Microsoft has been displaying a rather schizophrenic attitude towards PC gaming recently—on one hand, the company wants the PC platform to be recognized as a first-class gaming citizen, but at the same time it is fragmenting the market unnecessarily with the release of Vista-only titles such as Halo 2. Now, the cracking group Razor 1911 has fought back against the idea of Vista-only titles, with the release of a patch for Microsoft's new game Shadowrun that allows it to be run on Windows XP.
The cracked game comes bundled with a subdirectory named "xp" that contains replacements for several game files. According to the patch notes, the game will only work with single-player bot matches and LAN-based multiplayer, not online multiplayer. The retail game validates users over Windows Live in a manner similar to Blizzard games, so it is not surprising that a cracked version would be missing the ability to play online. What isn't clear is whether or not the "xp" patch would work on retail versions of the game as well.
Those not willing to find out can wait for a company called Falling Leaf Systems, which has a page on its site that offers a free XP compatibility utility called the Alky Compatibility Libraries if you buy either Halo 2 or Shadowrun through its Amazon referral links.
These and other attempts to bypass Vista-only requirements are proof that there is a strong demand for games that work on both operating systems. While Microsoft has made the argument that adding DirectX 10 required an architectural change to the operating system that could not easily be backported to Windows XP, this argument falls flat when it comes to Halo 2 and Shadowrun, neither of which use DirectX 10. They are tied to Vista purely as an incentive to get more gamers to upgrade to Vista, something that the data indicates is happening at a glacial pace. While there are DirectX 10 games in development, such as Crysis, it will be some time before most games make use of DirectX10 features and a long time before games will require both DirectX 10 (via Vista) and a DirectX 10-compatible graphics card.
Ars Technica
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