Windows Games Explorer

Starting with Vista, Microsoft has given us the rudiments of a way to organize our games on our PCs. A place where all of our games can be easily accessed. Great! Perhaps I'll be able to ensure that my machine is up to snuff for my games, or a way to help me troubleshoot the endless stream of problems that arise when trying to game on a PC?

Well, sort of. Like everything Microsoft, it seems, their "Games Explorer" is nice idea wrapped in a turd of an implementation.

I can add my own games links to it... though I have to do the leg work to find most games, because the GE fails more often than it succeeds at finding the games on my machine when I install them. And when I do add a game, chances are rather high that the wrong icon will be associated to it (see my rant on Program Files (x86)). And of course Microsoft didn't see fit to give me a way to edit my icons, say to fix the icon or to set start up options for my game (e.g. a command line option, many games do support them for power gamers or to avoid technical problems on some machines).

So, I have this place that is supposed to be a central launching point for all of my games, but it doesn't actually find my games, and manually adding them it generally does the wrong thing, with out recourse to correct its shoddy implementation.

Okay, well, maybe those short comings will be addressed in the next version of Windows... Windows 7. No. I'm running Windows 7 RC and I can tell you without a doubt that it still fails to detect most game installations, fails to provide basic interfaces to fix problems, fails to associate the right icon to the game in the first place, and provides no opportunities to customize the shortcut's behavior.

Hmm - well, maybe Microsoft would have thought to provide a central clearing house for ensuring that your video card is up to snuff, that the drivers are up to date, that Direct X is installed and up to date, etc, to help you be sure that your rig is configured properly to run the game your mouse is hovering over.

A reasonable set of features, a modest set of possibilities. So almost by definition then Microsoft comes to save itself from success and fails yet again.

No, there isn't any link or tools to see what version(s) of Direct X your machine is running. There's no diagnostics of any kind. What version of video driver do I have installed? Can't tell that from here. What version of Direct X does this game require? Nope, can't tell that from here either. There is a goofy number associated with each game that seems to supposedly refer to the minimum system requirements needed to play the game... the same sort of vague, poorly defined marketing bullshit that one finds on the side of the game box, that is so vacuous as to be useless to anyone but the most clueless consumer - say a 12yr old's mom trying to buy a game for him. To everyone else, these things are pointless.

But for the real stuff - the issues that get you messed up regularly when trying to play a game: Video drivers, Sound Card drivers, OS-Compatibility modes, and Direct X versions, there is absolutely no support. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Go fish. Sucks to be you.