Vista, will it be game?

Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 30 January 2007 08:59

Opinion and Analysis

Poised to launch itself on a reasonably suspecting world, what does the new Microsoft OS offer gamers in particular?  Renowned for driving bleeding edge technology, is there a compelling reason for the hard nose gamer demographic to update to Vista?

Oh it is another exciting time in technology world.  A new operating system is about to become public, and we all have decisions to make about when and where to jump.

From a gaming perspective, there are some home truths that just don’t change.  First and foremost, Windows is the personal computer platform of choice.  This is evident at all levels, from game publishers through to peripheral designers.

Gone are the days when your OS simply presented a way for you to load applications onto the computer.  Now we are in the digital entertainment age, and the OS needs to provide integrated tools for manipulating our life styles in this arena. Or at least this is what Microsoft and Apple lead us to believe.  As such, OS’s have bloated out to millions of lines of codes, with development cycles and budgets to rival any man-made artefact in all of history. 

Adding more “bells and whistles” is the requirement of modern day OS developers and their respective marketing departments.

Anyway – snapping out of the nostalgic days, when you did not need to update your PC hardware to support the OS, now we have Vista, in all its variety of packaging and iterations.  And with a stated Microsoft focus on gaming.  Jason Hill over at The AgeScreenplay blog has an entry in his , discussing Vista and its approach to gaming with Rich Wickham, Director of Mircosoft’s Games for Windows department, from an interview at E3 last year.

One thing that comes out of the discussion is that Vista will provide obvious enhancements for people not normally used to lifting the covers of their machines often.  Giving users a specific interface to view what games are installed, along with some information about said game, and centralised management is merely (pardon the pun) window dressing.