Halo 3 and greed

I play games on my PC. If the statistics are to be believed, you do too. I have an overclocked SLI “rig” for playing my FPSs and Sims. If you understood that sentence, you’re a gamer — if you were impressed, you may be “hard-core”.
I am not a HCG (hard-core gamer), but I keep my eye on things in the world of video games, and so I can say that Microsoft has done an underhanded, greedy, and short-sighted thing with its extremely popular Halo series of games…IMHO.

I don’t play Halo, never once, but my nephew is a big fan. Recently he used his birthday money to buy Halo to put on the PC they got for Christmas last year. He and his friends had played Halo to death, so he really wanted to buy Halo 2. That was his mission: Get Halo 2.
When he got to the store he discovered that Halo 2 is “Vista only” (his PC is XP) and, extremely disappointed, he settled for Halo instead.

I want you to understand something: there is nothing about Halo 2 that requires Vista except greed. No special video requirements. No special scripting. Nothing. Microsoft simply wants to sell more copies of Vista, and so they wrote a call into the install file of Halo 2 that prevents the install unless the response is “=Vista”.
Quite naturally, I received an email from said nephew asking me if I would install Vista on his PC.

This is marketing blackmail, and the fact that Microsoft did it — never mind that I would never recommend installing Vista over a perfectly functioning XP — lowered my opinion of the computing giant greatly. It irked me so deeply, that I considered advising my nephew to run a crack to bypass the install call.
But that goes against my scrupples, and I had to tell my nephew he was out of luck — no Halo 2.

Now amid much fanfare and hoopla, Halo 3 is released. You have probably seen the “news” of this release in the newspaper and on your local news. Halo fans are ecstatic! Halo 3 has been very eagerly awaited. But guess what? Microsoft wants to sell more Xbox 360s.
So guess what? Halo 3 only plays on the Xbox.

My nephew knows what he wants for Christmas this year. But he’s not going to get it. Santa (me, and my family) will never be blackmailed into buying a Xbox. I advise you not to be blackmailed either.

Copyright 2007 © Tech Paul, All rights reserved

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