- General Heed
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- Exalted Heroic Member
Bring Back Rocket Race!!!
Posted by: Btcc22
Posted by: General Heed
I've been in these forums awhile and it seems the biggest controversy about Halo 2 PC was that it was a Windows Vista exclusive. Not many people took that too well. People refused the simple solution of simply upgrading to Windows Vista. I mean, come on, what's so bad about Windows Vista? It's a great OS. It's secure, has tons of awesome features, and looks cool (Windows Aero). All the claims of Windows Vista running slow and taking up too much system resources are absurd. It's not the OS's problem, it's people's computers being too slow. It's like Windows 95 owners saying Windows XP takes up too much resources on their computers. Now with Windows 7 out, people say it's great even though it's almost exactly the same as Windows Vista.
You're saying that people should have gone out and purchased a new operating system for the sake of playing a half baked port? Now that's playing into Microsoft's hands since the sole reason for it being restricted to Vista was to sell the OS as opposed to say, some technical restriction that made the game better in some form. It wouldn't surprise me if the game was intended to be a loss leader from the get go. Port it quickly with minimal effort and hope people buy Vista for it.
As for Vista being a good O.S., I'm afraid I have to disagree. If a PC is running slowly then it's generally the fault of the software running on it. The operating system for example.
Aside from boot times, Windows 7 runs at almost the same speed as Windows Vista on the same hardware. In fact, Windows 7 has higher minimum requirements than Windows Vista which explains why it may be faster.
I think there actually is a technical reason why Halo 2 PC is a Windows Vista exclusive. DirectX 10 at the time was only available on Windows Vista. Now I'm not sure if Halo 2 PC was a DirectX 10 game, but there are many other Games For Windows Live Games that are DirectX 10. Microsoft didn't release DirectX 10 for Windows XP for the same reason they didn't release DirectX 11 for Windows XP. It's an obsolete OS. Even when Halo 2 Vista came out, Windows XP was on its way to being obsolete.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Windows Vista. I blue-screened more in Windows XP than I did in Windows Vista. Windows XP slows down over time. So far, Windows Vista has not slowed down and I'm running on obsolete hardware too (Dell XPS M1530, Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 8400M GS) for years.
You see, if a PC is running slowly, it's because the hardware is not enough to handle the new software. What you're saying is the same as saying that Windows XP is a terrible operating system because it runs so slowly on a computer that used to run Windows 95 perfectly.
Why don't people get the fact that newer OS's will always have higher system requirements? The reason people like Windows 7 better is because it was released at the right moment when people finally decided to get new PC's that had newer hardware. But trust me, if Windows Vista was never released, and if Windows 7 as we have it today, was released when Vista was supposed to be released, it would get the exact same bad rep as Vista did. The reason is because Windows 7 is the exact same as Windows Vista. Under the hood, everything is the same. The features you get in Windows 7 are nothing special or exclusive. They are all backwards compatible with Windows Vista. Take Windows Media Player 12. It's supposedly a Windows 7 exclusive, but it works in Vista by simply copying and pasting the Windows Media Player folder into Vista.
Therefore, I maintain that Windows Vista is a great OS and the best for gaming at the moment. I know Halo 2 PC works in Windows 7, but since 64-bit is starting to become popular, many people are reporting issues getting Halo 2 Vista to work in 64-bit editions of Windows 7. In fact, many Games For Windows Live games have issues in Windows 7. As a result, Windows Vista is still the best gaming platform in terms of compatibility.