Not all games that are installed on the system will be added to Game Explorer. The majority of Steam games for instance will not appear there, as won’t portable games and many other games that the service does not support.

To make matters worse, it is not as easy as it could be to add new games to Game Explorer, or remove some of the games from the listing. If you ever tried to dragg a Steam game shortcut to Game Explorer you know what I mean.

When you start Game Explorer Builder you will notice that it populates all existing game of Game Explorer automatically.

You can delete game entries right away or double-click them to launch them on the system. Adding games is a somewhat complicated process, as you need to add multiple file links for each game before the game is added to Game Explorer. Here is a short guide on how to add the game Team Fortress 2 to Game Explorer.

Team Fortress 2 is a Steam game and your efforts to add it to Game Explorer may have fallen short because of this.

Right-click in Game Explorer Builder and select Add Game > Create Resource.

Click on Resource Output and select a directory for the GFDResource.dll file. Enter a name and description for the game under General. You can fill out Details, Developers, Publishers and Genres if you like, but do not need to as they are optional. Switch to the Images tab and click the Icon path afterwards. Navigate to your Team Fortress 2 > TF > Resource directory and select the game.ico as the icon. If you do not have an icon you may want to search on the Internet for it.

Click the Boxart path and select the game boxart for inclusion. you may need to download the boxart from the Internet. Click on Create afterwards.

This opens yet another configuration window. You need to add a shortcut to the game. Click the Add Record button under Shortcuts. Enter a name for the shortcut. A click on the Shortcut path opens the file browser. Navigate to the Steam folder and select Steam.exe. Activate Parameter afterwards and add -applaunch 440 to it. This launches Team Fortress 2. You can find out app numbers of Steam games by creating a desktop icon and looking at the shortcut afterwards.

Click Ok and the Install on the Install Game Resource screen. If everything worked out fine, you should now see the Team Fortress 2 game in Game Explorer Builder, and your Windows Game Explorer.

The original Game Explorer Builder website is not available anymore. I have uploaded the Windows program to Ghacks, you can download it here. The program requires the Microsoft .NET Framework.

The Windows Game Explorer goes one step further by providing a control panel view of the installed Windows Vista games. At the first start of Windows Vista only the default games show up with big icons which makes identification easier. Microsoft added a few new games to Windows Vista and raised the design of them tremendously compared to previous operating systems. The biggest improvement over Windows XP however is the automatic addition of many games to the Windows Vista Game Explorer.

Not all games are compatible though. It’s fair to say that new games and popular old games are most likely compatible while lesser popular games are not. These can still be added but need to be moved to the Game Explorer by the user.

Several software developers have tried to port the functionality of the Vista Game Explorer to Windows XP to give XP users a similar experience. Users who are interested in playing Windows Vista Games on Windows XP can perform a Google search and will find ways to play them. It’s rather shady and I would not advise doing it unless you own Windows XP and Windows Vista. The search string Windows Vista Games should do the trick.

Microsoft made another decision that had lesser impact on Windows Vista sales than they hoped. DirectX 10 was made to run exclusively on Windows Vista. Windows XP gamers faced the decision to either stay on Windows XP and play the games with DirectX 9 or switch to Windows Vista to be able to play games in DirectX 10. The lack of high end video cards that were able to produce a constant playable framerate in DirectX 10 and the lack of games supporting that feature were probably the two biggest reasons why this strategy failed completely.

Microsoft lists only nine games on their DirectX 10 website. Good games but no critical mass to justify switching from Windows XP to Windows Vista just for gaming purposes.

There are not many exclusive Windows Vista games either which might make users change other than the newly created games that ship with the operating system and the games Halo2 and Shadowrun, both no prime examples of PC games though.

The Game Explorer will hopefully make its way into the next Microsoft operating system codenamed Windows 7. DirectX 10, or maybe 11 surely will and it remains to be seen if Windows Vista users will be left standing in the rain like the Windows XP users before.