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Live Anywhere (
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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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So let's say that we can actually save an extended gamer profile and all of our console settings onto a memory unit or hard drive. But then the Xbox 360 overheats and explodes, and there go all the hard-earned game saves and console tweaks. Where's the backup plan?
The real question is: where is the online backup plan? Xbox Live is one big network service in the cloud, which already stores a ton of information for each user. So why doesn't each Xbox Live account - the paying ones at the very least - have an "online memory card" that can hold a gamer profile, console settings, and game saves?
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Of the big three hardware makers, Microsoft is the only one getting spanked in the mobile integration area. Sony has the PSP acting as a remote window into a PS3 partner. Nintendo offers some games that include gameplay integration between the Wii and a DS. Microsoft...has no mobile gaming device, so I guess I shouldn't really complain about a lack of integration, right? Wrong!
Look, I understand that the Zune itself will probably never be a gaming device. That it would be very difficult to come out and try to compete with Sony and especially Nintendo in the handheld gaming market. All that is fine and good.
However, almost two years ago Microsoft announced its Live Anywhere vision - a vision that so far hasn't extended past the PC and the Games for Windows Live initiative. At the same time, about a year and a half ago, Microsoft demonstrated a Windows Mobile client. It seemed to work pretty well. Didn't Microsoft promise? Come on, there are pictures of the thing!
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