Microsoft Game Room is Shitty

If the first half of this article was a bit amusing, with its pithy cracked.com-style captions and all, then this half will turn decidedly darker. Coz Microsoft has really annoyed me on this one.

I decided to install Games for Windows - LIVE for some reason (alcohol probably). Then I went straight for any titles with the magic word: "FREE". And I found one, the so-called Game Room. This is an eclectic bunch of retro arcade-style games, bundled up into a single unit. These include the classic arcade cabinets, plus the venerable Atari 2600 and Intellivision consoles, and others. This set my old-school gaming bell a-ringing; without delay I punched the "Snarf" button and waited patiently for the 500 MByte download...

Wait... what? 500 megs? To run some mouldy old arcade games which originally fit into 8 kilobytes of memory? WTF??

You heard me, half a gig for this download. Granted, the program does portray the whole thing as a funky "virtual game room", complete with 3D renderings of various rooms, the old cabinets and WeeMee-style teenage loiterers. You can even theme each room and place random objects in your virtual arcade, like some kind of fullscreen YoVille.

It all looks cool... but what's with the chainsaw?

What theme palette would be complete without...

But we're not talking "Second Life" virtual here, or even "Sims" virtual; the texturing is basic. And it's not like you can walk through this virtual arcade at leisure; the sodding camera positions are fixed.

Don't get me wrong, it all looks very cool indeed. And there are a lot of extra features, like public leaderboards and opening your arcade to "friends" (*toot toot* here comes the social networking gravy train.)

But shit man, half a gig? What, did they give each virtual cabinet it's own copy of XP or something? This is bloatware gone absolutely haywire, and I mean Soviet N1 rocket haywire.

I'm reminded of the quip apocryphally attributed to Bill Gates some years back. You've all heard it. It's the one where he says like, "If GM kept up with technology like the computer industry has, a car would cost 25 bucks and get 1,000 miles per gallon." Bullshit! If GM made cars like computers running Microsoft software, they'd weigh 45 tons and need their own nodding donkey to run. And it's all Gates' f'king fault. (Disclaimer ;)

If cars keep pace with computers, this is how we'll all be travelling soon.

Oh but I forgot to mention, that 500 megs is just for a "virtual arcade" empty shell. It doesn't include any actual games. Hell if you wanna play something there are further downloads you must make, in the form is "packs". Each pack contains a few games, and is 50-90 megs in size.

For the second time today: WTF?? Each of these original arcade games comprises a measly ROM image mere kilobytes in size! What in the nine-levels-of-Hell are these idiots putting in to bloat it out 10,000-fold?

God only freakin knows. I think Game Room was cobbled together by a bunch of undergrads using .NET and a shitload of Red Bull.

"I predict by 2015 hard drives will be this small."

Ok point taken, this ain't 1995. Disk space is so dirt cheap, who gives a damn about it any more. Seriously, it probably costs more in instant coffee waiting a few minutes for the downloads to finish. With terabyte-size drives nowadays, 500MB represents a piddly 0.05%. So no problem there, really. After all, the games themselves are free, right?

Wrong. And here is where Microsoft is at its most despicable.

Yes, it is free to download the games. But to play the games you must pay up. After 590MB of download and an hour of installation time and tooling around with the dodgy interface, Microsoft kindly lets you play each game exactly once -- but after that you must cough up and buy it. They even show glittering virtual quarters to gently remind you of that fact. Congrats, Microsoft, that's a mighty f'king swindle you've cooked up there.

Purchase? But the man said "free"...

Ok, I get it... I think

Wait... didn't I just "buy" this thing?

 Clearly Microsoft is using Richard Stallman's definition of "Free", or possibly Kim Jong-Il's.

It'd be nice if Microsoft bloody-well specified this "free ain't free" policy before I wasted my precious time on the product. Granted, each game pack only costs a few bucks. But that's not the goddam point.

Now I don't begrudge a company charging for its products; obviously Microsoft invested time and money in this software... hang on, what's that? There's already an arcade games player available, completely free of charge? That's right, it's called MAME. This niftiest of programs can emulate any arcade machine your heart desires. Just like Game Room, but at a tiny fraction of the size. And you don't have to f**k around with silly 3D rooms and kludgy interfaces. Did I mention it's free, I mean zero cost?

(Actually the one you want is MAME32, which has an easier window-driven interface.)

Seriously, Game Room smacks of being drawn-up by pointy-haired bosses, with its emphasis on gross eye candy and couldn't-care-less design. And it probably was. Coupled with Microsoft's cynical redefinition of the word "free", I am disgusted to epic proportions.

Microsoft, here's a wake up call. The market for retro gaming is guys like me: crabby-ass 30-55 year olds. Not googly-eyed, thumb-punching teens. Pointless 3D eye candy holds our attention for exactly 1 minute, after which we wish to get on with as much gameplay as possible before the missus starts hankering about the lawn. We also resent being misled and screwed by false advertising. People like us vote with our feet pretty damn quick. Google (or, God-forbid, Bing) is but a click away.

Behold the average 80's arcade gamer. Note the "looking for a squarer deal" pose.

(Note: Although MAME is free they can't legally distribute ROM images, thanks to some douche-bags who sucked up all the copyrights and deserve a rhino horn to the scrotum. Fear not, ROM images can be found all over the place. Hell, I'll even email you my classic collection of 50-odd. It's a whopping 1 meg in size all up.)