Come on! This is just clever marketing. It seems to be more and more common for news to be used as another advertising channel.

...or it didn't happen.

Does MS really believe that all the gamers out there are going to upgrade to vista so they can buy a port of a 2 year old game that may have some nudity.

Projected sales of Halo 2 for PC must really suck, I know the reviews have been very harsh and by the sound of it, the port of the game deserved it. It could have been so much better, Halo is a very success franchise and the PC Halo 2 port should have more care taken over it for that reason.

The fact that MS use it to try and boost sales of vista with the gamers shows the desperation for vista's success in the first place. In my option to try a *suspected* trick like this get more interest in the game and therefore an upgrade to vista just makes me laugh.

"Does MS really believe that all the gamers out there are going to upgrade to vista so they can buy a port of a 2 year old game that may have some nudity."

You mean the way that a whole generation of teenage boys bought PCs and 14.4kbps modems that they may have some nudity or the way millions of young men worldwide have upgraded to broadband that they may have faster nudity?

Damn right they will!

"millions of young men worldwide" - having seen the picture, which is of a fat man with his shorts down, I doubt that millions of young men worldwide are going to want to look at it for more than a few seconds. If computer games fans want to look at fat bottomless men they just have to go to Google and type "fat bottomless men"...

No, tell a lie, there are no results for "fat bottomless men". A search for "fat man bottom" returns an article by Richard Herring(!) about his own televisual nudity.

"Our minds inevitably wander back to the similarly rated Duke Nukem 3D, which was full of scantilly clad females, and this didn't generate anywhere near the fuss Halo 2's partial nudity" - my theory is that, even as late of 1996, computer games were still a major cult, and Duke Nukem 3D was itself a cult-within-a-cult. The mainstream media simply hadn't heard of it, although it's interesting to wonder how the tabloids would have dealt with the game, given that you could blow up strippers. If the press could have tied it in, however tenuously, with a contemporary murder, it would have been dynamite, and probably still banned to this day.

As in the FPS with gopod multiplayer, and three good levels of single player followed by 7 or so formulaic potato stamped flood fightiong crap? The sequels have added nothing so far. Never has a mediocre FPS gained so much hype.

Halo 2 is an excellent Multiplayer, the Single Player isnt as excellent or perfect as the first. But halo 2 should of been release when XP was launched, The sad true that the best version of Halo ports is the MAC version. Smooth no need to upgrade the O/S. Microsoft should of release this sooner and on a standard platform. It will sell, unfortunatly

M$ needs to try harder to convince people to go to Vista.

I am happy with XP SP2 and it runs very well with the spec of PC I have (P4 3.2Ghz HT, 2 GB RAM....yawn, yawn). Why would I want an OS which will make my PC run like a 486 on non-turbo mode.......just for a FPS which in my opinion looks shite. Lets face it I will not be able to watch TV on my smaller monitor and play online games on the bigger 19" getting 20 fps (at 1152x 864,still playable only a 256MB Graphics Card :-( ) with vista.

But still, how much difference can we make, will M$ listen.........I think not.

Now if M$ had topless fit women who you had to 'save' in a game then well hell yeah it may be a good buy..................sorry dreaming there....;-) Lets face it an 18 certificate on a game is really going to stop the 11-17 year olds (and younger) from playing it, isn't it.........NOT!