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Halo 2 PC Vista Only, With Exclusive Content 156

Posted by Zonk from the master-chief-reporting-in dept.
Via 1up and Kotaku, news from the most recent Bungie weekly update. Work on Halo 2 PC is continuing apace, but players looking forward to the game should know a few things. The game looks to be Vista only and, despite the promise of the 'Live Anywhere' concept, will not be interconnected in the way that the Shadowrun game will be. The Bungie update clarifies on these announcements. From the article: "Will I need a DirectX 10 graphics card to run Halo 2 on PC? No. Although you will require Windows Vista to play Halo 2 on a PC, you won't necessarily need to upgrade your graphics card to do it. Halo 2, like some other Vista titles, will work just fine on a wide range of graphics cards, including DX9 cards. We will provide far more detailed minimum hardware requirements closer to the game's completion."
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Halo 2 PC Vista Only, With Exclusive Content More

Halo 2 PC Vista Only, With Exclusive Content

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  • Thanks, Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PSXer ( 854386 ) * <psxer@msfirefox.com> on Sunday May 28, 2006 @06:25PM (#15422027) Homepage
    Is there any reason for such a requirement other than forcing people who want to play Halo 2 on PC to get Vista? Might as well require people to get Office while you're at it!

    Oh dear, I just gave them an idea.

    • Believe it or not, there is a reason. Halo 2's multiplayer will work through the spiffy, magical Live-anywhere contraption that MS announced at E3. Since it comes only with Vista, Halo 2 multiplayer would only work in Vista. Since the single player campaign is short and pretty uninspired, releasing the game for an OS where they won't support multiplayer doesn't seem like a good idea.
      • Ah, but is Live Anywhere really that much better than the way PC gamers have been playing multiplayer for years? Does it have to be a requirement?

        Granted, if the market was split between LA and regular servers, LA might not work that well because so few would be using it, but it seems like a solution in search of a problem.

        Wait, will LA have a yearly fee like regular Live? If so, it's all starting to make sense.

        • At a guess it probably uses DirectX 10, which will only be available for Vista.

          Don't know why DirectX 10 is only available in Vista though, given that DirectX 9.0c is available from every MS OS from Windows 98 to XP...
      • The interesting thing of course is that DirectX10 is only really an update to it's graphics library. DX10 should therefore be more accurately called Direct3D10.

    • Re:Thanks, Microsoft! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by e03179 ( 578506 )
      Isn't Halo 2 for PC being exclusive for Vista kind of like Halo 3 being exclusive to the XBOX 360? One isn't going to run on XP. The other isn't going to run on the first-gen XBOX.

    • Re:Thanks, Microsoft! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by toolie ( 22684 )
      Instead of +5 insightful, this should really be moderated as -1 whining.

  • Exclusive Content? (Score:4, Funny)

    by The MAZZTer ( 911996 ) <(megazzt) (at) (gmail.com)> on Sunday May 28, 2006 @06:26PM (#15422030) Homepage
    Up yours, xbox owners!

    ... wait, Vista will cost me more money than an Xbox. :( Bah.

  • Oh man! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MrShaggy ( 683273 ) <chris.anderson@hush . c om> on Sunday May 28, 2006 @06:28PM (#15422038) Journal
    Funny I thought that this was the beginning of Web 2.0, and the end of forced upgrades.

    Guess I was reading the wrong news?

    So, does that mean that Duke Nukem Forever will also be vista only?
  • So... When is the Vista emulator coming out?
  • Surefire way to get the Halo fanboys to get Vista that much faster.

    • Re:Fanboys (Score:3, Funny)

      by MrShaggy ( 683273 )
      Kind of when Doom 3 came out and veryone rished out to get the best video card. Doom3: 70$ nVIDia top-of-the-line-card 400$; The look on everyones face when they realised that the game is played in the dark? PRICELESS!!

    • Re:Fanboys (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      .. the 5 halo fanboys who are willing to drop hundreds on a new OS but weren't willing to pay $200 for an xbox?

  • Wait a second... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Donniedarkness ( 895066 ) <Donniedarkness@g ... BSDcom minus bsd> on Sunday May 28, 2006 @06:42PM (#15422100) Homepage
    Weren't we JOKING about them making Halo 3 Vista-only to boost sales? Now they're gonna do this with freaking Halo 2? I don't even like the Halo series, but I see no reason that it wouldn't be able to run on XP, other than the fact that M$ wants to improve sales of Vista. Dammit, Microsoft must be reading Slashdot... Stop giving them ideas, guys!

    • Re:Wait a second... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @07:55PM (#15422363) Homepage
      Weren't we JOKING about them making Halo 3 Vista-only to boost sales? Now they're gonna do this with freaking Halo 2?

      Halo is Microsoft's new mythical moneymaker. When their games division needs a boost to help their rather terrible margins, or they need to push a new system, they'll lean on Bungee to release whatever it is they have and call it the next Halo.

      It's kind of sad, really. Halo is a great series and Bungee is a great developer, but they're almost commodotizing Halo. Not finishing 2? It's like the Legacy of Kain... an amazing game that really hurt the series because they released it unfinished. At least Halo 2's multiplayer was solid.

      MS is going to find that you can't milk a series too much before it simply goes dry. If you don't earn each and every sale, you can coast for one or two iterations but then it all goes away.

    • "Weren't we JOKING about them making Halo 3 Vista-only to boost sales?"

      I never joked about that, I figured that was their plan when they started buying up the popular game development houses. Unless something major happens, expect all their content to be Vista-Only by 2007.

      PC game developers outside of Microsoft will probably continue writing non-Vista games for a little while yet. But Microsoft is already encouraging us to "make the switch" to Vista-Only. And I have to agree that Vista-Only features lik

  • And who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @06:45PM (#15422116) Journal
    Halo did do something very nice that every FPS game should copy. Give grenades their own controls so you can throw them with your main weapon equipped. Brilliant.

    Everything else about the game was a distinct case of Meh on the PC. It just didn't compete with PC born titles. Part of it may have been due to its age (the x-box conversion took ages) and part was that it never delivered on its original promises.

    I just never got the idea that Halo PC had a big impact.

    As for coupling it to vista. Well that is just taking the piss. A 2.5 year old game + time until vista launches having such a minimum requirement can't be anything but fake.At least pull such a stunt with a more recent game, say the upcoming Halo 3.

    MS really could set it self up for a gigantic fall with vista. Have they forgotten Windows ME? Or are they remembering ME and are this time determined to ensure people can't just skip an upgrade?

    The game companies making their game Vista only must really be certain of MS success. Not only are they tying their game to an OS that keeps getting delayed but one that might not be picked up. Remember Vista is launching at a bad time. Gamers will have the PS3 and Wii competing for their dollars. Can you afford to buy the consoles AND a new PC?

    Why is bungie still called bungie? Shouldn't they just be called MS game division?

    • Re:And who cares? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "Halo did do something very nice that every FPS game should copy. Give grenades their own controls so you can throw them with your main weapon equipped. Brilliant."

      I'd like to note that the uberpopular Quake one mod "Team Fortress" did this originally.
      • Tribes had the seperate grenade controls from the beginning, without having a mod.
        It also had the limited weapons carrying feature, though it was limited by your armor class, not just 2.

        Duke3d had a kick feature, a weapon available at all times at the push of a button, even when you were unarmed and kicking anyway. Made for some amusing play sessions, people running around doublekicking stuff.

        Vehicles had been done many times over in other games.

        Really, there's nothing inovative about the halo series. What
        • Really, there's nothing inovative about the halo series. What made it a decent game was a good storyline and the specific combination of features.

          The story sucked ass too. Masterchief! Good grief how puerile.

          Well at least the controls are good, oh wait they aren't.
    • Halo did do something very nice that every FPS game should copy. Give grenades their own controls so you can throw them with your main weapon equipped. Brilliant.

      *THWAK* Don't forget they did the same thing with melee strikes. The dedicated grenade/melee buttons really add some complexity to the game. They also make watching a good Halo player a lot of fun; it's like watching some sort of deathmatch symphony. It also makes casual FPSers (ahem, like me) horrible at multiplayer.

    • Or are they remembering ME and are this time determined to ensure people can't just skip an upgrade?
      Wrong! Microsoft never remembers the customer.

    • Re:And who cares? (Score:5, Funny)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @08:01PM (#15422389)
      Why is bungie still called bungie? Shouldn't they just be called MS game division?

      Because when they wander too far afield they get snapped back by a big semi-elastic cable tied around their ankles?

    • Re:And who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by demon ( 1039 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @08:01PM (#15422392)
      Why is bungie still called bungie? Shouldn't they just be called MS game division?

      Because Microsoft still wants people to believe that Bungie still has a shred of independence. I'd say that this pretty well proves that they do not - if they did, this (the fantasy that a port of a now several years old repetitive sequel to a repetitive shooter targeted for an as-yet-unreleased OS being just the thing to push people to buy the OS and new hardware to boot) would have been laughed right out of the board room. Microsoft just needs to end the facade.
    • Vista will be the biggest OS release they have done so far.
      Almost everything has changed. The problem is that most of these things are under the hood, so the casual user (even uninformed slashdotters) think Vista is just Aero.

      Fact is:
      -New directx, will mean prettier games (and faster too, they said it is faster than dx9)
      -New networking stack
      -Sandboxed IE7
      -Better firewall and now spyware tool.
      -IIS 7
      -New included games

      I myself will get it, even if it is only to play the newest games. That said, halo 2 is not

      • Re:And who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) * on Sunday May 28, 2006 @08:36PM (#15422492)
        I only hope drm isn't that bad.
        This negates all the improvements you just listed, and more.

        Not to mention that they shouldn't be bothering with DirectX at all, but instead should be implementing a standard like OpenGL, etc., shouldn't have broken IE in the first place, and shouldn't need an anti-spyware tool since it's only because of the fundamental flaws in the OS that spyware exists anyway!
      • "Vista will be the biggest OS release they have done so far. Almost everything has changed."

        Well, that was /before/ they had to make such drastic cuts in order to release Vista late. Like dropping WinFS and all the other mayor features.

        Now all that has changed is CP's skin and the fact that you get even more amazing whining popups...but this time it's the OS and not some rogue website!
    • Halo did do something very nice that every FPS game should copy. Give grenades their own controls so you can throw them with your main weapon equipped. Brilliant.

      You mean like Team Fortress Classic (Multiplayer Half-Life 1 mod) did years ago?
      • It's called "Team Fortress CLASSIC" for a reason. TF was for Quake first. If you're going to try and point out the origin of something, at least get it right.
    • "Halo did do something very nice that every FPS game should copy. Give grenades their own controls so you can throw them with your main weapon equipped. Brilliant."

      Fast action FPS games, yes, every FPS no. Throwing a grenade is a moderately complex two-handed action. Im all for fast paced arcady shooters like Halo and TFC having their own grenade key, but in a realism shooter like Americas Army or Red Orchestra requiring you to switch to grenades is perfectly reasonable.
    • I just never got the idea that Halo PC had a big impact.

      Halo PC never had a huge impact because of two reasons. First, Gearbox did the port. It was terrible and had astronimic system requirements, and was not mod-friendly at all. With the Halo 2 PC port in Bungie's hands, I have a great deal more faith that Halo 2 PC will be much much better. However, the other factor is how late it came out.

      Reguardless, although it didn't have much of an impact, it still had one. There are still people playing Ha

  • ...that these practices are not criminal according to US law. Seems to me this is corporate greed at ist best.

    • You know, i'm not a fan of microsoft at all. I used to be a bungie adherent back in the Marathon days, but i don't care for them since they were bought out. But on this count i'll defend them. This may be a business decision, but this could be just as likely an engineering decision. So seriously, people need to lay off. There's barely a potential for unethical behavior, but seriously, this is their gear, their software, why the hell can't the decide what they release it for? What's next? Would you hav
      • their software, why the hell can't the decide what they release it for?

        Well, this may surprise you, but the majority of new PC games can play on XP, and 2K; even 98 is commonly supported. Heck, even ME (for the 7 gamers that play on ME).

        So, while it may be only slightly easier to develop Vista only, the difference to support all of the other Win OSs is not that much more significant (I'm not a game developer, so I could be off base on this...).

        Of course, with Battlefield 2 and CS, who really needs Halo on t
      • Well, I have to admit that I assume this is not for technical reasons, judging from past MS behaviour. It would be extremely hard to prove either way. And once the decision has been made to abuse the monopoly (once again), the game couls actually be designed in a way that it really needs Vista as basis.

        Well, I guess if Halo2 is the only reason to update to Vista, then MS is doomed in the long run anuways, because their business-model is dead.

      • Halo 2 might be using DirectX 10 for technical reasons, but Microsoft's inability to release DirectX 10 for its other operating systems that actually exist in an arguably usable form is purely not technical.
        • How do you know?

          Suppose, for instance, that there is a new display driver model in Vista, and that DX10 works only on this new model. Perhaps DX10 and the new model were developed together, since in Vista so much of the UI is using the GPU at all times.

          XP would lack this driver model, making DX10 not run on XP.

          If the above scenario were true, it would tend to suggest a technical reason, don't you agree?

          Do you know for a fact that what I've described isn't true?

      • "but this could be just as likely an engineering decision. So seriously, people need to lay off."

        Except it's not an engineering decision. Halo 1 ran on the xbox and got ported, Halo 2 runs on the xbox. Plus you have me telling you that it's not an engineering decision. The pc has all the hardware/software to play Halo 2....it's a bundling decions by MS to get more people to buy into Vista. So seriously, mopre people need to give MS shit for such an obvious tactic.
    • Hard to say where it begins and ends.

      I have an old mac that would have been tossed in the dumpster a long time ago except that it is the only hardware I have that can correctly run some games my daughters love. Should I be angry that I'm forced to use a particular platform in order to run software that I want? Should I sue the game manufacturer for never getting around to porting it to some other platform?

      In any case, if you want to get huffy about Microsoft lock-in, there are plenty of cases that d

      • The big difference between what you stated and what Microsoft is doing is that Microsoft is pushing one product with another within their own company. The Mac games your daughter loves so much, were they created by Apple? It's one thing if a group of developers outside the company independently chose to create Vista-only games, but this is a completely different story.

        My thinking for this article goes like this: Why would I pay for a newer operating system just to play a (single) game? I can just as sim
        • I don't think that it's completely different. Imagine if it was some other company (take your favorite non-microsoft game, for example) who told you that their next game required Vista. Would your feelings be any different?

          Imagine that you're a strategist working for microsoft. Your choices:

          1. Write the game for XP. Ignore Vista features that XP doesn't support. Hope that Vista is sufficiently backward-compatible so that it runs well on Vista.
          2. Write the game for XP (like above) and then port it to
    • ...that these practices are not criminal according to US law. Seems to me this is corporate greed at ist best.

      It's called "freedom," a word you aren't apparently familiar with. In this country, people are free to not buy Windows Vista, Halo PC, or whatever if they don't want to, thus voting with their dollars. Microsoft can only be as greedy as the market will allow it. If the market decides Microsoft's products are no longer worth the money Microsoft is demanding, Microsoft will lose customers. It's th
  • I playd Halo and for a while it was good. But then it became repetitive and boring. The same room-design over and over again. Like they neded 10 additional hours of play-time and just repliacted a 10 minute segment of the game to get it. Needless to say I did not finish it.

    I doubt Halo2 will be worth an upgrade to Vista. I also doubt an upd=grade to Vista will be a godd idea before end of 2008 or so.
  • I'm curious what they'll do to insure it only runs on Vista. I wonder if some good hackers could patch it to run on XP?
    • I'm not wondering if somebody will hack it to run on XP. I'm just certain that somebody will.

    • Re:XP Patch? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Fittysix ( 191672 )
      As a matter of curiosity, I took the sol.exe from a vista beta machine, and tried to run it on XP. I expected it wouldn't run due to some missing dependancies or something, but to my surprise it said that the EXE was not a valid win32 executable. It appears they've already implimented whatever the method is, and although I didn't investigate the matter any further I'm guessing by the error that this is a fairly complex matter, possibly beyond the ability of a simple patch/crack.
      • As I understand Vista is going to be 64-bit, so all of it's executables will have to be 64-bit code. And Windows XP won't run 64-bit code. This is all pure guessing on my part, but that would explain that error. And it would also make any Vista programs hard to XP-patch.

        Dammit.
      • Just because it doesn't run doesn't mean it's hard to patch. It could be as simple as a header modification.
    • I'm curious what they'll do to insure it only runs on Vista.

      My guess? They'll make DX 10 Vista only. If not 10, then 11. They did this with DX 7 or 8 (can't remember which), and it no longer installed on Win98. DX is tied in much closer with the OS and drivers than any game would be.

      I'm happy with my nice stable XP and fave games (never thought I'd say that) and I'd never upgrade an OS for a single game.

  • I'm more interested... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bieeanda ( 961632 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @07:13PM (#15422227)
    In when non-MS games will start to require DX10. I really don't care for Halo, so I'm not concerned about it being a Vista-only title. The real fun will be when DX10 comes out, and developers will have to start worrying about whether to risk alienating customers by using it exclusively, or forego any improvements it brings in order to stick with the widely accepted (and not Vista-exclusive) DX9. This isn't like DVD-only games, where the push came at the cost of drives that had already dropped to the price of an average game, or the performance gains brought by laying out a few hundred for a new video card-- it's paying several hundred bucks for a new OS (while XP is still very much supported) and pretty much having to flatten and reinstall in order to play a blasted game in the first place.

    And while I'm here, Halo 2 and Shadowrun? Christ almighty. Halo PC was one of the most atrocious ports that I've had the misfortune of dealing with, and Shadowrun is shaping up to be an ugly, me-too squad-based FPS. Some great incentives there, guys. Really.

    • Re:I'm more interested... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Mistshadow2k4 ( 748958 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @09:23PM (#15422627) Journal

      Would you trade a market of 95% of all Windows-users for even 50%? And how long do you think it'll take before Vista hits 50%? We (nerds) know that Vista isn't really that much of an improvement over XP now and the average user doesn't, but they will as soon as people they know get it -- and are likely disappointed unless they're upgrading from 98.

      Let's rehash Vista for a moment:
      1. Aero: You can make XP look just like Aero right now for free; just go look at softpedia.com or download.com.
      2. The sidebar (is that even still on Vista?): desktop sidebar [desktopsidebar.com] works even on Win 2k. And then's there the Google Desktop.
      3. Better security: You'd be better off sticking with Win 2k or XP and getting the free version of Win Patrol [winpatrol.com]. More security and it uses less than 5 mb of Ram to run in the background -- how much memory is Vista going to require again?
      4. DirectX 10: It'll be almost useless for a long time. No game company is going to trade the market of almost all Windows-users for the Vista-users market exclusively. I predict that when games get more advanced they will either use OpenGL or even program what the game needs into the game itself (which likely won't be a permanent upgrade to your system).

      Those are its pluses! Consider the biggest negative of all: 8 different versions, each costing more than the last. Is everyone going to rush out and buy a copy of Vista when the version they can afford has less features than the copy of XP they already have? Most who do so would by mistake.... and they won't be very quiet about how they feel they got screwed either. Personally, I think the 8 versions thing is what is going to be the biggest detriment to selling it. MS is trying to force everyone to pay through the nose for Windows and a great many simply will not. MS has forgotten that their target market is cheap; if they weren't a lot more of them would be using Macs (and I'm no Apple fangirl by any means, so don't take it that way).

      Pirate Vista? A lot of them won't even bother with that when they find out from folks who have it that it's not really that much of an improvement over XP (from a user's standpoint) and requires powerful, expensive hardware -- which a lot of people simply don't have even now. You can't download hardware over p2p so Vista will be useless to many, who aren't going to upgrade without a compelling reason to do so. And what complelling reason will there be? MS's own games? That's not good enough for most, not so long as there are a lot of games that still support XP. No, I think Microsoft's only real hope lies with companies like Dell, who will sell pre-built computers with Vista. And guess how happy those people are going to be when they find out that they have to pay do much exta for features? To summarize, I think word of mouth alone will do a lot to prevent Vista's widespread adoption -- it will cost too much to have anything beyond the basics, most hardware can't even utilize it and hardware that can won't be all that common for another couple of years. For all that inconvenience Vista Premium should have a boatload of great features, but it's apparently not going to. Even with all that aside it would be very foolish for a game company to go Vista-only because the Vista market share is going to be too small. And if Vista bombs they certainly won't. Even if it is suceesful, its market share is still going to be low enough compared to previous versions of Windows that marketing games to it exclusively just wouldn't be profitable enough, especially since OpenGL can be used instead.

      Come to think of it, maybe Vista will do more to push OpenGL than anything else. Bonus! Go MS! :-D

      • Re:I'm more interested... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Kazzahdrane ( 882423 ) on Monday May 29, 2006 @04:50AM (#15423667)
        Of course, all Microsoft need to do is convince Blizzard to make the second WoW expansion Vista-only and they'll instantly get huge numbers of people upgrading to the new OS :P
      • Not to get into an argument, but there are "nerds" who think they know what Vista brings to the table, and "nerds" actively doing development against it.

        The former believes Vista brings nothing signficant to the table. The latter, who is making huge changes to their apps to support it knows exactly what has changed, and the big stuff isn't in your list.
      • I predict that when games get more advanced they will either use OpenGL

        OpenGL is arguably a replacement for the functionality of Direct3D (although I've not used it, so I can't tell how close the feature equivalence is), but D3D is a relatively small part of DX. You can't just use OGL instead of DX.

        or even program what the game needs into the game itself (which likely won't be a permanent upgrade to your system).

        Now why in the world would you do that? You're saying that rather than rely on third-party libr
  • MS is actually kind of shooting themselves in the foot with XBox. Not only have they burned up an insane amount of money on the two XBoxes, but they are helping to encourage people to divide their time away from Windows gaming to console gaming. There have been many, many game consoles in the past, made by numerous companies. There is still a fair amount of competition in the console market. But, there has only been one OS that is popular for PC gaming, MS Windows.

    I can't see this "Vista only" requiremen
  • Let me say, who gives a crap? Halo for the PC basically sucked and was never popular among FPS fans.

    This whole DX10 being Vista only is BS. They are royally screwing over XP users and especially anyone who has bought a new GPU recently. Developers can't be happy with MS for pulling a stunt like this. Must be nice to always have that monopoly to fall back on when you need to force unwanted changes down people's throats.
    • This whole DX10 being Vista only is BS.

      Welcome to the Microsoft World (TM, pat. pend). They've been doing this crap for years, but mostly in the business market with Windows/Office. Why do you think there's so much news about governments and businesses trying to get out of the lock (see Massachusetts, Ernie Ball, etc)?

      The thing is, I don't understand why they're going after gamers like this. Most PC gamers are as pro-MS as you get, and have no doubt bought several PCs, Windows tax included. The only

  • Economics (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mattbee ( 17533 ) <matthew@bytemark.co.uk> on Sunday May 28, 2006 @08:38PM (#15422502) Homepage
    Price of your next Vista upgrade: £100-200 ?

    Price of second-hand XBox + Halo 2 at Game: £60

    I think they made a mistake and meant to say Halo 3 :-) There are lots more exciting game prospects than Halo 2 on the PC and only Microsoft can afford to tie their games to it -- sounds like it's a exercise for the new API & tech demo for developers rather than an enticing prospect for gamers.

    If you've not got one yet, old XBoxes are a steal at the moment! Also Gamecubes are only £30, and you won't waste your investment on any games either ... this awkward twilight for "current gen" games consoles will make life very cheap for a few months!
  • The game wont make me upgrade. By the time I do move to Vista Halo 4 will be coming out. Probably wont play that game either.

  • Microsoft Admits: Vista Isn't Worth It (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @09:19PM (#15422618) Homepage Journal
    You'd think that, with the enormous amount of prior art out there, and the amount of time and money Microsoft has had to design and develop Vista, that it would completely and utterly kick ass, from boot logo to shutdown. I mean, there are so many ideas out there, and Microsoft has had so much time to play with all of them and select the best ones, that Vista has no business being anything less that digitally optimized sex.

    Well, Microsoft just admitted that Vista sucks.

    Because, you see, if Vista was as good as it's supposed to be, it would stand on its own and sell itself. It would be so clearly better than XP or MacOS or even Linux that there would be no question that Vista is The Thing to Have For Your New PC.

    But no. Microsoft is telling us that Vista is so appallingly bad that not only can't it stand on its own, it needs to lean on an exclusive binding with Halo 2 to be able to support itself in the marketplace.

    There is no rational basis for tying Halo 2 to Vista other than the fact that Vista sucks. Halo 2 does not use DirectX 10 functionality, so Vista is not required. Further, by tying Halo 2 to Vista, Halo 2 sales will be depressed since, rounded to the nearest million, there are zero copies of Vista out there. Therefore, tying Halo 2 to Vista is being done not to drive Halo 2, but to drive Vista. And Vista wouldn't need driving... Unless Vista sucks.

    QED.

    Schwab

    • Re:Microsoft Admits: Vista Isn't Worth It (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      if Vista was as good as it's supposed to be, it would stand on its own and sell itself. It would be so clearly better than XP or MacOS or even Linux...

      Microsoft is telling us that Vista is so appallingly bad that not only can't it stand on its own, it needs to lean on an exclusive binding with Halo 2 to be able to support itself in the marketplace.

      There is no rational basis for tying Halo 2 to Vista other than the fact that Vista sucks.

      Mac OS X 10.2 was released on 24 August 2002, ten months after

  • ...when the PC world actually gave two shits about Halo?

    I'm still playing Call of Duty!
  • Fuck Bungie, and fuck Microsoft.

    The Bungie CEO and Bill Gates can jack each other off all they want. I'm not upgrading, they can both kiss my ass.

  • Interesting note (Score:3)

    by Perseid ( 660451 ) on Monday May 29, 2006 @04:08AM (#15423580)
    As of the last article I read, Microsoft Flight Simulator X is not going to be DirectX 10 and will indeed NOT require Vista. It will instead have optional enhancements that will make it better on the new OS.

    This proves that supporting both OSes is possible and that Microsoft isn't doing it on Halo 2 because they simply don't want to.
  • Who cares about this? PC FPS games like Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Quake, Battlefield, Doom, FEAR... you name it, they're all much better than Halo. Besides, by the time Vista's out, we'll have Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which will make Battlefield and Halo totally obsolete.

    I can understand that Halo's popular on the XBox by people who don't know what they're missing out on on the PC, but why the hell would any PC gamer give half a s*** about Halo 2 on the PC, especially after how terribly unoptimised the
  • Microsoft is desperate...
  • Remember when the Xbox was first announced and the "big thing" was that it would be super-simple to port games from Xbox -> PC and vice-versa?
    I can see why they would delay the release of this game for business reasons, but they're blaming it on technical difficulties. What's going on in Redmond?

  • Vista Halo 2 Exclusive content revealed (Score:3, Funny)

    by Psykechan ( 255694 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @08:38AM (#15427631)
    Microsoft has promised fans of the Halo series that the exclusive content for Halo 2 on Windows Vista will be an ending.

    We have this quote from the Microsoft's game division formerly known as Bungie: "With the new technologies available to us in Windows Vista we can bring gamers the actual ending to the game that we envisioned instead of simply fading to credits in the middle of the story."

    It was also revealed that players will need a monitor and video card with HDCP technology to actually view this new ending. "We believe that gamers will demand this new technology from manufacturers, probably in some sort of online petition."

  • look at the bright side (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rabbot ( 740825 )
    At least they are trying this crap with Halo 2 and not a good PC FPS. Let's hope it doesn't work out too well for them so they don't do it with something us PC fans actually care about.

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