Halo 2 / Shadowrun Cracked for XP

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=78437

Shadowrun and Halo 2 - the first champions of Windows Vista gaming - have already been cracked by warez and hacking groups, with patches enabling both to function on Windows XP flying around the Internet's darker regions at the time of writing.
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Were someone to find these patches and post them here, would the halflife2.net administration actually be obliged to remove links? Because really, what Microsoft are doing to restrict their user-base is more of a crime... in terms of stupidity at least.

Not that anyone with an IQ above 80 and a browser window can't figure out how to find the patch anyway...
 
I think the team line is no Warez - so keep it hush and send PMs?

:p

Good thing it got cracked, they got nerve trying to govern what OS we run.
 
What a waste of time.
 
Would it work online? Is Halo 2 even selling well? I didn't even know it had been released. I hope it crashes and burns.
 
This just further exposes the obvious greed of microsoft. I doubt halo 2 PC actually uses any DX10 features.
 
phantomdesign said:
This just further exposes the obvious greed of microsoft. I doubt halo 2 PC actually uses any DX10 features.
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it's not greed it's strategic marketing ..if anything making the game Vista only means they seriously hamper sales of the game ...this is just a marketing push to get gamers to adopt Vista ..both shadowrun and H2 are guinea pigs
 
Aren't both considered sub-par games anyway? These patches were probably only released as a teary-eyed raspberry to Microsoft.
 
well they're both far better on the xbox than on pc ..reviewers have panned the pc version specifically because of it's un-pc like controls

Microsoft is really missing the ball here with trying to get pc gamers to adopt vista and windows gaming initiatives ..I mean h2 years after it arrives n console ..and it looks worse? and shadowrun? a mp only game that gimps the pc control scheme so that pc gamers can play against xbox users? what brilliant mind thought that would be a selling point? if Microsoft were smart they'd offer a simultaneous release of a triple A title that relies heavily on the market place ..like Mass Effect/GTA:4 episodic content .....as it is they're just pushing themselves even further from pc gamers who see Microsofts efforts as more insulting than anything else
 
StardogChampion said:
Would it work online?
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That's a good point... I assume yes, it does. Though whether Microsoft can then work out who is running via XP and ban hammer them is another matter.

BTW, I don't have the patches or either of the games (though may consider getting Halo 2 once it goes down in price, regardless of what OS I have by then). Nevertheless, many Bothans died to bring us this information.
 
Halo 2 is pretty blah.

Shadowrun is really fun though. Once it reaches the $40 price point (or it was $40 and included Halo 2), then it will be an even better sell. The game is just plagued by bad press, and is totally worth the cash!

Oh, and I'm fairly confident that MS will release an update to Live which will block this method... This isn't like you could pirate a game before, where once it was cracked you're home free. Now, you're connected to the MS servers, sorta like XBL. I'm pretty sure they might consider banning people who get around the Vista-only protection. I feel they are going to take the same stance to this as they do console modding.

Anyways, people who complain about "why won't it come to XP?!" get over it! I'm sick of hearing that crap. XP is coming up on 6 years old, and is extremely outdated. People have just grown on their copies of XP because there hasn't been an OS refresh in forever, so nobody wants to change. If you want the latest and greatest, move to Vista and stop pretending like it's 2001 all over again. If you don't want Vista, fine, stay in XP. It's your choice. Just realize that once games start being DX10 only, your piracy groups won't be able to help you too much then. Just please, for the love of god stop bitching because it's pointless and nobody cares. It's a simple solution. You want a game labeled as Vista only? Move to Vista!
 
Actually most of us here care, certainly when it's a dx9 game that is vista only.
 
I have a copy of vista yet I'm hesitant to install it cuz I dont want all my apps to stop working
 
Iced_Eagle said:
people who complain about "why won't it come to XP?!" get over it! I'm sick of hearing that crap
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I was always the one that said "suck it up and buy a DVD player!" when games started comming out DVD only, and I have to agree to a certain extent about this. However, upgrading to Vista isn't the same as buying a DVD player.

1) Cost - Vista is around the ?80 mark (DVD players were around the ?30 mark). Then if you want it to acctualy run smoothly your talking atleast getting 2GB of RAM.

2) System Performance - When you do acctualy buy it system performance GRINDS to a halt. Simple tasks like copying files takes longer, ever loading thumbnails in explorer takes about double the time of XP. It's just generaly not a very good user experiance.

3) Game Performance - Vista has yet to acctualy bring anything worthwhile to current gen games that are comming out right now. Games like Crysis will benifit from being able to use DX10 but will still run in XP in DX9. I have yet to be convinced that turning on DX10 effects is worth the performance drop that it currectly appears to give. DX10 is said to give better performance, but developers (so far) seem to go overboard with effects and thus negativly effect the game.

Don't get me wrong, Vista and DX10 are the way forward but Crytek, and others i'm sure, are proving that it's possible to support both.

P.S. Stern: When you put the Vista CD in it will tell you what programs will need updating. I've got vista installed on both my Media PC at home and on a test machine at work. Both have had no problems with program compatibility. Between both machines i'm running a number of program, but a few I had a concern about but work fine are:
Azureus - My torrent downloader
Nero - Comes up with an compatability issue on install but works fine
Photoshop 5 and CS2
Macromedia Firefox 8 - Turns off Aero colour scheme and runs in basic mode and switches aero back on when you exit
Adobe Premier
Visual Studio 2000
Visual Studio 2005
All my games work fine as well

Had no problems getting drivers for anything either
 
Pointless if you can't play online, since that's really where Halo 2 shines the most.
 
2) System Performance - When you do acctualy buy it system performance GRINDS to a halt. Simple tasks like copying files takes longer, ever loading thumbnails in explorer takes about double the time of XP. It's just generaly not a very good user experiance.
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No idea what your talking about. All in all it feels much faster and smoother than Xp for me. And what your talking about is completely false when it comes to the search feature. I mean when opening a folder or even the start menu i'd always get a lag time on Xp. I'd wonder why Xp didn't preload the contents of the start menu into memory and why it was giving me a 1 to 2 second lag time when clicking on some folders.

Hell with XP you couldn't even really tell how long a file was going to take to get copied! It was always jumping around. Vista gives a lot closer estimitation, shows you the speed at which the files are being copied, shows you how much(filesize) your copying, and shows you how much it has left to do. As far as I can tell, Vista transfers files just as fast as Xp.

My performance on Vista is much better than on Xp. Even my homebrew C# programs run faster on Vista. I run a program that has to load about 1000 songs, get all the tags and then display the information. It's about 2x faster on Vista than Xp.

The only dip in performance on Vista is when it comes to some games. My biggest issue being Hitman 4. However that's because of drivers. Throw in the fact that I have an Nvidia card, and Nvidia has yet to get there shit together like ATI.
 
Cole said:
No idea what your talking about. All in all it feels much faster and smoother than Xp for me. And what your talking about is completely false when it comes to the search feature. I mean when opening a folder or even the start menu i'd always get a lag time on Xp. I'd wonder why Xp didn't preload the contents of the start menu into memory and why it was giving me a 1 to 2 second lag time when clicking on some folders.

Hell with XP you couldn't even really tell how long a file was going to take to get copied! It was always jumping around. Vista gives a lot closer estimitation, shows you the speed at which the files are being copied, shows you how much(filesize) your copying, and shows you how much it has left to do. As far as I can tell, Vista transfers files just as fast as Xp.

My performance on Vista is much better than on Xp. Even my homebrew C# programs run faster on Vista. I run a program that has to load about 1000 songs, get all the tags and then display the information. It's about 2x faster on Vista than Xp.

The only dip in performance on Vista is when it comes to some games. My biggest issue being Hitman 4. However that's because of drivers. Throw in the fact that I have an Nvidia card, and Nvidia has yet to get there shit together like ATI.
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It really depends on your hardware to begin with, someone with only 1gb or less of RAM and/or a 2.4gb or slower (single core) processor, and or a video card with 256 or less memory should never install Vista, performance will take a serious hit.

Like every OS before it, Vista takes up more system resources. Vista has the most memory intensive UI / system service base of any MS OS yet.

Otherwise any performance woes people experience are usually from slow driver support and user error. (you can disable excessive services and ui features that soak up memory and clock cycles). Give it a few years and Vista will take over quite a larger market share, because hardware (and more importantly drivers) will catch up.

All this aside I find it extremely irritating that Microsoft is willing to alienate gamers after claiming that Games for Windows would be to increase the validity of PC Gaming, when in reality it's being used purely to boost Vista sales.
 
Kyo said:
What? nerve? It's their software/publishing house they can do what they want.
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It's to be non-conforming, gosh, its the emo way
:rolleyes:
Seriously though, thats how lots of people seem to be nowadays, they yell at Emos because they don't want to conform, then they have to conform and they're like "NOOO I'M GONNNA RESIST!"
 
Fliko said:
It's to be non-conforming, gosh, its the emo way
:rolleyes:
Seriously though, thats how lots of people seem to be nowadays, they yell at Emos because they don't want to conform, then they have to conform and they're like "NOOO I'M GONNNA RESIST!"
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Or it's the fact that they approached the gaming community and were taken seriously, only to go and put out games that reach less than 1% of the community and require a fee to play online with others.

The way Microsoft marketed those two games was appalling, I doubt anyone here is saying that simply out of conformity.
 
xlucidx said:
Pointless if you can't play online, since that's really where Halo 2 shines the most.
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I've only played a couple DMs so far but it's pretty damn fun. And I didn't have to buy anything but the game.
 
The fact is, is that yes people should really upgrade their machines when they get Vista.

I've been reading all over the net today about various dual-core systems and such, and how much game devs are excited about multi-core and how single core is quickly going the way of the dodo bird.

It's just natural that you eventually need to upgrade to run Windows. I'm sure there was a time way back when, when people had to upgrade their computers to work with Win 3.11 from Dos or when Win95 came out... I'm sure this same argument came up then too.

Sure, it seems more expensive with Vista and it may seem slower on your current machine (mine really isn't though but it depends on how old your machine is), but that's just a sign you need to upgrade, espeically if you want to keep playing some of these high-end games.
 
Iced_Eagle said:
The fact is, is that yes people should really upgrade their machines when they get Vista.

I've been reading all over the net today about various dual-core systems and such, and how much game devs are excited about multi-core and how single core is quickly going the way of the dodo bird.

It's just natural that you eventually need to upgrade to run Windows. I'm sure there was a time way back when, when people had to upgrade their computers to work with Win 3.11 from Dos or when Win95 came out... I'm sure this same argument came up then too.

Sure, it seems more expensive with Vista and it may seem slower on your current machine (mine really isn't though but it depends on how old your machine is), but that's just a sign you need to upgrade, espeically if you want to keep playing some of these high-end games.
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Sure they should have to upgrade for Vista, but they also should not be pigeon holed into upgrading their OS when they have hardware that can play DX9 games.
 
Iced_Eagle said:
Anyways, people who complain about "why won't it come to XP?!" get over it! I'm sick of hearing that crap. XP is coming up on 6 years old, and is extremely outdated. People have just grown on their copies of XP because there hasn't been an OS refresh in forever, so nobody wants to change.
Click to expand...


umm wrong.....xp is one of the best and most stable OS Microsoft has ever created. vista doesn't have that much to offer right now. people are staying with it because it runs all of applications and software perfectly. really all games have been xp/2000/me/and some 98,but with the horrible move of making games vista only it makes me want to stay with xp more. theres nothing wrong with xp right now and theres is not really one reason to move imo. in fact you can turn xp into vista yourself with a few thirdparty applications; well besides dx10 of course.
 
It really depends on your hardware to begin with, someone with only 1gb or less of RAM and/or a 2.4gb or slower (single core) processor, and or a video card with 256 or less memory should never install Vista, performance will take a serious hit.
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I'd say a 128meg video card or less. 256 meg video cards are more than fine to run games and Vista with. For games yeah you should have over 1gig of ram, otherwise 1gig is more than fine.

umm wrong.....xp is one of the best and most stable OS Microsoft has ever created.
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And Iced_Eagle never said it wasn't one of the best and most stable. However XP is infact 6 years old. There has been 6 more years technology and improvement since XP came out.

. in fact you can turn xp into vista yourself with a few thirdparty applications; well besides dx10 of course.
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No, you can make XP look somewhat like Vista. That's about it. Moreover, things that 3rd party applications add to Xp arn't nearly as seamless as Vista.
 
Cole said:
No idea what your talking about. All in all it feels much faster and smoother than Xp for me.
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I'm not going to argue with that - you must just be one of the lucky ones :)

I have to admit to being intrigued by Halo2 on XP... I don't think I would ever play it online anyway and never got it for the Xbox.

Shadowrun, however, can take a running jump off a cliff (and teleport away ;)) - Doesn't look like my style and the reviews are WAY below par.
 
Yup, I'll totally agree XP is a great OS. I can understand why people would want to stay on it since it performs well.

However, there's a time when you need to just let go, take the leap and move to Vista (or wait for a few years for the next version of Windows to come out, codename simply Windows 7 for now). In fact, if you have a spare HDD sitting around, go download a CD image of Vista off of the internet (just a retail image, not a cracked pirated copy) and then when it asks for you to enter a product key hit cancel and say you will enter it later. You then have 30 days evaluation to try Vista for yourself.

Honestly, is there any one big feature (besides DX10) in Vista that makes you scream "I MUST HAVE!"... Not really. It's a whole bunch of addition, enhancements, and possibly removals that make Windows that much better.

For those of you who are still worried to make the leap, SP1 should be out late this year or early next year (more likely the former). In fact, word on the street is that a beta is soon to be released to a very very very small group of external people *cough*

*Edit* Viper: Halo 2 is pretty blah. Not worth it except maybe for achievement points, but it's not as fun as it used to be IMHO. Shadowrun is about a million times better and is sooo fun! Ignore the reviews for one minute and play the game for a while. Loads of fun and I promise you that you will think better about the game and laugh at the reviews that came out.
 
I'm not going to argue with that - you must just be one of the lucky ones
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Unless your running Vista on 256 or 512 megs of ram, it should be pretty damn smooth considering.


Although Microsoft should really drop there anti-pirating stance so it doesn't hurt consumers at all. I mean not that I pirated Windows Vista or know anything about Vista ever being pirating by any indiviudal ever. But the fact is, it is so incredibley easy to pirate Vista.
 
Vista really hampers performance, that's why I'm not switching to it. That and the fact that I want things to work. By the way, right now I'm NOT trying this out. Because that would be illegal. And it would be very immoral of me, and of anyone, to try a game that really does not need an operating system that will make it run like crap regardless of what hardware is run. I repeat, I'm NOT going to try this. I'm really not.
 
Upgrade your machine and get Vista at the same time... Expensive? Unfortunately, yea... Worth it? Hell yea! Sure, some games that weren't made for it, don't perform well at this point in time. What a surprise and bummer that you lost those 5 precious FPS in counter-strike (or whatever I don't know how much).

For the latest games though that are developed and tested with Vista in mind, expect there to be even less of a performance hit. The best performing games will be DX10 though without any DX9 compatibility.
 
The sad thing is: You have to upgrade your machine only in order to counter the performance loss! :-S
 
It's the nature of technology that you have to upgrade... Because guess what, your same machien way back when that ran Win 3.11 which used to be top of the line, then became slow and had huge hits in performance when Win 95 came around. OMG conspiracy!!!

If we didn't have to upgrade to fight performance loss because of the platform moving forward, then why aren't we all still on our 486's?
 
Nemesis6 said:
The sad thing is: You have to upgrade your machine only in order to counter the performance loss! :-S
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Please get your facts straight. Vista will be faster than XP with a decent rig, you'll only notice a decrease in 3d performance. Believe it or not Vista can perform many functions faster than the same system running XP. Needing a machine capable of running Vista is a moot point and shouldn't be considered at all.
 
Iced_Eagle said:
It's the nature of technology that you have to upgrade... Because guess what, your same machien way back when that ran Win 3.11 which used to be top of the line, then became slow and had huge hits in performance when Win 95 came around. OMG conspiracy!!!

If we didn't have to upgrade to fight performance loss because of the platform moving forward, then why aren't we all still on our 486's?
Click to expand...

Well, Win 95 was actually a marked improvement.
 
I'm still not convinced to get Vista from all the compatibility issues it has with games and software.

I see no use for it atm.
 
xlucidx said:
I'm still not convinced to get Vista from all the compatibility issues it has with games and software.

I see no use for it atm.
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Pray tell what issues are those which affect you?
 
Kyo said:
Pray tell what issues are those which affect you?
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Being unable to play certain games(Starcraft, Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, Battlefield 1942), unable to use certain programs(Power desktop, WinRAR, AIM), and the thousands of pop-ups it has for everything.
 
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