I’ve been looking forward to playing Halo 2 for a while now. Not being as much of a gamer as I once was I’ve decided to skip this current generation of consoles — when they’re available at all they’re quite expensive, and the console game prices are just insane. I have no desire to spend $500 just so that I can spend a further $60-$70 PER GAME in order to have fun and relax. I mean, there are limits. So, to play Halo 2, I had to wait for the PC version to come out, and I just bought it earlier tonight. Well, I haven’t even played yet, and it’s proving exceedingly annoying already. Why? Because it’s made by a company whose motto is “you’ll bloody well do what we tell you and sign up for what we tell you to sign up for and you’ll like it.”
No really. It’s not like there aren’t reasons why Microsoft should feel that hubristically imperial about the Halo 2 for PC user. After all, if you’re even capable of playing this game it means that you have Windows Vista installed. This already suggests a certain gullibility and/or suggestibility on the part of the user. My excuse is that in my case it was free (a free upgrade). Why does H2PC need Vista? Mostly because it uses DirectX 10, which is only available with Vista. Of course it also suggests that said user went out and spent hundreds of dollars on a video card that handles DX10 well, and those are limited to the top 2 card lines by Nvidia (8600 and 8800) and the new X2000 line by ATI. I got an 8800 GTS (which I will write about at some point). In short, at this early stage in the Vista life-cycle the H2PC gamer is pretty much the game-maker’s wet dream — one that will buy what he’s told to buy. Mostly so he can later buy more stuff and sign up for tons of asinine crap that do little but spirit away his personal information to Microsoft’s already-by-now enormous marketing databases.
And trust me, that’s where Halo 2 for the PC starts to annoy. I rather liked the low price ($40 in Canada) compared to most of the latest titles, but in reality Halo 2 is a bit like a bit of IBM hardware — the price of entry is reasonable, but the hardware itself is ultimately only a way for IBM to score a service contract that will bring in far more revenue than selling big iron. Likewise, Halo 2 is really eye candy designed to sell a few things to the user, and those things are Windows Vista (remember, you can’t play H2 on Windows XP, I guess it’s just not good enough), Windows Live (I’ll stick with Gmail, thanks) and Games for Windows Live, which is like 360 Live if you don’t have a 360. But frankly it really doesn’t sell any of these products very well. Halo 2 for PC does an extremely poor job integrating these things together and doesn’t introduce them to you in a way that makes you want to use them.
The problems there are multifold.
Before the game can startÂ
For one thing, H2PC doesn’t install the way any other program installs. Once again Microsoft figured it had to take something that works well for EVERYONE and, logically, completely fuck up the process. I’d like to have a word with the crack monkey who thought it would be a good idea to install a game, but create no desktop icons, no quick launch icons and no shortcuts in the Start Menu whatsoever. No, to play Halo 2 once it’s installed you have to open the Computer icon and double-click on the Halo 2 DVD. Unless you’re one of those people who hasn’t bothered turning off Autoplay for your optical drive (if you’re one of those, no, I will not fix your computer).
Secondly, Games for Windows Live. I appreciate Microsoft’s crack-dealer-inspired efforts to get me to sign up for their pay service (hey, the first month’s free!) but frankly I tried the multiplayer version of Halo and to say that I was unimpressed would be a strong understatement. That game has no feel whatsoever. Hopefully Halo 2 will provide a better experience, but I’m really not expecting it to live up to the expectations set up by online games that are actually, you know, good. Games like Unreal Tournament 2004 or Half-Life 2. Perhaps it will, but I really don’t know that, so there’s pretty much zero chance that I’ll sign up for the $10/month membership until I’ve given the game a thorough going-over.
As such the constant nagging that Halo 2 provides if you’re not signed on to Games for Windows Live (GWL from now on) does not augur well. It certainly gives me the impression that the game experience is a bit crippled unless I create a new account. So I created a new account. Sorta. Kinda. You see, I made the mistake of using the very buggy WGL window within H2PC to check the availability of a gamertag… and the game proceeded to place a hold on that name, a hold which then made it impossible for me to actually register an account with that gamertag. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. Yet another shining example of Microsoft’s right hand not knowing what Microsoft’s left hand is doing. Hey, idiots! I like the name “clevershark”. I’ve been using it just about everywhere for over 10 years. I hate when I can’t use it, and I hate it doubly when some badly-written coding clusterfuck by a company I’m not too terribly fond of in the first place (but which insisted on buying a company I at least used to like until they bought the one company that made games for their main competitor, I wonder why that happened) is causing that situation to arise.
And (a preview of things to come) even though you’re playing in “connected” mode and have a constant internet connection Halo 2 does not synchronize its GWL and local save points!!! So if the game crashes (and it will, I’ll have more to say about that later) you have to restart at the point at which you last manually saved the game. Which, if you game for hours as I like to do occasionally, means that you can find yourself replaying very long, complicated stretches of game if you want to get “Achievements” on GWL. That’s no way to make friends. It also makes no sense whatsoever, given the constant bitching the game serves to you about how important it is to be connected to GWL before starting the game. Once again, left hand, meet right hand. Right hand, left hand. This leaves me with the distinct feeling that Microsoft just CANNOT GET IT TOGETHER. That’s right, the world’s highest-market-cap company can’t figure out how to make their game software talk with their network. And people trust it with their enterprise infrastructure?
Another example of that is GWL’s own partial disconnection with Microsoft Live. Again, something else that makes no sense. To register on GWL you need a Live account, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to register both at the same time, so in the middle of registering for GWL you’ll have to open up a new browser, register for Live, and then enter your new Live email in the GWL browser window so that eventually you might be able to get some fucking gaming happening. Somewhere even IBM engineers are sitting back and thinking ‘this is much more complicated than it has to be’.
And of course all this is done in browser windows, separately from the game. Get all your regs done, then get back to the game, copy the GWL reg data into the game’s interface, and you’ll be ready to go… not quite. Halo 2 for PC is quite new and it’s painfully obvious that they haven’t gotten rid of all the bugs yet, so even if you specify that it should save your GWL profile it won’t! You’ll have to reenter your GWL and Live data the next time you start the game. Ah-ha, you think, I can run the updater before that! Well no you can’t, because because you need to be connected to live before you can fetch and install the downloads.
It’s quite ridiculous, that’s what it is. And by and large you haven’t even started gaming yet.
More coming up tomorrow, including my early impressions of the game, which will definitely be more positive than this early pre-gaming assessment.