A year ago this month, at the last really big E3 ever, Microsoft announced its Live Anywhere initiative, promising to rapidly extend Xbox Live to the PC and cell phones. Finally, your Xbox Live friends list, achievements, Live Arcade, and all that other good stuff would be accessible on those other platforms with over 100 million gamers. I was absolutely giddy. They didn't show the service off per se, but rather had a mock-up demonstration of what it would be like. You'd be sitting there on your PC and someone on the Xbox 360 would see you online, invite you into a cross-platform game, and away you'd go. They'd send you a message, and you'd get it on your phone, PC, 360—wherever you happen to be. You could edit your Forza Motorsport 2 car on your PC and then take it out on the 360 to drive. Sure it was just a mock-up, but the idea was to say, "This is what we're going for."

This month, the first two Live PC games hit the market, first Halo 2 and then Shadowrun, and boy did Microsoft ever drop the ball on this one. Microsoft has set everything in place for Live on the PC to be a failure, and what's more, they're continually showing that their PR-speak claiming "we really care about the PC as a gaming platform" is 180 degrees out of alignment with their actions.

Live on the PC is nothing like that mock-up demo a year ago. It's Vista-only, which I guess I can understand. They want to move Vista as the gaming platform, not just Windows PCs in general. Perhaps Vista's networking security stuff is actually necessary for Live, I dunno. Okay, fine…we need to buy your expensive new OS to use Live. Fair enough. I can still sit there browsing the web and get a game invite or a message over Live, right? Or set up a Live voice or video chat? Nope. Live on the PC only runs while you're actually playing a Live-enabled game. So in order for my friends to see me online on my PC, I have to actually have Halo 2 or Shadowrun running. This sort of defeats the point, and it's not the way the 360 has worked for the last 18 months. I can sit at the dashboard, watch a movie, listen to music, or do whatever other non-game stuff on the 360 and still be fully connected to Live. So from a very core level, you get a second-tier experience on the PC, even though Live is coming to it much later.

Press Home on your keyboard when you're in a Live PC game and it acts like the big silver Guide button on your 360 controller. It brings up the Live menu, which looks exactly like the Guide on the 360. In fact, it looks too much like it. It's a very controller-centric interface, down to using controller buttons and icons. You can use your mouse on it, but it has clearly been designed for, well, a console. Mistake number two.