Vista prevents access to popular family-friendly games

Alex St. John, along with Craig Esler and Eric Engstrom, made the original DirectX. Now he’s the chief executive of WildTangent, a software development company that publishes and develops computer games.

And he has some bad news about Microsoft Vista – and this is really bad news if you’re a fan of casual games.

“Parents who choose to use Vista’s parental controls are likely to accidentally block access to hundreds of very popular family friendly games that happen not to have ESRB ratings,” he said. How is this possible? St. John says it’s because Microsoft “has gone overboard” with making so Vista so secure.

If you like casual games from MSN, Yahoo, America Online, RealArcade, and others, then you might want to check out the claim that Vista “breaks” games from these sites.

WildTangent has already spent a year working on software so its games could work with Vista. “We worked with nearly every major casual game developer,” he said, “to get their games tested and compatible with Vista in our network in anticipation of these problems.” The result is WildTangent Console, and this software is free for download at WildTangent’s site.

 

This is not good publicity for Vista. After all the claims by Mac OS X users that the “new” stuff in Vista are just knock-offs of long-running OS X features, and after reviewers of Vista expressed disappointment and concern that Vista has trouble working with drivers.

Alex St. John, along with Craig Esler and Eric Engstrom, made the original DirectX. Now he’s the chief executive of WildTangent, a software development company that publishes and develops computer games.

And he has some bad news about Microsoft Vista – and this is really bad news if you’re a fan of casual games.

“Parents who choose to use Vista’s parental controls are likely to accidentally block access to hundreds of very popular family friendly games that happen not to have ESRB ratings,” he said. How is this possible? St. John says it’s because Microsoft “has gone overboard” with making so Vista so secure.

If you like casual games from MSN, Yahoo, America Online, RealArcade, and others, then you might want to check out the claim that Vista “breaks” games from these sites.

WildTangent has already spent a year working on software so its games could work with Vista. “We worked with nearly every major casual game developer,” he said, “to get their games tested and compatible with Vista in our network in anticipation of these problems.” The result is WildTangent Console, and this software is free for download at WildTangent’s site.

 

This is not good publicity for Vista. After all the claims by Mac OS X users that the “new” stuff in Vista are just knock-offs of long-running OS X features, and after reviewers of Vista expressed disappointment and concern that Vista has trouble working with drivers.