How are you guys launching your games?

That's a pretty neat solution. Most of my PC games are via Steam though, so I don't think that'd work for me.

Man you guys make me feel so inferior. I just keep the icons on the desktop, and double click. Old school.

I use Games Explorer with custom entries via the Vista Game Explorer Editor utility. I have about 150 games installed currently, so it is useful to simply click on the small box art icon of the game I want to play.

What is also useful about this method is that you can neatly input multiple paths for each game. For instance, I can run a benchmark simply by right-clicking on a game and selecting the executable or batch file.



There's a portion of the games. Also, I still have a few games to enter.

What I do with games that require Steam to open is create a Steam generated shortcut for each relevant game, and use the path specified in each shortcut for my custom entries. The result is in the realm of what you mentioned.

I either launch them through Steam, which is just about always signed in. Or I launch non-steam games through my dock on the left side of the screen. My other applications get launched through the dock at the bottom of my screen.

http://www.stardock.com/products/objectdock/
and if you dont want to pay for the plus version for multiple docks, you can get a second dock by using RocketDock as well:
http://rocketdock.com/

I once strived for total Media Center integration, but there were too many obstacles in the way of getting what I wanted. Launching my games from Games Explorer and playing my music through foobar2000 is not the ultimate in prettiness, but it provides excellent functionality and quickness.

Maybe by the time I get Windows 7 (will probably wait another year or two) there will be some exceptional hacks for Media Center.

Steam... with mouse clicks!

Can I umm...like...come over to your house and be your best friend and stuff? Man that is a rockin' assortment of games. I guess you're sporting at least a TB hard drive?

Nice ass collection there.

I double click the appropriate icon in the Games folder on my desktop.

I've never really found media center interfaces to be anything more then a hassle. Good for showing off when people are over, but just a loss of control over simply using windows explorer.

The combined footprint for all games (about 150 in all) is approximately 500GB, which is spread across 640GB and 1TB drives. Of course, this includes the many custom maps and content that I have for numerous FPS games.

With the size of newer games, I'm going to need as much storage as possible. I see The Force Unleashed alone uses about 24GB of space. Not even Crysis, Crysis Warhead and Crysis Wars combined takes that much space.

Norton Commander

I've played The Force Unleashed on the Xbox 360. Save your money and HDD space and avoid it. If you really want it, you can find the console version used for cheap.

I have two gaming machines. One has 2 ea 500 gig HDD's, the other, older one has a 80 gig and a 500 gig. And I also have a portable 500 gig that I move around to all of the various pc's I have.

But to get back on topic, I use Stardock Fences. I have different boxes on the desktop for different genres of games as well as as my apps. It's free, gives my desktop a nice clean look and it provides easy access.

P.S. It looks like you have a lot of stuff from GOG!

The worst combination is a big game with limited installs.

Disc authentication is annoying. Unfortunately, the cracks (I call them "patches" for peace of mind) found online do not always work.

Limited installs are slightly fine with me as long as there is an option to revoke a license before moving a game to another machine.

Old school indeed... just give me a command line and I'm good

I can't even get Windows Media Player to work on my Win7 setup as it crashes on startup. I get the damn "Windows Media Sharing Service" error on Win7 boot too. Bleh.

I'm glad that I listened to you and did not buy the game. It is another sloppy port with significant performance issues.

Worst of all, the frame-rate is apparently capped at 30 FPS. That is absolutely inexcusable for a PC game. Developers just seem to like taking away the niceties of PC gaming.