More On Vista's Exclusivity / Stranglehold on XP

I've recently gotten a flood of traffic (like twice my normal rate alone) to this article on Vista's exclusive hold on DirectX 10 because gamers are wondering if John Woo's Stanglehold is being, well, held hostage on Vista.

PC Gamers should not fret, if you peruse this blog post you'll see XP gamers have apparently dove into the demo with nothing more than a hail of virtual bullets to worry about. It sounds intriguing and I'll probably download it myself when I get a chance - being a huge Chow Yuan fan and all. Midway is using the Unreal 3 engine for the game and both developer and technology has a good track record on being fairly broad, requirement wise.

In short - expect a similar threshold as to the on BioShock had (if that helps).

I gotta say, though, this is more evidence that Microsoft is simply being a detriment to PC gaming. By causing this divide in technology, every gamer starts to think twice about whether a game will run on XP or if some developer decided to go the lazy route and make it DX10 only. PC gaming doesn't, to put too fine a point on it, need this crap. It's a marketing blunder and one squarely in Microsoft's hands to fix. The way they've dealt with Vista has killed any good "Games For Windows" ever intended to have.

And give us Halo 2, you twerps.