'Vista Only' Games Hacked to run on XP

In case anyone thought generally lower frame rates and appalling openGL support (through a DirectX wrapper) weren't enough reason to avoid Windows Vista gaming at all costs, news emerges that 2 of the new crop of 'vista only' games have been hacked to run on XP just fine.

Microsoft trying to force people to upgrade when they in no way need to? Shocking :)

The 2 games in question are Halo 2 and Shadowrun, both DX9 games that Microsoft has simply chosen to not allow run on XP.

According to next-gen.biz, Hacking/Cracking group 'warez' has beaten falling leaf systems, who previously called Microsoft out for these tactics, to the punch with allowing users running XP to run these games.
The multiplayer 'live' network remains Vista only at this point however.

It would be trivial for Microsoft to have these games running perfectly if they wanted them to do so and I for one strongly disagree with Microsoft's tactics of trying to force users to upgrade by not bringing DX10 to XP as well as just blocking some DX9 games from running.

Sweet ive always wanted to play Halo 2 on my PC but i heard windows vista was crap

I wouldn't say its totally crap, but it sure doesn't offer anything at all that would entice me to upgrade other than DX10, and thats could be on XP if the marketing department allowed it.

Once it has better drivers and quite a few bug fixes/optimisations to the DX and OS itself then DX based games will start to run better but without true OpenGL support then games that use that API will suffer.

ID Software game engines have linux ports due to them being openGL.

Stopping DX9 based games from running on XP to sell their new OS is just an insult to the PC gaming community.