Interesting times my 1337 gam3r friends… got handed a copy of Halo 2 for Vista last week – another happy day in games land: Forza 2, Shadowrun for Xbox 360, and Shadowrun for Vista came my way today.

I’m stoked for Forza 2 because I know I can trick out a MINI Cooper, but it’s Shadowrun that presents an interesting quandary. Either way I’m playing with a 360 controller. That’s a given. At home I’ve got a larger screen yet on the road, I can take yet another fun and multi-player Xbox game with me… and that’s in spite of the specs for the PC version: they are not for the faint of heart. According to the box, the following are required: dual processor, 2GB RAM, and either an ATI’s X1800 or nVIDIA’s 7800 level of video card. What is nice is that these seem to be the ligitimate estimates rather than the “typical” feeling that “you can run with 512MB, but don’t plan on liking it”. In fact, I’m able to run it on my notebook – Core Duo 2.16GHz, 2GB RAM, ATI’s FireGL 5200, Vista Rating of 4.3 – and that’s at 1400×1050.

What’s really neat about Shadowrun is that it’s the first “active” cross-platform game for MGS: you play online with a PC via Games for Windows Live against other players on their Xbox 360 via Xbox Live. I did that this afternoon without even knowing it – only the Achievements that I earned told me it was a cross-platform game… and those points are welcomed: I finished wh0r3’ing myself out for some more Achievement points this weekend and finally broke 10,000.

And props to FASA for their Achivements list: you get points for fragging or restoring players on the “other” console, which should keep things very interesting.