predcon: The solution involved flushing my primary User Account's DNS, and almost nothing to do with port forwarding.
Aliasalpha: Was the game ultimately worth all that work or did you go though it all only to think "geez, this is crap"
Define "work". All I did was call GFWL tech support, and when the low-tier guy couldn't help me, he said he'd escalate the issue to someone who "specialized in that game" or "application" or whatever, and set up a call back time. All I had to do was wait for the higher-tier guy to call, and he seemed to know what the problem was, and the issue was solved within ten minutes of him calling me.
Like I said, I'm really enjoying the "skill shot" system. If you look on my GFWL, XBL, and PSN profiles, you'll see that I am the (self-titled) "King of Trick Shot!". The name hails back to the early days of FPSs, when grenade launchers with "rebounding grenades" that bounced around corners were kind of a new thing, and I would play almost solely with that weapon because I enjoyed impressing my friends with trick shots. It only got better when the expansions for Quake II came out, with that Ion Ripper weapon. And now that there's a game that rewards me for skillfully chaining trick shots, I get to hone my playing in a whole new way.
I can definitely see where PCF picked up influences from Epic Games' past games (now that the former is part of the latter, the former has access to all of the latter's reference materials, I'll bet), but I can also see influences from past PCF games. For instance, the leash weapon reminds me of the Painkiller staff weapon's alternate fire (the alt fire was the one that launched the spear head, right?).
I think that the majority of people who complained about "poor graphics on highest settings" are people who are running ancient hardware. I've seen the system specs of some of these complainers, and they're running single-core AMD64 CPUs, Radeon HD 3000 series GPUs, 2GB RAM, etc. My specs are just under "top of the line", so I have no problem with visuals. The only thing I have a problem with is when all the textures take a half second to a whole second to go from "lowest" to "fully rendered" or whatever. It's like, when a texture isn't within "eyeshot", it "relaxes", and when I turn the camera around to view that texture again, it's like "oh crap! wake up guys! he's looking at us!". It's been like that with every Unreal Engine 3 game I've played.
Bottom line, I think Epic had less of a hand in the game's development than "conspiracy theorists" would have you believe, and if you liked PCF's previous offerings, like Painkiller, and in a way Gorky 17 (most of the guys who worked on it went on to form PCF), I'm pretty sure you'll like it. And the story isn't so bad either. It's kind of the inverse of the old cliche of "Good soldiers work for good general, but general turns to bad general, and good soldiers end up hunting down bad general". In this case it's "Good soldiers go rogue, while general who's always been bad continues to get away with doing bad things while being backed by the government, who thinks he's good".
