I have been looking through the Xbox Live Games App that comes with Windows 8 for a few days to see what I thought about it. The layout looks nice. The option to look through games that you can buy on the xbox is an okay feature. I clicked on a game in Game Activity that I bought (Halo Reach) and a box popped up giving a brief description, beacon status, and 4 things I could do: First off is buy the game (Funny I thought I bought it from Xbox Live already),  Second see game details, third Play on Xbox, and Fourth play a trailer. While all of those things are nice to see, I find the first thing on the list is buy it when Xbox should know I have already bought it from them since I was signed in to my account is a little alarming.

I found the app to be a little slow as well. It shows your last 3 friends that are online which for me is 2 people who were online less than 12 hours ago and one who hasn’t been online for a very long time as it says offline. What really slows it down is when you go to look at the achievements. I guess it takes a long time to download them all since I have over 500, (first being from Halo ODST and 500th being from Halo 3.)

The Windows game market place in the app is coming soon so I really cannot comment on that piece of the app.

Over all I really do like this app. Since this is only the App Preview I expect it to get better. I believe that the Xbox team and the Windows Team are doing a really good job of integration between them as from rumours I hear is that the Xbox may become an entertainment device that can play games along with the usual movies and music.

I will continue to use this and see if the updates make it more useful.

I am continuing to get the Xbox Companion app to work. Until I do get it to work I will probably be trying to find something else to post about.

Ryan Orser.