Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Purely because we haven’t mentioned it and probably should – er, as above. Should you buy it? Hmmm. It’s pretty good – a far more pleasant desktop environment than Vista, and noticeably nippier in certain areas. But, long story short, it ain’t gonna make a blind bit of difference to your everyday videogaming, unless you’re into running framerate counters at all times and watching ferociously for an occasional 1-3 frames per second difference. If you’re buying a new PC though, make sure it comes with 7 rather than Vista. Oh, and do install the 64 bit version – very few compatibility problems (really old games are the most likely thorns in the ointment) and it means you can use more than 3Gb of RAM.

Of course, knowing our audience, anyone who’s genuinely interested in Win7 has probably been running A Version for months anyway….

Idle hardware browing leads me to Techradar’s coverage of Microsoft’s concept mouse project. Usually, attempts to redesign one of the most fundamental features of the PC is something I greet with a sneer – how can you be so stupid as to waste so much money on trying to replace the irreplaceable? When it’s Microsoft, though, for all their flaws it’s worth paying attention to.
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Don’t worry – I’m not going to inflict a blow-by-blow technical details post on you. This is more to point out that the Release Candidate 1 for Microsoft’s next operating system is now free to all comers, and to address the question of whether we gamers should care about it a lot, a little, or not even slightly.
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Shacknews have posted up an extract from an interview with Ensemble’s Dave Pottinger in which he talks about the cancelled Halo MMO. It turns out the model was very much “World Of Halocraft”, as people had suggested.

Shack: So you didn’t have plans to go for a more FPS-style game.

Dave Pottinger: It was definitely more of a classic MMO, but it still had that very action feel. Definitely more actiony than WoW.

Go read.

Well here’s a spot of news. Games For Windows Live Gold accounts are now to be free. According to a 1Up report, Microsoft announced today that PC users will no longer have to pay for a Live Gold account to be able to access the cross-platform shenanigans of their multiplayer gaming. Which can only be delightful news to the 360’s paying suckers.

1Up go on to say that MS are planning a GFW Marketplace, aping the Xbox Live Marketplace, also offering various downloadable bits and pieces from demos to extra gaming content. Which sounds awfully similar to, er, the rest of the internet.

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The existence of a Halo MMO is an ongoing rumour, but how likely is it?

It’s a safe bet that if anyone was going to be able to pull off a successful MMOFPS, it would be Bungie and Microsoft with a version of Halo. Of course it might just be on 360, but why wouldn’t MS try to tap into the Blizzard millions with a cross-platform version? This is more than wishful thinking: the clues are out there. No, they really are.
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Dear RPS Readers,

As not one of the quintessential quartet that makes up the Rock Paper Shotgun team were able to make it out to Los Angeles, they sent me instead. Well, they say they “weren’t able to make it out” – they probably all remembered that going to E3 as a journalist lumps you in with a large group of hobbyist “journalists” who whoop and pump their fist in the air when executives come out on stage during press conferences.
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The race to establish the Youtube of gaming continues. Kongregate - which we really should visit more often – is by far the most likely bet at the moment, with its 4000+ free games, but predictably Bigger Boys are trying to snatch a piece of pie. Enter Microsoft with its Popfly project, which combines a gallery of user-made games with simple tools to create and share your own.

It’s mainly show-offery for Silverlight, Microsoft’s proprietary Flash rival, and doesn’t seem yet capable of going much beyond basic casual games and retro remakes. Its main requirement, though, is simple patience, allegedly not any sort of coding experience, so a suitably inventive mind could churn out some gems. I’ve not had time to try devising my own game yet, but it took me mere minutes to modify a pre-generated Missile Command clone into spawning such a bewildering deluge of giant-size rocket ’splodes that my quad-core processor wept (not a good sign of Popfly’s worth , quite frankly). I am so creative.

It’s all very interesting, though yet to demonstrate greatness – if, however, anyone here fancies delving deeper and establishing what this thing’s actually capable of, please do link to your creations below. We won’t laugh, promise.

This wibble is only loosely related to gaming, but as it concerns what our PCs will be like in a couple of years’ time, hopefully it’s of some interest to those who haven’t yet heard about Windows 7. If not, sorry. I’ll put my fun-hat back on tomorrow, promise.

Upgraded to Vista yet? Well, of course you have. All those wonderful platform-exclusive games, those high-end graphical effects not possible on XP, all that added stability, security and speed… Irresistible, non?
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I can’t help but feel a successful campaign will need something a little stronger than a single page of dense text – an entirely ineffectual online petition and detailed instructions on exactly where to post jiffy bags full of dog poo, perhaps – but hell, it’s a start. I’m generally a little too resigned to Microsoft despotism to get terribly upset about their damn-fool misfires, but Games For Windows Live is one thing that really does make me want to take the hose to Redmond executives.
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