I pointed out recently that Windows 7 is mostly Vista. I even used Ballmer's quote in a followup comment that it was Vista "just better".

Now I'm going to play devil's advocate and say that's actually a good thing.

Yeah Microsoft didn't remake Windows as they'd implied, plus most people think of Vista as an all-bad train wreck (IMHO half true, but that's a negating statement isn't it?), so anything leveraged onto it is more of the same, right? Maybe not.

Take Vista. Pull out a lot of the more annoying default bits, like the stupid sidebar, the popup control panel window and a lot of the unnecessary services hogging up RAM. Reduce RAM usage overall, so 2gigs of RAM becomes comfortable again. Turn off all that clutter stuff that most Vista users learn to turn off anyway. So by default, it looks and acts cleaner right from the install.

There have been fringe efforts online to create Vista 'lite' installers to streamline the OS like this, to put Vista where it should have been by default.

Then tweak a few of the UI elements, make the taskbar more useful and automatically toggle Aero off when games are launched. Organize everything with a bit more common sense, so the user can barely care about the OS rather than wrestle against it. At this point, Vista's improvements in areas like video streaming might actually get noticed by the common user. The entire experience is smoothed out more.

That could actually work well.

I don't really intend to review the Windows 7 Beta directly, it's a Beta. I just hope this is what the experience is like upon release, because I might actually *gasp* use it.

I'm also crossing my fingers that DX10 / 11 gets a little more stable before the OS releases. Drivers could still be a big issue.

Even I had a bit of faith that Microsoft might come to their senses and make Windows 7 more lean and mean, but frankly it's just a slightly more matured version of Vista with a new name.

I've been under the assumption that I'd finally trade XP for Windows 7 and just skip over Vista, but most likely I'll be sticking with XP for awhile still.

My PC blazes brightly enough, but I don't see much sense in trading framerate in games for slightly better shadows with DX10, especially at the tune of a couple hundred bucks for a new OS.

Marketing-wise (or should I say marketing machine-wise), Microsoft is going to do really well with this. Windows 7 will perform better simply because the average PC is catching up, although it'll still be a dog on most laptops. In other words, buy a new PC this year with Windows 7 and it will run faster than a PC from last year with Vista: The PC itself is faster.

I think Microsoft is doing their customers a disservice though, the minor tweaks and improvements just aren't much. A whole lot of current laptop owners will upgrade to (desperately?) push their performance a little bit more, no matter how small. And for some of them, it could be the threshold they need, although for many others they won't see much difference at all. Either way, the mainstream press has been run over by Microsoft's marketing steamroller.

Apple could have capitalized on this at MacWorld, but they're being dumbasses this season, going back to their old passive-aggressive nature instead of the simply aggressive stance they took against Vista. Oh I'm sure there will be a bit of rumblings, but it's after the fact at this point. It's like they're Microsoft customers themselves, playing wait-and-see. That'll be too late, Microsoft will win this round and it may be the end of Apple's recent upward curve unless they can leverage another iPhone-like device.

I was also a little delusional last year thinking I could maybe switch to Linux on my desktop once Wine catches up to DX10, but once again I overestimated desktop usage on Linux overall, I think it's almost moving backwards in usability while the geeks keep adding flashy gadgetry.

*sigh*

Update: If you want to try it for yourself, the Windows 7 Beta should be available (starting tomorrow afternoon) at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/

Another Update: The Beta is available again after being offline for a day or so.

Stargate Worlds is launching its Beta on October 15th, which I think will be the first serious look into this game beyond a handful of screenshots.

As much as I like the TV series and the license itself is promising (coordinating teams is as natural to their storyline as a Star Trek MMO), this game falls into the category of shooter MMORPG and sadly I think it will suffer in the same ways Tabula Rasa has. This sub-genre overlaps too much with hugely popular FPS games, it's unlikely to hold up well against the likes of Halo, Unreal Tournament, CounterStrike, etc..

There's also been those pesky rumours of cash-flow problems at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment.

We'll see though, maybe they'll exceed my expectations, but honestly right now I'm enjoying WAR too much to take a deeper look into Stargate. I hope they do well with their beta and come out of the gate with a good alternative to the myriad Fantasy MMOs.

The full game is set to launch sometime in 2009.

The most fun I've had so far with WAR's Open Beta has been with the Public Quests (which I love, when they work) and in PvP (RvR areas and Scenarios). That is-- during Primetime hours.

Unfortunately, I tend to play most during the off-hours, either early morning or late evening. Outside of Primetime the RvR areas are ghost towns and Scenario queues don't pop at all. And Public quests aren't playable when only one or two players aside from myself show up.

In other words, this Beta has only been great fun for me between 3pm - 9pm. For Michelle, she's usually working during those hours so she has yet to see a single bit of RvR or Scenario combat and her opinion of Public Quests hasn't been as favourable as mine.

Is WAR just a game for Primetime players? I certainly hope not.

The central design of WAR appears to require a balanced high population present at all times. Public Quests don't scale. RvR works only when there are more / less equal numbers on both sides (Order & Destruction). I cannot say I'm fond of Mythic's queue approach to the problem, I would have much preferred instancing of their RvR areas (say what you like about instancing, at least it lets you play).

I'm hoping this crummy status of boring off-hours is more indicative of the Beta and perhaps our late choice of server: Wurtbad, since at the time all other servers were maxed and in queue for Destruction. I can't imagine myself being more pleased on a high pop server if I'm hitting queues tho, so I've been in a conundrum here.

Hopefully Mythic can balance their server populations better than they've done so far.

Every server should be fun at ALL times.

Update: Right after I posted this I noticed that Ethic @ Kill Ten Rats has similar concerns, you may appreciate his perspective.

WAR's Open Beta has officially begun and my first impressions are mixed.

I was going to write my thoughts down in full, but I'll let the beta take its course and see if things improve by the time the game gets released. For now I'm gonna go cheap and just ramble off the basic points of Good, Bad and WTF.

Good: Visuals, Interface, Public Quests, Characterization, Warhammer Lore. The basic fun factors are there.

Bad: Combat feels spongy (melee especially), Lag is handled poorly, Public Quests get overcrowded, Gameplay bugs abound. Plus Mythic's annoying tendency to rename all established terminology (Ranks instead of Levels, etc.).

WTF: Where's the "you've already killed" (bears, bears, bears) feature for quests? Instead they have specific Kill Collectors? Somehow they found a way to make this part MORE tedious, not less.

My caveat: This is a first impression during beta, which can change very quickly. That's why I haven't gone into much detail or ranted about the finer points. Overall I'm enjoying myself, but I have reservations and there are some serious issues / downsides that I hope Mythic addresses.

I hadn't really planned to examine the 2004 box art of World of Warcraft so deeply, but take a look at this portion. It's lacking in detail, but I think you'll see the same thing I'm seeing:

When WoW was released, I had a hard time convincing my girlfriend to switch. One of her comments was a lack of classes and in a related note she pointed out that there was a race ("with horns") on the box that wasn't in the game. I looked at this little screenshot on the back and brushed it aside as a helm.

Now hindsight is 20/20, I see a female Draenei casting next to a Tauren. Maybe they were meant to be female Tauren at some point? I don't know, I'm not going to read too much into it other than when the game was released, what was in this image didn't make it into the game.

That's not a critical observation, much the reverse.

Yeah, I'm using this in my leverage against the 'polish' catchphrase. To me, this is what polish actually is, Blizzard cut things from their game as late as the box art going to press. They stuck with what was working and they shelved the rest for a later date.

Is this any different from other games? I don't think so. Blizzard had a smaller audience examining their pre-release, plus their PR team knows how to keep things under wraps. There's this myth that they had no beta NDA, but they segmented concurrent betas for PR: the more public one with no NDA, the closed-beta for real testing and even a friends-and-family server in a state between alpha and beta.

Even WoW's public test servers now are notorious for not so much testing (because invariably, most every mistake on PTR will make it to Live) as advertising upcoming changes.

That's the sort of misdirection that Age of Conan, Warhammer and other upcoming MMORPGs are lacking. Hide what you're working on, trickle out the good info and save the hype for what's actually going into the game.

It's pretty hard to do, because people rarely recognize what it is.

Blizzard wasn't perfect at it either, they had features anticipated that never arrived, but they also didn't have the same massive community of anticipating fans that have followed in WoW's wake.

In most areas of entertainment, the journalistic focus is on new products. In videogames, for some odd reason, it's on future products.

This is IMHO the Number #1 Uno Prime reason Videogame Journalism is so messed up.

Anticipation is not such a bad thing by itself, it's what sells product right? But it's just so accelerated, what's been on the shelf for days is already old news. The window for game sales is so small, if it isn't a blockbuster from the get-go, it's getting tossed into the discount bin pretty quickly.

There's no more room for sleeper hits. I honestly don't think The Sims, Rollercoaster Tycoon or Warcraft could have made it in today's game climate. Neither of those games were hyped much before release (The Sims barely got attention in a small corner of EA's '99 E3 booth, seriously).

The games industry has become addicted to anticipation.

• Beta and Alpha product is never fully indicative of the final game. Simple things like removing debuggers, compressing textures and patching visibility leaks are rarely done until last minute and make huge performance differences. Or a game with pretty pre-release screenshots can turn out to have horrible framerates.
• Journalists choose favourites based upon brand, designer and worse: the games they have pre-release access to. A stinker can get a lot of attention and a gem can be neglected.
• Journalists comment on what they think ~may~ be good features based how they expect a game will turn out, applying inaccurate assumptions.
• Gamers begin to predict success or failure (of games and consoles) and the pride of predicting correctly overshadows the actual enjoyment of the game.
• It's ethically unsound, because a game can be hyped by the press without actually reviewing it, creating conflicts of interest between advertisement and news.
• The 'scoop' becomes the 'exclusive first peek', which again, is ethically questionable as these become hand-selected by the publishers looking for pure promotion.

I could think of a whole lot more points, but you get the idea. The fascination with what's in development versus what's playable now is the root of so much evil.

Now, we're migrating into a situation that's compounding it: Bloggers the world around have decided that the established journalists are corrupt (there's plenty of good evidence for that) and are taking it upon themselves to replace the industry, which they're doing very effectively.

Except the Numero Uno problem is now just exasperated, because bloggers write what they damn well please and the fascination with beta and 'next-gen' is so over the top at this point.

I've seen a lot of bloggers comment that what they think is wrong with the established press is the lack of full disclosure over games before they get released. This is soooo messed up backwards to me, it's not thinking with their heads it's thinking with the pre-release hype. Correct the mistakes, don't repeat them.

We need more disclosure of completed products and less of what's in the works.

It's a damn good thing most game designers are passionate about the games they make, otherwise it would be all hype and no game. That's probably the only reason I see this as a journalistic problem, not one with the game developments themselves.