GameShadow review

I installed Tomb Raider: Anniversary on my Vista system. It failed on
install but ran successfully after "run as administrator". However it has no
system to check if a patch exists, relying instead on GameShadow (included
on the dvd).

I installed GameShadow to see if there was a patch available for TombRaider
and experienced considerable difficulty and what I consider poor programming
in the product. I have to assume my experience was unusual (the inability to
install a patch) since the product remains on the market and thus must work
for most people. I am unwilling to spend the effort to get it to work
however, and I documented my experiences in a letter to the developers (the
address of which the "welcome to GameShadow" email helpfully provided). I
thought I would post the email, in case other people have similar problems.

Mark

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The links at the bottom of my "welcome" email say this is for "developer
team feedback" so I thought I would send you some feedback: I was extremely
unhappy with the GameShadow system.

All I wanted was to know if there was a patch available for my newly
installed Tomb Raider: Anniversary. Since the game doesn't seem to have the
ability to know by itself, I had to install GameShadow to find out. To be
fair, it installed easily on my Vista system, though it did inform me that I
could not "change the path of the installation" even if I wanted to install
into a alternate location.

Not only did it take a long time to search my system for games, when it
finally did come up, it said nothing about Tomb Raider and just gave me ads
for demos and trailers of other games. It did say that I needed an update to
Doom 3 and Quake 4.

I thought I would try the system, so I clicked on Quake 4 and instead of
being taken to Quake 4, I was taken to the list of all my games and had to
scroll down to find Quake 4.

It said "new items available" and there was a (very small) text link for
"patch" which I clicked and finally got to a download button which said that
it was going to download version 1.42, interestingly when running the update
tool from inside of Quake 4, it says the current download is 1.4.2 - Sorry,
but I am VERY suspect of a product whose purpose in life is to tell me what
updates are available and cannot get the versions right.

I did click the "download" button and a file transfer began. Since it is a
LARGE file I left the computer to have dinner. When I returned, the file
transfer window was gone. There was no indication if it went ok or failed or
was sitting on my hard disk ready to be executed or nothing had happened. I
will say that nothing seems to have been updated. When I went into Quake 4
it still showed it needed to be updated. The GameShadow screen still said my
game was out of date. In short it seemed to have failed in the one thing its
supposed to do or there is an additional step which was not made clear.

After a de-install and re-install of GameShadow, I noticed it still
maintained a complete list of my games. Therefore it is either sending the
data to your servers in direct contradiction of your privacy policy
(www.gameshadow.com/privacy.asp) or the data is left behind on the server
after the uninstall in direct contradiction of Windows logo programming
requirements (I believe)

Note: I did find down at the bottom of the list (after I clicked on Quake
4) that it said Tomb Raider:Anniversary was up to date.

As feedback, I want to say that I feel this is a very poorly executed
program. I feel, especially in view of your privacy statement which says "We
sometimes have to share your personal information with other companies which
we use to provide some of our own services. For example, we use specialist
companies to conduct market research on our behalf to see how we can improve
the services we offer to our customers. We would need to give those
companies your personal information so that they can contact you to see if
you'd like to participate in our market research," that a product which
specifically states that it will send the data it collects about me to
marketers is not one I want on my computer.

Mark

P.S. the FAQ link from the "Contact Technical Support" of the "Help" section
in the help doesn't work, http://www.gameshadow.com/minisite/faq.asp gives a
404 error. You might want to fix that.

Great review mark, thanks...

Personally I picked up Anniversery on my Gametap account, or was that
Legends, I forget.

"Mark" <mark_butler@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:976EE0FA-AE22-445F-BC64-7961D6E80DEF@microsoft.com...
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->
> The links at the bottom of my "welcome" email say this is for "developer
> team feedback" so I thought I would send you some feedback: I was
> extremely unhappy with the GameShadow system.
>
> All I wanted was to know if there was a patch available for my newly
> installed Tomb Raider: Anniversary. Since the game doesn't seem to have
> the ability to know by itself,
In defense of the great guys at Crystal Dynamics, most games don't check for
updates, some online games do, but most offline games do not.

> I had to install GameShadow to find out.
Next time try Google or check Fileplanet or Filefront for patches. Hell,
ubisoft.com should list any patches it's published for it's games.

> ...though it did inform me that I could not "change the path of the
> installation" even if I wanted to install into a alternate location.
Booo...

> Not only did it take a long time to search my system for games, when it
> finally did come up, it said nothing about Tomb Raider and just gave me
> ads for demos and trailers of other games. It did say that I needed an
> update to Doom 3 and Quake 4.
Anniversery is fairly new, maybe the version of GameShadow had to be patched
first before it would detect it?

> Sorry, but I am VERY suspect of a product whose purpose in life is to tell
> me what updates are available and cannot get the versions right.
Possible the program uses decimal numbers to determine if your software is
older (or newer) than what you have installed now. since 1.4.2 isn't a real
valid number the program probably strips out all but one period to determine
the version. Makes it easier. Some games like Sims2 use version numbers like
2.0.3292.1 so stripping down the number to 2.032921 might make it easier to
do a compare.

> After a de-install and re-install of GameShadow, I noticed it still
> maintained a complete list of my games. Therefore it is either sending the
> data to your servers in direct contradiction of your privacy policy
> (www.gameshadow.com/privacy.asp) or the data is left behind on the server
> after the uninstall in direct contradiction of Windows logo programming
> requirements (I believe)
Na, you aren't required to delete anything from Application Data
(c:\users\(username)\appdata) so chances are it stored the info there and
read it in again when you reloaded.

> Note: I did find down at the bottom of the list (after I clicked on Quake
> 4) that it said Tomb Raider:Anniversary was up to date.

> As feedback, I want to say that I feel this is a very poorly executed
> program. I feel, especially in view of your privacy statement which says
> "We sometimes have to share your personal information with other companies
> which we use to provide some of our own services. For example, we use
> specialist companies to conduct market research on our behalf to see how
> we can improve the services we offer to our customers.
Welcome to business 101... supply and demand, they supply what they think
you'll demand, and how do they know what you demand if they don't ask or
poke around a bit? Personally I love doing marketing research, the really
good companies usually pay you cash for spending an hour or so answering
questions. It's great!

How much did Google buy Double-Click for? $XX Billions? All Double-Click is,
is a list of email addresses attached to marketing data that somewhere down
the line XXX billion people said they'd be ok sharing that data with
Double-Click and their parent companies.

I'm paraphrasing, I'm not really that big into business, but yeah, I can't
remember a day where I haven't agreed to an EULA that basically said, we are
gonna track you, but we don't keep your personal data attached, it's just
movement marketing data.

Probably why all those "date" ads know I live in California.

> P.S. the FAQ link from the "Contact Technical Support" of the "Help"
> section in the help doesn't work,
> http://www.gameshadow.com/minisite/faq.asp gives a 404 error. You might
> want to fix that.

An alternative to what you're trying to use here Mark might be XFire. It's
an IM client that also tracks game servers and lets you know when game
updates come available. They've been around for a while, and they have some
nice (albiet sometimes buggy) features.

Good write up,
Andy.