I managed to get around the brain crunching slowdowns by playing in windowed mode. Secondly, for some reason, I have no problems getting into the options menu from the game itself, only from the starting menu, so I managed to get to the keys set-up page that way, although that is a disaster in itself with the keys still grouped under xbox controller titles. I finally reset to defaults and went off to play.

This is the first game I've ever owned that was a Games for Windows deal and I am declaring, here, a tap-repeatedly exclusive, that I will never buy another one thusly anointed. You can't save a game without any Windows Live account. To me this seems rediculous. The 'benefit' of having your save games available in the cloud available to play from other computers (really a thinly disguised DRM play) has the opposite effect when the clouds in your area have a tendency to piss rain interrupting power and network connectivity on a regular basis. The save/load mechanism is also dubiously implemented. I'm not sure if this is the game, or a 'feature' of saving games on the cloud, but loading doesn't take you back to the point where you saved, but to some common location. This is a problem if you were out driving around with no real purpose and don't remember how to get back to the fun. I've yet to figure out how this works exactly.

After all that the game is actually pretty fun. A cross between freeform driving around with the ability to destroy targets of opportunity mixed with predefined missions against various targets very GTA like with better weapons. And it is very neat to 'wound' a big building with some charges then have it fall down some time later.