Live Anywhere, or how to F*** something so good up so very bad.

Circuit City has become a great store.  It seems like every week they have some unbeatable sale going on, and in my opinion, they’ve quickly become the top national retailer for a lot of electronics things, if not the top, than certainly my favorite.  I have them to thank for my 250.00 Polk RM 6800 open box (MSRP 849.95) 

And my LCDTV, amongst other niceties. 

So it was with little hesitation that I picked up a copy of Shadowrun for Vista this week at the bargain price of 34.99.  Since my 360 is on its way to Texas to get reacquainted with its family, it seemed like a good time to check out Live Anywhere, and all that that entails. 

On putting the disc in the tray the game installed like any other PC game, taking about 20 minutes to do its work.  (FYI, I’m running an AMD 4400 X2, with 2 gigs of ram, a Radeon 1900XTX, and a 500 gig SATA drive). 

Once the install was complete, the game asked me to activate it online before playing.  Not a huge deal, but I can imagine it being a nuisance for someone without an internet connection, but then again, Shadowrun probably isn’t the game for them anyway. 

Once into the game, I was presented with the option to create a new gamertag, or use my existing Gamertag.  Here’s where the fun ended.  Of course I was interested in using my gamertag, so I could add to my nonsensical Gamerscore.  Unfortunately, this meant that I couldn’t actually play Shadowrun for another half hour as my gamertag had to be downloaded in the most painfully slow process of downloading imaginable. 

Let me be clear, this process, while I’m sure intended to prevent the sharing of gamertags and all of the purchased goodies associated with them, has the unquestionable effect of making live anywhere effectively useless for anyone with a 360 who wants to use their gamertag on their windows games.  If you want to play a little XBLA and then head upstairs for Shadowrun, you’re talking about an hour of not playing games while you wait for your gamertag to go back and forth.  This is simply unacceptable, and in my opinion, is alone enough to call the Live Anywhere initiative a failure.

But let’s talk about why else it’s a failure… the Live Anywhere window.

This is the thing that’s supposed to look like your Live blade, and give you access to your buddies, achievements, invite people to play games, chat, etc… 

Instead of being some slick blade that slides out, it’s a square box that pops onto the middle of your screen when you press the “home” key on your keyboard.It is clearly designed for the 360 controller with A and B button navigation, but to make things really embarrassing, the text in this window is blurry (on my 24” gateway widescreen monitor running at 1920 x 1200) to the point of being difficult to read in places.Further, the notifications, instead of taking any graphical cues from the 360 are plain gray boxes that pop in the top of your screen and have a little image of your home key next to them.These are also blurry and difficult to read.

All in all, the live anywhere presentation is sloppy and half baked.  Because of the time hit necessary for a 360 player to move between his or her console and pc, it’s essentially useless unless you’re a) not interested in playing games when you load up your games, or b) are able to plan ahead with crock-pot precision as to which system you’ll be using the next night.  I cannot recommend jumping into this get up for anyone who already owns a 360. 

Making matters worse, Shadowrun actually had frame rate issues on my system.  I realize I only have 1 video card, and I only have 2 gigs of ram, but come on, seriously? The game runs flawlessly on a 360 with a fraction of those specs. 

I also can’t recommend Live anywhere to pc gamers without a 360, as the polish and seamlessness that the live experience has on the console, simply isn’t there on the PC, and it’s really that, that we pay for on live.  It’s a half finished idea, and not worth paying 50.00 a year for, if you don’t have a 360.  At best, Live anywhere is, at this point, a novelty for 360 owners who a) already have live gold accounts, b) already have blazing computers with Vista installed, and c) are having their 360’s repaired.