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Halo 2 Only on Vista
iLogiK writes "Halo 2 will be available for PC, but only in Windows Vista. From the announcement: 'Halo 2 the game that redefined first-person combat and multiplayer action for millions of gamers worldwide, is set to explode onto PCs exclusively for Windows Vista. Halo 2 for Windows Vista will be developed by a dedicated Microsoft Game Studios team in partnership with Bungie Studios.'" That's one way to force upgrades. I thought just not releasing patches for the microsoft-worm-of-the-week would be enough ;)
Does this mean DirectX 10 will be available exclusively on Vista? Or are they simply introducing an artificial restriction here? If the latter is the case, I imagine someone will work around it fairly quickly.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
That's the time it'll take for WINE to handle the "Vista-only" software. It's also twice the time it will take for M$ to respond with a lawsuit. Isn't it wonderful knowing what we're efficient at?
Anyone gonna release a 'compatibility patch' for H2 after it comes out? :)
Halo for PC came out long after the Xbox version and it still managed to sell very well. I think you're underestimating how many people would like to play Halo 2 on PC. Granted the xbox version of Halo couldn't be played online like the PC version, but I'm sure the Halo 2 PC version will add some new features that will make it better than the xbox version.
Also note that Gamespy stats show that Halo is still being played by lots of people on PCs. Good games sell for a long time.
And we all know how well anti-trust suits work against companies that have enough money to pay the right people off... I don't think MS will be quaking in their boots anytime soon over antitrust. They've been there before and they know how to game the system. The way to get them to quake in their boots is to make them obsolete. I think free/open source software has done a good deal of work toward that goal. :)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
It wouldn't be as crazy as it sounds. More than half of the XBox owners I know bought it almost exclusively to play Halo. The statitiscal insignificance and bias of this sample notwithstanding, I could definitely believe that this would push a few people over the edge who were waffling between getting Vista and sticking with XP. Enough, at least, to make up for lost Halo PC sales. After all, the marketing guys at redmond are no dummies.
My thoughts exactly. Halo 2 was released for xbox in what, november 2004? Assuming Vista isn't released until the end of this year (and that's being generous) Halo 2 will be at LEAST 2 years old, if not older. I've played it on my friend's Xbox, and it's hardly unique. Seems like a weak product to act as a 'flagship.'
I wonder how long it will be before Wine will support emulation of Vista?
Truely, I found that my soundcard driver and various other thing would hard-lock my system in XP... very annoying when you're in the middle of a game. Most of the windows games I run play nicely on Wine/Cedega, some even better (as in the case of my laptop, where the video driver will not update in windows).
If Cedega gains more support for newer games, all the more reason for me to stick with it and/or linux. XP is bad enough, I certainly wouldn't want to upgrade to vista just to play a few newer games.
I am in the same boat as you. I would love to see MS allow PC gamers to play Halo on the same servers as Xbox players. My money says the PC gamers would pwn people using an Xbox and controller.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
The only thing that Halo 2 redefined was hype. If these guys think that Halo 2 - which has been on the Xbox for months now - is going to be a selling point for Vista, they're sorely mistaken.
I skipped ME and 2k for gaming purposes. They both sucked for it.
:D
I have my concerns that Vista is going to be the next ME. I seriously doubt it, but I wouldn't put it past the boys at Redmond to hand us another debacle. So, I'm going to wait 6 months before I even consider upgrading.
I'm not buying a Mac, though. I like my games too much
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
The original Mac OS had this (circa System 7, at least). The disc would put a couple KB of config files into your "preferences" folder and that was that. Of course, this was because we had 250 meg hard drives in systems that had CD drives as well...
For the last 3 years, Microsoft has said that they're extending their XBox Live service to Windows when Vista comes out. (No, I don't know why nobody has reported it either; maybe because it still seems so far off. The usb version of the XBox 360 controller [announced at the same time] has already come out.) Anyway, Halo 2 comes to mind when I think of a game that utilizes XBox Live well. It makes sense that they'd use that title to highlight the new features of Windows Vista.
Notice, btw, how they're reinforcing their overall position by leveraging their two platforms in tandem. When some people say cross-platform they're thinking Windows/Mac/Linux. When other people say cross-platform, they're thinking PC/Console. Microsoft is creating an enticing proposition for the content developers.
Not true, I had to up to XP to play EQ2
:D
According to this page, not unless you were using Windows 95. EQ II supports 98/2000/ME/XP. And if you were running Windows 95 in 2004, WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?
And I laugh at some of these new games that "require" Windows XP...funny, they run on Windows 2000 fine. I'm playing Battlefield 2 (XP only), and Fable: the Lost Chapters (XP only) with no more issues than any of the XP users are experiencing.
Me, I just swore to avoid Windows XP because it doesn't offer much over Windows 2000, and so far I've had no issues with that. Now, Vista I will probably buy, but not because it supports Halo 2 (couldn't care less). I'll buy it because its an excellent upgrade for Windows 2000. When you skip an entire release, Microsoft's OS products are a lot more enticing
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
What are you smoking to say CS doesn't have marketshare?
STEAM PLAYER NUMBER STATISTICS
This page last updated: 2:00pm PST (22:00 GMT), February 09 2006 Average unique users per month: 2,625,878
Game Current Players Current Servers Player Minutes / Month
Counter-Strike 105,554 54,018 4.760 billion
Counter-Strike: Source 49,241 27,577 1.378 billion
Off Xboxconnect, showed 10,000 players for a day.
btw, those CS stats where for current players online, not a total for a day.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
Also, W2k uses less CPU and memory.
I know you can turn off all that fisher price and bubble help crap off, and turn on your desktop icons (What dunderhead at Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to hide your desktop icons? Good God....) - but that's the point - I don't want it like that in the first place - it should be turned OFF by default. I don't want to spend time turning all this crap off. It shouldn't be there in the first place. if you want it, then fine, it should be up to you to turn it on.
The only thing I had to turn off with 2000 was the personalised menus - lordy, that still drives me up the wall when I use someone elses machine.
And Ex Pee has product Activation, something I have serious issues with. if it has product Activation, it stays on the shelf (i loved Partition Magic, but they too started using Product Activation, so I haven't bought an upgrade - I'm still using version 5!
And hey, it's a really, really nice feeling wiping Ex Pee from a computer :o)
-- Fuck Beta
Me, I just swore to avoid Windows XP because it doesn't offer much over Windows 2000, and so far I've had no issues with that. Now, Vista I will probably buy, but not because it supports Halo 2 (couldn't care less). I'll buy it because its an excellent upgrade for Windows 2000. When you skip an entire release, Microsoft's OS products are a lot more enticing :D
K ernel/default.aspx
r nel.mspx
Actually this is a sad myth in the Windows world, a lot did change with WindowsXP, stuff that would be important to almost everyuser, and from your level of knowledge especially you.
Things from several fairly big performance, but also stability changes are in WindowsXP, and were worth the upgrade, sorry that you didn't ever move over. However at this point, I agree you should just wait for Vista if XP would cost you to upgrade in the meantime.
However for people that think XP is only Win2K with crayon buttons, do a bit of reading, there are things that would surprised a lot of people.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/12/XP
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/kernel/xp_ke
Win2k was a massive milestone in the Windows world, so XP got overlooked, and this is where you will note a lot of things that the 'average' journalist just don't get or didn't understand well enough to report on. Also remember than WindowsXP is basically the newer Windows 2003 Server code base, (as long as you have SP2 installed).
PS To add to the above thread about Halo2 being used to FORCE users to upgrade to Vista, that is about insane. If that was MS's intent then the WPF and all the other Vista technologies they are making available for XP would not be available for XP users. Why would Microsoft bother?
Secondly, Bungie is the developer of Halo2, they actually make the decisions on the platform and graphics requirements, Microsoft doesn't micro manage their work.
So all the people with the conspiracies need to get a life.
Take Care,
TheNetAvenger
I AM boycotting it.
Did you read a word I said? I'm BOYCOTTING DRM, not the OS it is attached to.
You don't magically feed the DRM machine by buying the OS. You feed the DRM machine by purchasing DRM-infested videos and music and playing them on the OS in question. Since I don't plan on feeding the DRM machine, I feel good about the upgrade.
Look at it this way: if nobody BUYS HD-DVD movies, and therefore nobody PLAYS HD-DVD movies on Vista, then nobody will experience the DRM.
Be reasonable: you can have the OS without partaking in the DRM. And be realistic: it's not like yours or my stance is going to help anyway, the sheeple are still going to eat DRM up...Apple anti-DRM folks already know this first-hand.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
No, you're not, because "not planning to do anything [with it]" is not the same as actively avoiding it and working against it. Your "mini-boycott" won't make any difference, because Microsoft can still point to a chart and say "X million people bought our DRM-infested OS, so obviously they don't have a problem with DRM! Go ahead, US Government, make it mandatory to connect to the Internet (or some other thing that you will do)!"
It doesn't matter if you aren't planning to use it, because you're still part of the number that Microsoft will point to to justify it's existence.
Besides, even if you disregard all that, Microsoft is still pushing DRM and you're still supporting them by buying their products. If you really care as much about stopping DRM as you say you do, you'll boycott all products from every company that pushes DRM, or at least try as hard as you can to do so.*
*I can see maybe having an Apple product because of the strategic value of keeping the market fragmented between "Fair"Play and PlaysFor"Sure," or getting Windows because you're absolutely required to use it for your job, or something.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Lets see here...
They removed the 200G limit on mapped files... Wow thats useful for... well nothing unless you have a 64-bit machine.
Larger than 220M driver images, again really useless, the average windows driver is less than a meg.
Larger registry's, so now you can consume more than 300M of memory for your registry, which is just silly, frankly if your registry is that big you need to run a registry cleaning utility
Changes to the default use of large pages.. primarly a debugging tool, and a slight performace decrease if you only have 128M of ram on XP
More efficent work set trimming, which is nice except it doesn't work as advertised with my tests which show that the 2000 VMM is acually faster for systems with fewer than 4 processors
Reduced lock contention, again won't affect the majority of desktop users which have 1 or two processors.
So i'm getting bored... about the only things in that whole list that might help desktop users are the "faster hiberate and resume, a the system restore/and driver rollback" options.
On the negative side, I have to call M$ every few months when I want to resinstall the OS on my PC because i've changed the motherboard or upgraded to a larger harddrive as my system drive.
No thanks, I will stick to 2000... and when it finally gets to the point where 2000 is completly unusable I will finally switch my primary OS to linux (even though I think it is an archaic piece of crap).