Halo 2 PC Vista Only, With Exclusive Content

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."

Comments

Re:And who cares?

[prisoner-of-enigma]

This negates all the improvements you just listed, and more.

That is your opinion only. There are plenty of people out there who find nothing wrong with the DRM at all because (gasp!) it allows them to do whatever they want to do with it (i.e. make backups, etc.) Just because it prevents you from ripping the latest movie and giving it to all your friends free of charge doesn't mean some people don't find it the least be intrusive...or even less intrusive than the current DeCSS since it offers no legal way to copy it at all.

Not to mention that they shouldn't be bothering with DirectX at all, but instead should be implementing a standard like OpenGL, etc.,

OpenGL? Oh, you mean that graphics standard run by the woefully-lethargic standards body that took years to move from one point release to the next? The standard that came to have almost as many proprietary extensions as it did standard ones? OpenGL was a great thing, and it could've remained a great thing. The problem is, it didn't keep pace with graphics card development and gamer interests, largely due to its glacial roots in professional OpenGL cards. I should know because I have had many such cards over the years. The point here is that Microsoft put DirectX in place and pushed it farther and faster than OpenGL could. The initial DirectX was a disaster and it really didn't come into its own until about DirectX7. Today, DirectX9 is the "standard" whether you like it or not. If you doubt that, just see how many modern 3D-accelerated games you can run without it. QED.

shouldn't have broken IE in the first place

Other than failing a variety of tests that also make Firefox puke (ie ACID test), please explain how IE is "broken" in a way that matters to the average user. Every website on the planet that entertains customers QA's their site on IE first and all other browsers second -- if at all. You stand a much higher chance of getting a non-functional or poorly formatted web page using Firefox or Opera than with using IE. Oh, sure, IE implements things in a non-standard way, but that doesn't matter to the end user! They just care that their pages look right and don't care one whit what coding gymnastics you went through to get it that way. You can get all high 'n mighty about standard-this and standard-that, but it doesn't matter one hill of beans. If the vast majority of people use something, it's generally a de-facto standard. I know that offends your puritanicalism, but it's true.

and shouldn't need an anti-spyware tool since it's only because of the fundamental flaws in the OS that spyware exists anyway!

So are you implying it's impossible to construct a spyware tool for another OS like, say, OS X or Linux? If so, would you be willing to bet a year's salary on that? Don't be so foolish. Your narrow-mindedness is blinding you to reality. Take a step back and remember that this is software, not a religion. Microsoft is a competitor, not the Nazi party. Quit taking this stuff so personally and your judgement won't be so badly marred by your emotions.

Re:And who cares?

[prisoner-of-enigma]

And plenty of people are stupid and shortsighted. What's your point?

My point is that you're being insular, arrogant, stupid, and shortsighted yourself. Everyone is not like you. DRM is not necessarily a bad thing all the time. True, it's far worse than totally unfettered access to digital content, but the media companies are not going to release content in an uncontrolled fashion. Of course, we have the wonderful pirate culture to blame for that, since they've shown themselves to be oh so responsible when it comes to observing the rights of intellectual property holders. But I digress. The point here is that DRM which allows at least limited copying is far, far better than things like DeCSS which allow no legal copying whatsoever. You can argue otherwise 'til you're blue in the face, but that doesn't change the fact that you're wrong. If anything, you're just pouting because you can't violate copyrights anymore. ...and bunches of others that I haven't bothered to list.

Perhaps you missed the part about "modern 3-D accelerated games" in my requirements. Many in your list have a bit of age on them. Try harder next time.

E allows the average user to be subjected to unwanted advertisements.

Perhaps you're unaware of the existence of an integrated pop-up blocker in IE? Or the fact that ad-removal options do exist for IE? Besides, this is no more a "broken" feature than Firefox's lack of support for ActiveX Controls. You're grasping at straws here.

IE allows spyware and adware to take over the average user's computer.

And Firefox on Linux is immune to this...how? A number of exploits have surfaced for FF on Linux. Several of them allowed arbitrary code execution. Are you going to be stupid enough to suggest that all the bugs in FF are gone now? That there will never be another exploit? Or, going further, that FF is somehow immune to social engineering practices that trick users into downloading malicious content? You're making a huge fool of yourself here and not even remotely presenting a challenge to me in this argument.

IE allows the average user's computer to get viruses. IE puts the average user at extreme risk of identity theft.

Blah blah blah. You keep spouting the same old tired lines. I will remind you that FF, Opera, Safari, and every other browser known to man either currently has or recently had numerous exploits available that would allow such as this. If you want to be stupid enough to claim that this will never happen again, go ahead. It will simply reinforce the idea that you're so blinded by anti-MS hatred that you're unable to make a rational decision in this matter. And even if you could somehow magically make FF/Opera/Linux/OSX/whatever immune to code exploits, all of these are still vulnerable to socially engineering an ususpecting, ignorant user into doing all manner of nefarious things to their own machine. Even non-root users can do a lot of damage, especially to themselves (deletion of user home directory would hurt, now, wouldn't it? And that can't be stopped by simply restricting root access because the user has rw privs to his/her home dir). Gosh, you didn't think about that, did you? Now that I mention it, you didn't think much at all about this whole concept, did you? You just reacted emotionally, like a good /. myrmidon.

ot to mention that by now the number of websites that don't work in Firefox are negligable.

Oh really? You don't surf much, do you? I use FF every day (I'm using it right now). I come across at least one or two every day that don't render properly in FF but look fine in IE. Sure, FF is trying to do things the "web standard" way and IE is doing things the "Microsoft" way, but my original point stands unmolested: none of this matters to the end user. If it renders properly in IE, it doesn't matter if the site had to be coded in object-oriented FORTRAN. The user doesn