CVG: There's a lot of buzz going around at the moment with the imminent arrival of Windows Vista. What's your take on Vista?

Mark Rein: Well I think Vista will ultimately be good for games, it's going to get us a lot closer to the hardware, much in the same way you can get significantly more power out of an Xbox than the same piece of parts configured into a PC. And that's partially because Windows wasn't designed for games originally, so one of the things they've done is they now have Direct X powering the desktop, so we have less competition between the GDI layer and Direct X for resources. That's good. On the other hand I'm bitterly disappointed that they're shipping a 32-bit version of Vista; I think that's very short-sighted, I really don't see the point of it. I think they kind of capitulated to Intel; you know Intel was going along really well making 64-bit chips until their original core chips which are 32-bit, and then I think Intel put the squeeze on Microsoft and said 'we're still going to do some 32-bit chips, you've got to do a 32-bit version'.

And I'm also disappointed that the Aero Glass interface isn't the standard interface for Vista. In other words isn't the only interface for Vista; I think that would've helped us a lot in terms of bringing up the bottom of integrated graphics if Microsoft said 'no Intel, we're not going to capitulate to you, you're going to have to make better chips if you want people to run Vista on your machine'. Now I understand they're a business, they're trying to sell as many as they can but I think they had a good opportunity there to move the market forward and you know, they kind of dropped the ball a little on that. But that's just my view, I think there's lots of good things in Vista that will help gaming but I think the biggest thing they could've done was maybe give us 64-bit only.

What do you think about Microsoft's big Games for Windows push? Do you see good things coming for that?

Mark Rein: My fingers are crossed that they're going to basically help fix the marketing problem with games. In the US, you walk into a store, It's almost impossible; the PC games are in the back, they're filed sideways, there's no rhyme or reason to them, the stores don't market them and then they wonder why they don't sell. Best Buy does a pretty good job; they give us front facings and things of that nature, but the specialty shops have almost given up on Windows gaming. They're happy to take the money from it but they're not giving it enough shelf space, they're certainly not pushing it and that's probably because they can't re-sell those games. But hopefully what Microsoft are doing with Games for Windows will get us some more shelf space and get us some front facing and better organisation, better marketing - I'm going to wait to actually see it happen, you know, actually see EB put those shelves and displays in before I actually label it a success. It's certainly a valiant effort and something that's badly needed.