The New Games for Windows Experience

By Joe Haygood | November 13, 2008

As you may have read yesterday on some blog sites, the new Games for Windows experience has finally gone live.  When you go and put in one of the PC games that is Games for Windows Live enabled, you will get a client update.  Once completed, you will be introduced to the new Games for Windows Live client.  Here we have Fallout 3 open, with the first screen you will see when you open the experience for the first time.

In this screen you see the look of the new interface.  No longer to we get the ugly rectangle in the center of the screeen.  Now you have an elegant drop down menu bar whenever you push the Home button.  The bar shows your Gametag, friends, messages, other players you have played online, and private chat.  There are also buttons for options and signing out.  It is very smooth, and has a nice streamlined look to it.

Here we have the Gamertag screen, which shows off all the information about you that you would see for your Gamertag.  You get all the pertinent information, like your gamerscore, location, slogan, and more.  Now you get a look at the achievements for the game you are in, and all the other options to fix your account.  Again, it drops down from the top of the screen, and it looks sharp. 

Lastly, we get the games windows, which shows off all of the games that you have played.  All the other screens like friends come down, looking like this.  Very sharp and intuitive.

These changes are long overdue.  With these changes, one can only hope that we have some new initiative from Microsoft to make the Games for Windows Live platform a true alternative to what is out there.  Once the marketplace is up and live, we will get a better place as to the support that Microsoft is planning to do for us PC gamers.