Gameshadow

GameShadow is a program, which offers downloads of game patches, demos, mods, videos, drivers and various “things to buy” for detected games. It is advertised as an alternative to poking around on the Internet in search of any of the aforementioned files and software. It also prides itself on being spyware free, which is often a problem with free services of this sort.

Let us see how GameShadow fares outside of theory.

Set up is a simple affair. I went to www.gameshadow.com, which provides the user with an installation program. When ran, it quickly guided me through the process as well as the registration. One thing that I enjoyed in particular, was the ability to use the program right away without having to wait for a confirmation e-mail first.

The next step was to detect my games, my video card drivers and my directx version. This took roughly about a minute and was 100% accurate, much to my satisfaction. As soon as GameShadow was done, it offered me a patch for one of my games, an ATI driver update and also told me that my directx was up to date. I proceeded to download the new drivers and ended up with an exe file, which I otherwise would have to download from ATI’s site. The file ran itself as soon as it was downloaded.

Next, I tried to download a demo of Narnia. I was presented with an error message and informed that “The Requested Link Was Not Found”. After retrying a couple of times I decided to give it a few days. 5 days later I was surprised to have encountered the same problem. Either the GameShadow staff is unaware of this or they can’t fix it. Both cases warrant a raised eyebrow as far as I am concerned.

Aside from this unfortunate happenstance I was pleased with the experience. The selection is quite large and the download speed was a stable 640 KBps, which is a lot higher than many web sites offer.

The interface is clear and simple. I had no trouble finding any sections or options that I was looking for. Since the look and feel of GameShadow software mimics the look and feel of most web sites, navigation should never be a problem for the user. One nice touch is that the software offers to use your antivirus program as a plugin for scanning all incoming files. Also you can set up a proxy if you so desire.

Since the service is free, I was faced with a lot of flashing advertisements which I found highly annoying. The remedy for this is to upgrade for $14.95 per year-- a so called introductory price. This brings about a complaint on my part, as the offer opens up in IE. Other than that, whenever GameShadow needs to open a web site it uses your system’s default browser.

Overall I find GameShadow to be adequate for what it is designed to achieve. Of course those who like to do everything manually (myself included) will not find it particularly useful, but I’m certain that those who are not bothered by having an extra piece of software installed, will be happy to save time by downloading their updates from one convenient location instead of having to hunt for them all over the Internet.

Saying 'I could care less' is improper.

The correct way is 'I couldn't care less'.