Microsoft promised that Windows Vista would usher in a new era for PC gaming as a part of “The WOW Starts Now” marketing campaign. After spending several weeks with a complimentary copy of Microsoft’s new operating system (Ultimate version), we say: “WOW, what was Microsoft thinking?”

As an everyday operating system, Microsoft has a winner. The stunning new look and the Aero interface (while functionality worthless) screams “Sci-Fi movie.” The integrated sidebar allows for an assortment of useful (and not so useful) widgets and the OS simplifies many of the more laborious computing tasks (like hooking into a home network). The first few weeks were sketchy, with numerous appearances by the “Blue Screen of Death,” oddball crashes, and an abnormal assortment of bizarre glitches, but things have improved dramatically over the last few weeks, making for a much more stable environment.

Promoted as a renaissance gaming platform, and so far, our experience with Vista falls so far short of a “gaming platform” it’s laughable. In its current state Vista requires far too many manual tweaks to get games, hardware and peripherals to function properly. Sure XP was riddled with flaws in the early days, but XP wasn’t touted as the savior of PC gaming.

Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and City of Heroes/Villains (pictured) force gamers to do some investigating and tweaking in order to get them running properly on a Vista machine.

Take, for instance, Cryptic Studio’s City of… games. Gamers must manually alter the executable start file to get the in-game cursor to work properly. Worse, this “fix” can only be found in the game’s official forums. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. also forces gamers to wade through unreliable Internet forums to find a fix that will get this fantastic hybrid shooter to work. Even after spending the better part of a day attempting to get it to run for longer than five minutes, we gave up in sheer exasperation. City of Heroes has been out since 2004. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has been in development for several years. Both of these games should run flawlessly on Vista, and they don’t.

During recent testing of Halo 2, a game developed by Microsoft and built exclusively for Vista, several issues were found. Vista’s User Account Control (UAC), a security feature intended to make the OS safe, has become the number one most hated new feature. As the UAC tries to verify every program, in some cases numerous times, with an endless barrage of highly annoying “Do you want to install/run this program” windows. Virtually every power user and gamer deactivates the UAC within 5 minutes after installing Vista.. Sadly, it requires the UAC be enabled in order for Halo 2 to operate. Furthermore, the game will not run until one completes the registration for a Games for Windows - Live! account (more on this later). Simply bypassing the process causes the game to shut down. Lastly, it wasn’t completely compatible with a top of the line GeForce 8800 card. The underlying wireframe kept flashing through the texture maps. While a “known issue,” it remains inexcusable considering how long Vista and Halo 2 (for Vista) have been in development. Apparently Microsoft noticed the glitches since the game’s release date was pushed back from May 8 to May 22.

Tweaks weren’t required for games like Steam’s Half-Life family, The Ship. Others like UT2K4 and Quake 4 seem unaffected, but users simply won’t know what games work or require additional modification until they install them, despite Microsoft’s Chris Donahue, Games for Windows group manager saying “We’ve hand-tested over 1,000 individual Windows XP games on Windows Vista to help ensure that everything runs smoothly for end users.” Which games were “hand-tested?” Endless gaming sites have acknowledged (including the highly respected ExtremeTech.com) through their own independent testing that games run slower on Vista than they do on XP. All of these factoids combine to show that, at best, playing games on Vista can be a crapshoot.

At least not everything about Vista’s game interaction reeks. The first time NetDevil’s post apocalyptic massive multiplayer game, Auto Assault, was fired up it crashed with a “Missing Critical Component” error. That component turned out to be a Microsoft 4.0 XML Parser. As soon as the error message was cleared Vista looked for, found and installed the missing component automatically. This feature works with hardware and software, and thus becomes a favorite new addition to the Microsoft OS.

F.E.A.R. is one example of a game takes a bit of tinkering to get sound working in Vista when it should really be fucntioning out of the box.

Incredibly, neither NVIDIA nor ATI have fully baked Vista drivers yet. Referring back to the City of… games, even after installing the latest drivers from NVIDIA’s website, the game still read them as outdated. Graphic drivers aren’t the only problem. Vista no longer supports hardware DirectSound acceleration, meaning hardware and (older) games that rely on it will not function properly, or in some cases at all. Creative’s line of X-Fi sound cards avoid this problem by utilizing an open-source application sponsored by Creative Labs called “ALchemy”, but this requires gamers to go out of their way to do something that should have already been solved. (Note: F.E.A.R. (a newer game) needs ALchemy to work correctly.)

Vista’s network stack (the stuff behind the curtains that makes a PC network card connect to the Internet) seems more bloated and cumbersome then XPs. Why? No clue. But we found this to be the case while recently testing Bigfoot Network’s Killer NIC (network interface card).

Issues also plague hardware and keyboards. Razer, makers of the Habu gaming mouse and Recluse gaming keyboard (both Microsoft branded) will not install automatically. When first connected, the customary “New Hardware Found” message flashes, but the OS fails to locate the drivers. Yes, the Razer installation software corrects the problem, but these are Microsoft products being installed on a Microsoft OS. There shouldn’t be ANY problems.

Then there’s Games for Windows Live! This application (which comes in Silver and Gold versions ala Xbox Live) allows Xbox and PC users to chat and play against each other. Silver lets players use voice and text chat free of charge, while Gold brings cross-platform competition, multiplayer achievements and advanced matchmaking. Sadly, the devil resides in the details and the way Microsoft plans to handle (or in this case mishandle) this system. First, Live only works with games designed to use it. Secondly, unlike the Xbox Live experience, where gamers do all sorts of cool things and still receive an invite or message from a buddy, the PC Live experience requires a Live enabled game to work. These requirements disqualify Live from being a stand-alone program like Xfire, thus defeating its purpose. Furthermore, several third party chat clients on the market (Xfire, Comrade, etc.) include a slew of features that Live does not, and they do it for free. PC gamers have been playing online longer then console players, and they’ve been doing it for free. Microsoft charges Xbox users $59.99 a year to play online, and now it wants to charge PC users for the same luxury. In the end, it appears that Microsoft wants gamers to pay more to get less.

Common sense dictates that a true “all encompassing game platform” should at the very least support the most recent high profile games, hardware and features without ANY issues. After all, unifying game development under the “Games for Windows” initiative was one of Vista’s main selling points. We wholeheartedly agree with that concept, and at some point in the future (when the first service pack drops at the end of the year perhaps) Vista will live up to the hype. As of right now, it has a long way to go.

The fact that so many of these problems still exist, months after release, borders on sheer negligence. Combine this with the recent announcement by Microsoft that XP will no longer be available on new PCs by the end of January 2008 (nine months from now) and it looks like a wanton attempt to force all Windows users to migrate to Vista. Let’s hope things improve.

Title: New Vistas: Problems with Windows Vista
Author: Eli Shayotovich
Date: 31 May 2007
Source: Game Daily