve it's full title.   What a rage inducing piece of crappy software.  Many people hate STEAM but I'd have that any day than the debacle I went through with Live.  In fact I've never had a problem with STEAM and I've used it since the Half Life days.

OK, so I install the game and have to setup a Live account which I knew the game would have but wholeheartedly wish it didn't.  I really wanted the game so I'm not complaining about not knowing about it beforehand.

The login is your email address which is pretty easy you would think, but no, it wouldn't accept that and kept telling me either my email or password was incorrect.   I tried more than half a dozen times until I discovered it wouldn't accept my email address which is from the largest ISP in Australia for heaven's sake.

So I had to change it to my Yahoo address which was accepted.   I then get an email at said Yahoo address to verify the email so when I try to do that I get a blank page OR a Live page saying there's a problem and "Try again later."  Later is two days ago with several attempts until I finally searched Google and found out how to get them to send me another confirmation email, which actually worked.

Stupidly, I ticked the boxes to auto log me into the game so I don't have to enter the details every time and now when I start the game I see another person's user name flash by at the top of the screen and I seem to be logged as that person in the game.  I cannot find out how to change the auto login for the game despite extensive searching and the Live help files don't say anything about it.  I can login to the Live site with the correct details but can't change that bit, so who bloody knows.

When I get over my rage I MIGHT reinstall the game although I don't want to and see if that fixes it, but I'm not hopeful.

Edit:  Sorted this out or at least found out it is my account but not the user name I provided.  At least I can play the game so I suppose it's something. 

This is THE last game I will ever buy with GFWL no matter how much I want it.   I'm going to try and setup an offline account which will probably mess with my saves but I'm not that far in so I can live with it as long as I can actually save offline.