Chris @ Olstrom (.com)

And we’re live with another one. Sometimes I think I take on too many projects. It’s probably true too, but how are we supposed to find out where our limitations are if we don’t push where we think they might be? Overburden yourself, and you’ll soon discover that you can do far more than you gave yourself credit for.

Vista Gamer stems from the fact that my shiny new laptop came with Vista. Now, I’m not a Windows fan. This is plainly clear, but since the laptop that had the hardware I wanted didn’t have an option of not getting Vista, I accepted that I was screwed. And, since I now have a shiny licensed copy of Windows, I may as well use it to play my games. Saves me the hassle of tinkering with Wine… or does it?

I figured it’d be easy. Pop in a game or two, and have some fun. But no. Vista wants to play rough, and not be compatible with several of my games. I’m pleased with the performance of the ones that run, but disappointed that a large number of the online games I’ve wanted to play simply don’t run on Vista. Things like DEP killing nProtect, for example. I can’t fault Vista for that, really. nProtect is an invasive little process, and any half-decent security system should consider it’s behaviour (not the app itself, mind you) to be a threat.

Looking around, I couldn’t find a site around that told me what was compatible and what wasn’t. Sure, people mention things in forums, but I wanted a single place I could find the information. A starting point for my game compatibility research, much like Wikipedia is the starting point for a lot of questions that cross my mind.

Spent a bit of time struggling to find a domain that felt right, and went to bed without an answer. The next day, I checked a few more that struck me during lunch, and to my surprise, vistagamer.com was available (let this be a lesson to all of you “OMG, all the decent .coms are taken!” people. Even if you think it’ll be taken, check. You might be wrong).

So the site’s up and running, looks decent enough. A few games are in the list, and I’m looking for submissions for any experiences others have had with games working or not.

Play games on Vista? Check out Vista Gamer. While we can’t make Vista suck any less for gaming, we can at least know that a game doesn’t work before we waste 3GB of bandwidth downloading it (seriously, these online multiplayer games should have their requirements listed on the site. Even if the game is free, wasted bandwidth doesn’t benefit anyone).