So i'm relatively computer savvy. And as a new user for impulse (i used to use the old stardock central service, which was still a pain, but less so)

and i must say i'm pretty annoyed with it. I play galatic civ II, but not regularly, though i bought the game a while ago and felt like replaying it. I download everything at once, and then go do some errands. I come back and says "install complete" Ok, so i run the game, and guess what, nothing at all works, except the main game. Futher more, they used some crazy directury structure, buy putting dark avatar in the C drive, the main game in Program files, and twilight in a sub folder of the main game folder. Thats freakin weird in and of it self. Having no control of the directory path is also annoying, as i use a non-standard way to keep things sorted out, and don't have that option.

looking around before i waste time on another download, i find an "archive" option. I activate that, and wait for download. Now with files archived i can go back and i assume, reinstall from those, so i can trouble shoot, instead of having to reinstall from download 20 times. Oh wait, turns out i get a useless IMPULSE file, that i have to find, that isn;t linked to anything in impulse, that i assoicate manually that doesn't actually do anything.

So i re-download again from impulse, because there isn't an obvios option to do anything with the archive, and it still installs to that crazy directory path that i stated earlier, giving me an unmovable dark avatar folder in the wrong spot, that i suspect is actually the reason no expansion actually works, but because its downloadable and because the archiving feature doesn't do anything or is badly documented, i can't troubleshoot the problem, and even if i could, i don't have any control over where the pathing goes, and i hafta wait 10 minutes every download before i uninstall and reinstall.

here is what i want, and its a feature that should be really implimted. Let people download freakin .exe. We paid for the games, give us some exocutables so we can get it to work. I paid for these games, but because i can't wrestle with impulse, i'm about to just Torrent the whole series from pirate bay and use that version instead beacuse it will save me time, and beacuse i'll have control over what goes on my machine.

I'm a little scared actually at how a program like impulse can install stuff and bypass windows program management all to-gether. isn't that how viral exploits are born? by people coding things to make things convient for their customers, providing some easy back door access to a computer through a native program? There is a reason you use the windows interface. Cuz nothing gets past your clicks. since Impulse is browswer based, i could imagine any number of scripts that could be inserted into say forums that a user could click, and then auto install a virus masquerading as an impulse product.

Offical Holywar Review of Impulse service. 2 out of 5.