Check with your machine's maker for driver updates.
And uninstall, reinstall those apps that fail.
The games are star wars battlefront 2 and need for speed carbon both officially compatible with windows 8 and 8.1 according to microsoft's compatibility center page.
The games begin to launch then stop. When I have task manager open it shows the games for a few seconds and then they disappear.
Additional Details
*I had windows 8 and i upgraded to 8.1.

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