Age of Empire III Complete Collection is $0.10 [10 Cents] on GFWL Marketplace

[A Black Falcon]

And like Steam you can't choose where each game installs to. At least you can set download and install locations, so you can have games download to one partition and install to another (Steam does not let you do this, of course, so GFWL beats Steam on install location options, even if it's also terrible, bottom-of-the-barrel stuff), but it's only minimally better than Steam.

And then after the game installs, it does NOT create any Start Menu program group. The "Play Game" link in the GFWL store/launcher thing only opens the folder on your hard drive that the game installed to, nothing more. They evidently assume that everyone using the GFWL store plays all of their games via the awful Windows Game Explorer launcher, which is of course completely crazy.

Steam doesn't create program groups either, which is annoying, but at least the games themselves do automatically get files in the start menu in Steam. I wish they'd put them in normal folders and give links there for the manuals, readmes, etc. too, but it's better than nothing for sure. What GFWL does proves that.

I mean honestly, really, clicking "Play" in the GFWL launcher just opens the game's install folder, and then you just have to go through it, find the program file yourself (and in both AOEIII Complete and Deus Ex it's not in the main folder but in a subfolder, and AOEIII Complete of course has multiple files to run for the different campaigns, etc... not simple.)? Wha... what in the world is wrong with them? "Games Explorer or nothing" is their policy? Then why didn't GFWL's launcher open Games Explorer wehn you hit play? I mean, as I said I think the Games Explorer is utterly useless, but lanuching that would make more sense than dumping you in the install folder, at least. It's so, so bizarre...