This weekend I purchased Borderlands after hearing all my other friends go on about how awesome it is.  So then I was confronted with a choice of how to get the game.  First I have been sick with the Flu all weekend so I don’t really feel like going to the store and getting others sick and I am not going to try getting my wife to go out and get it for me.  So I guess I am going to download it.

Well I know one of my friends downloaded it through Steam.  I prefer not downloading through Steam and/or playing because it seems to take so much longer to download.  So I checked Direct2Drive and decided to download through them.  Well since I have found you do get better speed with their Download Manager I used that to download the game.

When it started up it had a notice that there was something new for downloading and managing you games called Comrade.  Well what is this Comrade thing?  Well much like Steam and Impulse it is a download and game manager.  Seems to be a popular trend.  Nice thing about Comrade is it will scan your computer for games and add them to the list and maintain updates for them.  Pretty handy since Steam only does that for games you manually add and Impulse only lets you add their games.

In addition Comrade links into the GameSpy Network linking you through a IM type program to chat with your friends or Comrades.  This allows you to see what people are playing much like XFire does.  It also lists your games for a quick launch and allows you to challenge your friends.

So now it seems to be a popular trend to put out a game manager and downloader by different companies.  I don’t know if this is a good thing or not but it seems to be coming up in popularity every day.  Newer ones seem to be also working to include more and more features in it so that you select theirs over the competition but I would suggest caution in to many features.  The more you add the more people will have to deal with various features they don’t like/want and that makes them move away from what you offer.

The IM feature may be nice to combine all you friends into a list but it is it really needed?  I would have to say not really since you either can call, use TS or Vent, IM, or text the person you are playing with already so it is just one more extra you have to deal with.

As for the game manager it doesn’t give you the option to uninstall games which disappointed me.  It has allowed me to find that there were games on my system that I didn’t know I had.  Other than that I would say it is pretty standard compared to the other two with similar interfaces that allow you to look through the games they offer for sale.

In the end I wouldn’t say there is a lot that makes Comrade stand out more than Impulse or Steam.  It had a couple new features and it still maintains the high speed download from Direct2Drive.  It downloads and installs the games for you like the others.

Now from what I understand the download and game manager are new additions and it shows.  It is somewhat buggy with the tabs not showing names and after it installed Borderlands it didn’t register that it had done so.  As it gets updated though it should move into the family of DaGs already out there.

Comrade