The Gamers’ Temple Oracle

The first Vista-only game from Microsoft arrived in our offices a few days ago for review. This distinction went to Shadowrun as a production delay slipped the Halo 2 release to a couple of days after Shadowrun. One of the interesting things about Shadowrun is that the box clearly indicates that it’s for Windows Vista, but required or recommended system specs are nowhere to be found. Vista introduced the Windows Experience Index (WEI) which is supposed to help gamers benchmark their systems and determine which games are supported, but the WEI required for Shadowrun is not even listed. A check of some of the major online retailers revealed that not a single one of them listed the WEI required for Shadowrun, or even the minimum required system specs to run the game. Some retailers even failed to note that Windows Vista is required! It wasn’t until after installing the game and attempting to run it for the first time that I was informed that the minimum WEI required is 4.0, and I only learned that because the system scored below a 4.0.

Now here’s where things get even more confusing. It took some serious digging, but I was able to find the minimum and recommended specs for the game:

Minimum system requirements:
CPU: P4 3.2 GHz processor or higher
Video: ATI X800 (256 MB or higher), NVIDIA 6800 (256 MB or higher)
Memory: 1 GB RAM

Recommended system requirements:
CPU: Intel Core Duo CPU or AMD FX Dual Core CPU
Video: ATI X1800 (256 MB or higher), NVIDIA 7800 (256 MB or higher)
Memory: 2 GB RAM

If you have spent any time trying to figure out the WEI for your system, then you’ll know that the rating your system receives is equivalent to the lowest score received in the benchmarks that the WEI test runs on your system. Now the minimum required CPU of a P4 at 3.2 GHz will score below a 3.0, meaning that a system with the minimum recommended specs for the game won’t even be able to come close to the required WEI. What’s going on here?

Things went from confusing to just plain bad when I tried to run the game. The system I was using is about two years old, with a P4 3.4 GHz CPU, an NVIDIA 7800 with 256 MB VRAM, and 2 GB System RAM. This is a machine that began life as a Windows XP gaming system and has never had an issue running even the most demanding PC games to date. However, attempting to play Shawdowrun on this system (it was recently migrated to Vista) was a nightmare. Even with the game settings set to the lowest values across the board, the game stuttered and paused constantly during the more action-packed sequences making it practically unplayable - and this on a machine that exceeds all of the minimum specs and hits two of the three recommended specs!

This whole experience has me worried for PC gamers. Vista is such a system hog that it can turn a rig perfectly suited to running system intensive games under XP into a stumbling dinosaur. Making matters worse, if you run a Vista compatibility check before upgrading everything will indicate that your system will do just fine under Vista, and if you look at the packaging or product pages for Vista-only games there’s no indication that P4 systems will have issues with the games.

If you spend several thousand dollars on a new system that can handle Vista and play games, then you run the risk of not being able to play your older, non-Vista compatible games on your new system just so that you can play Shadowrun and Halo 2. If you decide to pass on the new system, then you may find that you’re kept from playing more and more new games as Microsoft pressures game companies to move to Vista only production. However, with Microsoft’s push to integrate Xbox Live and Windows gaming you can also expect there to be far more games debuting on both PCs and the Xbox 360 in the future. This means that you can still play those new games without spending a few thousand dollars on a new PC by spending a few hundred on a new Xbox 360. Perhaps this was Microsoft’s strategy all along, to increase their share of the console market by throwing a big roadblock in front of PC gamers and hoping that many of them would take the detour to the Xbox 360.

As I played through yet another movie-based platform game filled with jumping puzzles that shall remain nameless, I began to wonder if there are any gamers out there that actually enjoy jumping puzzles. Do game companies do market studies in which the gamers polled overwhelmingly ask for more jumping in games?

Jumping sequences are quite simply lazy puzzle design. A short mediocre game can easily be padded out to a long mediocre game by throwing in a bunch of jump sequences and calling it a day. That this is a lazy approach to game design is further evidenced by the fact that jumping puzzles aren’t even implemented well. How many times have you had to make a blind jump because the camera wouldn’t align itself to let you see where you were going? How many video game characters have died because of poor edge detection or shoddy button response? Please, a moment of silence for the fallen…

I’m not really sure what can be done about all this. Game companies will continue to try and exploit movie licenses with hastily produced games filled with jump sequences, and as long as people keep buying these games this will never change. As a game reviewer I can only warn people about what they’re getting themselves into, it is up to the game buying public to stop all this inane hopping about. Remember, every time that you buy a game simply because it has a green, flatulent movie star on the cover you’re asking for more … and dooming intrepid game reviewers to long and frustrating hours repeating the same jump sequences over and over again.

I recently had the chance to review the Xbox 360 Wireless Receiver for PCs. In case you’re not aware of it, it’s a small device at the end of a USB cable that allows you to use any Xbox 360 wireless controller with your PC. I like the Xbox 360’s controller - it looks like Microsoft learned from its mistake with the Xbox’s terrible behemoth of a controller - and it is nice to be able to use it with your PC games. It also lets you use any wireless steering wheels or other special controllers for the Xbox 360 on your PC.

Several things struck me as strange about the receiver, though, and I’m not sure if they were just oversights or conscious decisions on Microsoft’s part for some obscure and nefarious reason. The first and most glaring is the like of included Vista drivers. With Microsoft’s push towards Vista-only PC gaming this is a pretty amazing gaff and I have to chalk this one up to poor management. You’d think Vista drivers would have been developed for it well in advance and included on the disk in the package, but instead Vista owners are forced to go to the Microsoft site and hunt down the drivers on their own.

The next oddity is that no game profiling software ships with the device. This means that if the game you want to play doesn’t support a gamepad you’ll have to hunt down some third party software to map the controls to keyboard strokes. It also means that even with games with gamepad support you may be forced to spend some time in the configuration screen mapping buttons. This seems to be something that may be more of a deliberate oversight by Microsoft. Since Vista only games like Halo 2 recognize an Xbox 360 controller and instantly map the buttons for you, Microsoft is probably pushing developers to include this support in their Vista games and providing incentive for PC gamers to start investing in Xbox 360 peripherals.

Lastly we have the little issue with recharging the Xbox 360 wireless controller. The rechargeable battery pack relies on a USB cable for charging, but when you plug this cable into a PC it won’t recognize the controller. You’d think that the drivers would at least recognize that you are trying to charge your controller and just let you go about your business, but instead every time you charge the controller you need to let the PC know that you don’t want to install any drivers. I’m not sure where to file this one. It seems pretty incredible that no one at Microsoft thought about gamers actually wanting to charge their wireless controllers, but it’s also hard to think of a reason why they wouldn’t want to make the recharging process more seamless. I’m sure that someone has a good conspiracy theory about this one though…

I’ve been holding out as long as possible, but I’ve finally had to bite the bullet and upgrade one of our gaming PCs to Windows Vista. Vista just hasn’t struck me as a necessary upgrade. The next time we need to get a new PC we’ll certainly order it with Vista installed, but Windows XP Pro has been doing its job well enough around here and the thought of breaking numerous vital apps (i.e. games) by making the move filled me with dread. That all changed with the arrival at our offices of an innocuous little package with a certain game called Halo 2 for Vista inside. Now I actually had a reason to go for the upgrade and I picked one of our Dell XPS PCs to be our sacrificial guinea pig (I had nothing against this computer, it’s primary qualifications being that it was not the PC I use for my day to day work and it wasn’t the one I used to play World of Warcraft).

The first step in the upgrade process was to download Microsoft’s Vista Upgrade Advisor application to the PC and verify that it would play nice with Vista. Other than a few warnings regarding incompatible apps (the antivirus program, CD burning software, etc., no surprises there), the application seemed to be happy with the PC and so I went forward with the upgrade. I chose the Ultimate version because I wanted the benefits of the Business edition without losing the multimedia features. I prepped the PC by removing the anti-virus, firewall, and other incompatible utility software and then running the disk defragger on the hard disk. After that I was ready to take the plunge and popped in the upgrade disk.

There were a couple of minor prompts to click-through at the beginning, but after that the whole process was automated. This is not a quick process by any stretch of the imagination, though. The install program warned me that it could take “several hours” to complete and it wasn’t kidding. I can’t say exactly how long it took because I didn’t stand over it through the whole process, but it did clock in at over four hours. Once it got through all that there were the standard timezone and clock type of settings to enter, and a short reboot later I was in Windows Vista. This was not the end of the process, though, as the first thing it did was go onto the internet and determine that there were ten or so updates that I needed to download. After the downloads and another reboot I was back into the Vista desktop. However, I was still not ready for Halo 2 as I had to take care of the lack of anti-virus protection in Vista. It comes with a firewall but when it comes to anti-virus protection all you get is an informational warning informing you that you have none. After locating a Vista-compatible anti-virus package, downloading it, and installing it I was ready for the next step, which still was not running Halo 2. The Vista installation did a great job of detecting the machine’s hardware, but it did a woefully inadequate job of providing the latest drivers for some of the hardware such as the graphics card, even after it went on the internet to look for updates. I had to at least go to the vendor sites for the video and sound cards and get the latest drivers before diving into Halo 2. More installation programs, more reboots. Lastly it was time to add the Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows so that I could use an Xbox 360 controller with the game. Guess what? The installation disk that came with the receiver didn’t include a Vista driver, so it was back to the internet and another download and install. Finally, five plus hours later I was ready to play Halo 2.

It took a lot of time and expense to get a PC running Windows Vista and ready to play a game, and I was lucky enough not to run into any issues bigger than some outdated drivers. I haven’t had a chance to try out some of the other games on that PC under Vista, but I did try World of Warcraft and found that the patcher had issues at the very end of its process which left the game in an infinite state of trying to patch itself each time I tried to load up the game. I’ll have to defer my overall opinion of whether or not the upgrade is worth the trouble until after I’ve had some time to put Vista through its paces and try out some of its new features. I can say that the interface is pretty slick, but a spiffy interface alone is not worth a couple of hundred dollars.

Oh, and what about Halo 2? Well you’ll have to read my review of the game after I’ve had the chance to play my way through the game…

Welcome to The Oracle, the weblog of the Excutive Editor of The Gamers’ Temple, namely me, Ned Jordan. Here you will find my editorials, observations, musings, and such about the video game industry and video gaming in general. I hope that you enjoy reading about this crazy and fascinating industry as much as I enjoy being a part of it… and remember, it is all fun and games around here.