I've been a fan of Sins of a Solar Empire from the start, so I ended up downloading the Impulse game client. Impulse is sort of a Steam wannabe, that I've bought an occasional game from.

This last weekend the special on Impulse, which is now Gamestop, was Mass Effect 3, $49.99 - not a great price, but still less than the $60 it costs everywhere else. So I took the plunge. ME 3 is a huge game, about 11 gigs. The Impulse/Gamestop servers aren't real fast, either - took about 12 hours to download.

So I go to play the game, and box comes up with a product code and launches an install of Origin, yet another game client. So I let it install Origin, figuring I would get to play the game. But there were no games in the menu. So I found a "redeem code" menu item, put in the code and it took it, cool. Mass Effect 3 shows up on the menu with a status of "Ready to Download."

Well wait a minute, I just spent 12 hours downloading this, why won't it just install? So I figured I'd outsmart it, I took the Impulse download and moved it to the Origin folder, should be good, right?

Nope, still demanded that it was going to download. The good thing is that the Origin servers are vastly faster than the Impulse servers, and it "only" took about 2 1/2 hours to download. Still, this was the stupidest thing I've seen in a long time. If the Impulse download won't install, then don't make the user download it, just send them the code.

This will be the last game I buy from Impulse.