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Alan Wake Reconfirmed As PC/360 Exclusive
Alan Wake (the game with the really great tornado from last year's E3) has been reconfirmed as an exclusive title for Microsoft platforms. Via Wired's Game|Life blog, the news comes from the awesomely named Helsingin Sanomat website. Remedy (makers of the Max Payne titles) had this game slated as a 360/PC exclusive back in their E3 2006 trailers, but news of Microsoft's new 'mentoring' role for the company appears to have renewed interest in the game. It's unclear why Microsoft isn't following their general pattern of purchasing the company outright, but the 30-employee strong company is staying independent. Microsoft's resources still back the company, though: "Microsoft has huge machinery for games production. If a team of 80 voice actors are needed from the States, they can provide it. Their test laboratory is also fantastic."
No, this is NOT a PC/360 exclusive title. This is a VISTA/360 exclusive title.
From TFA (emphasis mine): Alan Wake will require either the Windows Vista operating system or Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming console as its platform.
Go f**k yourselves, Remedy! I'm not switching to Vista just to play one of your damned games! You want me to play your game? I expect a copy of Vista to come with it, and we all know that that's NOT going to happen. Otherwise, I'll be sticking with XP and going back to your gaming pinnacles, Max Payne and Max Payne 2!
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I was waiting for someone to state that exact response. Thank you for not making me wait too long. No, it absolutely does not sound silly. Your attempt to equate the two is what sounds silly, or actually closer to ignorant.
As people like you always tend to forget, upgrading a PC vs. a console it a totally different experience. When you upgrade a console, it's with the expectation of newer and better games. The console is expected to be engineered with a narrow scope and hardware platform with one specific function -- to play games, although admittedly many are marching towards becoming media centers. The hardware is a specific chipset; the coding is for a specific set of circuitry. You can have a reasonable expectation that everything will work just fine and if something goes wrong, you lose your ability to play games.
With Remedy's expectations that you must upgrade to Vista, there are a ton of other issues that might be affected. We're already getting reports of hardware and software incompatibilities across the board. If you have iTunes, don't go to Vista - the blue screen will follow. I've been reading that old games run slower on Vista than on XP. I've not heard good things about NVidia's drivers for Vista. There are lots of reports of application incompatibility.
So, upgrading to Vista just because Remedy doesn't want to use DX9 will likely have more ramifications than just the cost of upgrading to a new operating system. In this case, if something goes wrong you could lose a lot more than just your ability to play games, not the least of which is who-know-how-many hours possibly rebuilding your PC, loss of data, inability to use software that you've been using for years, and lots of other headaches that have been reported for just about every new Windows version since 3.1 -> 95.
In fairness, some have reported no problems at all with Vista, and I say "Good for them". And, yes, yes, we know all about backups or using a test PC instead, blah, blah, blah. We're geeks. We know all about that. Some ignoramus parent who buys Vista (A) because it's programmed into them by Microsoft marketing, (B) because they want to have the newest status symbol, or (C) because their kid is screaming to play Crysis or Alan Wake isn't going to take the same precaution and therefore risks encountering a lot of upgrade problems. "Gee, dad. Did you back up all of your data before you tried to upgrade?" "No." "How far back does your data go?" "Since XP was released." You don't run into that with a console upgrade because your old console is still there!
Upgrading to Vista just to play one game has far more risks involved for things that have nothing to do with that game than buying a new console just to play one game. Forcing customers to a whole new operating system is a much more arrogant statement on the company than forcing them to buy a new console.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.