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Vista and Games For Windows Hits the Street

by Matt Enis

I’ve never owned a graphics card that had its own cooling fan.

But now, courtesy of Nvidia, I am now the proud owner of a new GeForce 8800. And just in case my opening statement has left me open to ridicule from the overclocking community out there, I must add — I am sure that the Nvidia GeForce 8800 will make my copies of Age of Empires II and Word 97 run like a dream on my 15-inch eMachines monitor if I can figure out how to cram this thing into my stock Gateway.

The card was a gift given to game bloggers and journalists attending a Microsoft press conference in New York a couple of weeks ago, whether or not they had a decent rig at home. And I’m bringing it up here both in the spirit of full disclosure and because it’s a good illustration of the challenges and opportunities that Microsoft will face as the company moves forward with the rollout of Windows Vista and their accompanying “Games for Windows” initiative. But more on that later.

Born from a merger of Microsoft’s Windows gaming team into the company’s Interactive Entertainment group, “Games for Windows” is basically an effort to

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demystify PC gaming for casual users both on their home computers and at retail stores.

Let’s face it, most consumers currently view the PC games section of their local electronics store as something akin to the outskirts of a 15^th century map — dragons and chaos be here. The tiny system specs box on most PC games reads like it was composed by a technical writer with a grudge,

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and even fairly knowledgeable consumers who have recently bought a new, off the shelf system are going to be frustrated when they walk out of the store with a graphics intensive title and are forced to spend an hour at home installing new drivers and endlessly tweaking the resolution and lighting effects so that their game doesn’t run like a slide show.

Microsoft seeks to smooth out that frustration curve. The company has described Vista its first operating system “built from the ground up with gaming as a core scenario,” and judging by the brief demo given for the press by Kevin Unangst, director of global marketing for Games for Windows, several of the system’s new features will definitely make Windows a more welcoming platform for casual gamers.

The most obvious point of difference with XP is the inclusion of a “Games Explorer” window accessible from the Start menu, offering a single launch point for all game related content on a user’s harddrive—everything from Chess Titans and new versions of Solitare and Minesweeper which come with the system, to the latest titles that users have purchased or downloaded. Here, parents are also offered a significantly beefed up set of parental controls, where they simply select which games their kids can play, allow their kids to access titles based on ESRB or PEGI ratings, or delve a lot deeper, allowing, for example, any games that contain mild violence while blocking all games with offensive language. Selections can even be made to allow games to be played only at specific times of the day. Sorry kids.

The feature which most impressed me, however, was the integrated system benchmarking. Games Explorer automatically checks out your hardware, testing things like your processor speed, what type of graphics card you have and how much available memory is on your system. The result is a simple ranking of 1 to 5. Games for Windows titles will have a similar ranking of 1 to 5, so that shoppers can easily tell which games will work well with their system before purchasing something at the store. That may sound tough to manage, since some games might require more RAM even on a slower processor, for example, but Microsoft has said that it plans to work closely with developers seeking Games for Windows branding to do extensive compatibility testing. The games will also be required to meet rigorous autoinstall requirements that will make the games simpler to load and play once shoppers take their purchase home.

In addition, as has been widely reported, Vista is engineered to work with the LIVE service popularized by Xbox and Xbox 360, and the 360s controllers, headsets and steering wheels will all be compatible with Vista systems.

I had a chance to check out Shadowrun, the upcoming multiplayer FPS from Microsoft Game Studios, with Jim Ying, the company’s global product manager for first party games, and it looks like the cross platform LIVE service is going to be pretty seamless. The game itself is based on the old pen and paper RPG franchise, where magic has returned to the modern world after a 5,000 year hiatus, and global corporations become locked in a fight with a group called the Lineage over how it will be controlled. The action seemed a little chaotic at first glance—among many of the games available magic powers, players can fly through the air, use cybernetic eyes to see through walls, and can teleport through floors, walls and ceilings at will, making level maps unusually open—almost like they were being played with the clipping turned off. After playing for a few minutes, though, it became evident that the developers at FASA had done a lot of work to ensure that the game balances out, and that the playing field is level between players on 360s and PCs. It looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Have to say, a licensing a concept where flying through walls and ceilings makes sense as a built in feature is an inspired choice to get the cross platform competition launched. It’ll remain to be seen how future titles deal with keeping things fair.

Boiling all that down, Microsoft is essentially trying to make PC gaming a lot more like a console experience, and they’re already working to carry that vibe over to retail as well. Best Buy, Circuit City, Target, Wal-Mart, CompUSA, Gamestop, etc., are all working right now to put together Games for Windows kiosks near the area where consoles and their games are sold. PC titles will finally have their own demo stations where shoppers can check out the latest and greatest.

Back to the GeForce 8800, which is currently at the bleeding edge of the never ending PC graphics race. It’s the first card out there that will support DirectX 10, which, in turn, is currently exclusive to the new Vista operating system. Together, they produce unbelievably realistic lighting and shading effects with a silky smooth frame rate that could make a console fan such as myself wish he didn’t have a drinking habit to finance. There’s a reason the card alone retails for as much as a next generation console — it already produces far superior graphics on a top end system, and the Alienware demo stations set up throughout the press conference area were showcasing upcoming titles like Crysis and Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures in all of their fully rendered glory. They look absolutely gorgeous.

Unfortunately, a top end system is something that I do not own. I tried installing the card, but it is understandably very large, and when placed in my only PCI express slot, it ended up jutting against my CPU heatsink on one side, and against several smaller but probably important things on the other. To use it, I’m estimating that I’d need at minimum a new motherboard, a new case and a new power supply.

Taking all the intricacies of hardware and OS upgrades into consideration, it seems like Microsoft is making a conscious two-pronged effort here to push a new operating system that, despite tighter security features and many, many cool bells and whistles that remind me a whole lot of Mac’s OS X, doesn’t seem fundamentally different than XP.

Hardcore PC gamers will need to buy Vista in order to get DirectX 10 and maximize the benefit of new hardware upgrades. Other than bragging rights for creaming the competition on LIVE with the help of a mouse and keyboard, most of the other Vista gaming features probably won’t matter much to that crowd. These aren’t exactly guys that spend much time trying to find icons on their desktops or puzzling over the system requirements for “The Sims: House Party” at their local Circuit City.

The effort to draw in casual gamers, on the other hand, recognizes some fundamental problems with the current state of affairs in PC gaming retail that no one has ever bothered to address, and could really help revive a segment of the industry where sales have been lagging for several years now.

Some hermits are likely to worry that Games for Windows will cause PC gaming to become homogenized, but given the growth of broadband, I don’t see much of a threat there. The new kiosks and store sections may indeed squeeze a few smaller, unapproved titles out at retail, but hey, it’s retail. PC games were going to start losing that space regardless if something didn’t change.

This still looks like a long, if ultimately promising slog for Microsoft. The vast majority of home PC users are comfortable with XP for now, so we’re not going to see the midnight lines outside of Best Buy that happened when Windows 95 launched with a much more evident set of interface innovations. In fact, judging by recent mainstream press coverage, the upgrade process sounds downright laborious, and many of Vista’s coolest looking features run best on systems that already have a decent graphics card and 2 gigs of RAM. That’s a lot to ask from casual users.

Lookinig a couple of years down the road, though, Vista and Games for Windows will almost certainly be a good thing for the gaming industry. As home users inevitably trade up to newer equipment with Vista pre-installed, they’ll find that PC games departments aren’t so intimidating after all. Both Microsoft and game developers will benefit from having a more standardized set of good peripherals to work with. And building an interactive display area closer to the console games in many retail outlets could, in fact, encourage many adults to junk that 6 year old clunker in the home office and splurge on something new.

(February 15, 2007)


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