Taken to Task: The All-Important Alt-Tab Test

Game of the year? Who cares.

During the course of any PC game, there is only one grading category that really matters--a single moment that will determine whether we'll be coming back.

Tasking out. Alt-tabbing. Minimizing. Whatever you want to call it, it is the ultimate litmus test--when great games rise to the top, and other great games show their truly annoying colors.

Take Half-Life 2 and the Source engine, sworn enemy of multitaskers everywhere.

The Source engine is like the kind of ancient Macintosh computer you'd find in an elementary school: sticky to the touch, and always thirty seconds behind your last task-out command.

Playing a Source game is like sitting in a movie theater after drinking a 48 ounce soda. You try to hold it in, try to put off leaving, but you can't help it--and then the line in the bathroom is long, and you miss the next TF2 round. The whole experience is an exercise in minimizing your impatience.

What causes this kind of command delay? Is it a problem with the game itself, or some inherent issue with DirectX? Who do we blame for this obnoxious defect?

Of course, pure delay is not the only sign of an alt-tab offender. Desktop resizing and icon manipulation are also serious symptoms of poor alt-tab support.

Take Diablo II, old game exhibit A.

Playing the dungeon crawler these days, one has to admire a decade-old game that works so well on modern hardware. That is, until you task out--and are frequently treated to a decapitated desktop, icons shoved into an 800x600 corner as if hit by an AoE knockback spell.

Some games excel in their alt-tab support. For example, Blizzard's own World of Warcraft provides a zippy task-out, with a maximized window mode that allows for instantaneous task cycling.

But for every game that does alt-tabbing right, another does it wrong--or simply doesn't support it at all.

It may seem a trivial complaint, but the strength of the PC platform is found in its versatility--and the only way to fully exploit that versatility is by pausing Valve's latest masterpiece to check your eBay auctions.

BioWare's next game might be the best turn-based online skateboarding sim in years, but if I can't quickly quit out of an elaborately designed cutscene for an update on the status of my friend's pregnant cat, count me out.

While it is nice that Microsoft requires PC developers to support alt-tab under the Games for Windows program, there should be an extra line in the contract that guarantees a level of performance.

Something like: "The user's desktop must load before the user has time to call technical support and/or buy the Xbox 360 version of the game."

Something. Anything. Just let us out of your games, PC developers.

We'll come back. We promise.