It was silly of me, I know now. When I buy a PC game I expect it to function like the console games I have become so used to in the past 5 years. I got a game off Steam at the weekend to try with a friend, since it was half price. I made sure the game had downloaded, so I’d be ready to go. I had an hour to spare, so I thought I’d give it a shot tonight. It is now half an hour later. The game has gone through a five-part initialisation, and then told me I needed to log in with my XBox LIVE account to play this Windows LIVE game. Okay. No problem. Then it told me that LIVE needed to be updated. Okay, do it.

Then the game restarted after a short delay, and I was prompted to sign into LIVE again. Coulda sword I checked the “just automatically sign me in” box, but okay. I signed in again. Another patch was needed. A bigger one. Then, it restarted and asked me to sign in again.

Through gritted teeth, I did so. “downloading your profile…”, accompanied by a very slow progress bar. It is just finishing now as I type this, 40 minutes after I sat down to play.

These kinds of delays were okay when I was 20 year old geek, but I don’t really have the time to waste now that I’m a 32 year old geek and have accumulated responsibilities. No wonder no one plays games on these things anymore.