Every so often, when Cindy Lou Grue would post on the Gamerscore Blog (by the way, is she still even on the team?), I would get a little shocked because she would remind me that Microsoft's MSN Games casual game portal still exists. The other bloggers would be going on about their gamerscores, friends lists, multiplayer experiences, and Cindy's posts would always feel oddly "disconnected".
That makes you wonder why exactly Microsoft isn't doing something, anything, to somehow integrate the casual portal into the rest of its gaming network. They even have a section of of MSN games for Vista - the perfect example of "games for Windows" - and yet none of those integrates with the Live network. I'm not even asking for them to be distributed through a PC marketplace (well, sure, eventually, but anything at all would be a start), but why aren't those games part of the Games for Windows Live program? Some of them even have counterparts available on Xbox Live Arcade, so it just seems weird to see them as completely isolated experiences.
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