Microsoft, I hate you.

Oh, Microsoft... I hate you. It's nothing personal, really, just pure resentment that you screw me over so badly in the name of providing features for a set of gamers.

I bought Supreme Commander, you see, because I'm a big fan of Chris Taylor's Total Annihilation, and Supreme Commander looks to be a worthy successor. I've been looking for a decent next version of TA for a while. It's easily the best RTS of its day – eat it, Command & Conquer – and I have a lot of respect for his efforts.

But, Microsoft, he used DX9.0c. I guess that's better than requiring DX 10, but not by much, and it doesn't help me in any case.

DX10 is great, I suppose, if you've one of those $250 video cards in your desktop. I don't. In fact, I don't even use a desktop nowadays, so for me, DX10 would involve changing how I do everything.

For a game API.

DX9.0c is better, like I said... but still! This game wants vertex shading or something like that. Darn it, I just want to play the freakin' game! I couldn't care less about how shaded the vertexes are. I can live with unshaded vertexes. Really. They're not that important.

Give me gameplay and I'm happy. Supreme Commander looks like it might provide that... but I can't tell, because the closest I can get to this game is the splash screen, before it tells me my fairly late-model laptop can't support it.

I know, I know, I could have gone with the high-end video card. But, see, it's a work laptop, not a game machine, and when I bought the thing, I didn't anticipate a $30 game requiring an extra $300 video card. And I can't upgrade the laptop.

Thanks. I appreciate it.

It would have been really nice if you'd said, “Well, sure, specify that you need vertex shading, or whatever, but since you don't have hardware support for it, we'll... emulate it. Or just not use it. Or something.” I don't even think it would have been that hard. It wouldn't have been that hard for DirectX 9.0, or DirectX 10, or... anything. 

You guys have the best programmers in the world, right? Would it have been that hard to act like it?

tags: games  directx  supreme  commander