Written by Johnny Blaze.
Credit goes to http://blogs.ign.com/MGS_HiredGun/2007/04/05/51370/ for this story. Go there for a great interview and piece about it. I’ll give a brief rundown of the gist of it, for the lazy, as well as some thoughts of my own about this.
Halo 2 for Windows Vista uses a new technology they developed called tray and play. Put the game in, press play, and it installs in the background. Quit the game, and it will finish installing the next time you put the disc in and choose to play. Once the game installed, you never have to put the disc in again because of the new product activation technology. They claim that this does not impact performance. Although it remains to be seen wether this is fully true, its not really of big concern, since you can install the game the old fashioned way, before playing, if you are really worried about this being an issue.
If you ask me, this is a great development, and I hope it becomes the standard for PC games in the future. One thing that I would have liked them to ask would be wether this feature is made possible because of Vista, or if it would be possible in Windows XP also, or even other operating systems. Since Halo 2 PC is exclusive to Vista, it’s hard to know.
Between this and the functionality revealed by screenshots of the new Live! for PC demo, it looks like a bright future for PC gamers is ahead.
