So I got the Eidos pack off the Steam sale and played some Batman: Arkham Asylum two days ago. When I first started the game, it prompted me to log onto Windows Live. Having no Windows Live account, nor an inclination or desire to make one, I pressed cancel and the game threw up a pop-up saying 'if you don't log in you won't be able to access' etc etc etc, which i clicked off because I didn't really care about online anything in regards to the game. So, having played about 4-5 hours and progressing fairly far, I stopped for the day.
Now, for the fun part. I start up the game again and it tries to log me in again, which I ignore, but then I realize that the game goes straight to a new game rather than letting me continue the one I used previously. Now, there isn't a save/load option anywhere, but since playing the day before always allowed me to continue from the last checkpoint (that option is there), I assumed the game just saves checkpoints automatically and you don't actually have to save the game separately. Wrong.
Apparently, if you don't log into Windows Live, YOU CANNOT SAVE THE GAME.
Granted, I should have read the pop-up more carefully, which does state this, but who the puts in a feature that you CAN'T SAVE A SINGLE PLAYER GAME WITHOUT BEING LOGGED INTO THE INTERNET/WINDOWS LIVE? I'm incredibly pissed off because if I want to get to where I was before, I have to replay 4-5 hours of a game. What fucking fun. \
I don't really know who is to blame for this, Eidos or Microsoft, but this is goddamn obscene.

I don't know about other Windows Live enabled games, but with SF4 you can create an offline profile that allows local game saves, stats, etc.
I think it's that way for Batman:AA as well.

Yeah, Live is like that. It's certainly not without its faults and there are some decisions that are so bad they boggle the mind. But once it's up and running it's not so bad.

Microsoft for creating Live, the world's worst epidemic since Bird Flu and Steam...oops...

This is true.
So calm down. :P

You can make an offline account to save your game. I know GTA 4 has this.
It's not that obvious, and it was kind of hard to find.

That GFWL/saving issue you described was why I passed on the game. Not worth the headache as far as I'm concerned.

yeah that is pretty lame. Windows Live gets unnecssarily stupid and complicated. (here comes a story that isn't relelvant about gaming, but anyway)
Last night I tried opening up a zune account on my pc, and Windows Live was being a pain in the ass. I don't feel like telling the whole story, but basically it appeared that registering a zune accounton my PC was not possible. Luckily I also had the option to sign up for a zune account using my xbox 360, and that was really easy. But still if my 360 was red-ringed or something, I would have had to put up with the needlessly complicated PC method thanks to Windows Live being an a-hole

None of this Live malarkey will ever stop me from getting a Zune HD.
But I will not buy games on demand from their shitty service.

Offline accounts can't collect achievements but otherwise everything is identical. If you want as little to do with Live as possible this is the option to go for.
It would be nice if future versions of Games for Windows Live fell back to a default offline profile if you fail to select a profile. If you aren't paying attention to the warning it could be a bit of a shock to come back to the game and find that all of your progress has been swallowed up.

Are you sure about that? Only I never had any problem collecting achievements in Fallout 3 offline and that uses Live for achievements too.

Then simply using a real gamertag solves that problem. Clearly nobody here is unable to connect to the internet. So it shouldn't be an issue.

If you go to the Games for Windows site, there is absolutely nothing about signing up.
Edit: Oops, I couldn't find how to join because I had no-script blocking microsoft.com from running javascript. That's still pretty terrible site design if you need Javascript to sign up. And their javascript doesn't even work that well. I can get the sign up link to show up once, but it won't come back once it goes away.

The site is pretty terribly structured and uninformative anyway.