I received a sorta odd press release last night from Wild Tangent. In it they claim that Vista, which launched today, is "still breaking even some of Microsoft's own games on Zone.com, not to mention smaller web-based casual games across the web."

Alex St. John says that fortunately his company, Wild Tangent, spent the last year working to make sure that wouldn't happen with their games, which are 100 percent Vista compatible.

Hmmm, seems like an attempt to grab some facetime with new Vista gamers. I have the system loaded up on my super computer, so I'll be checking out his claims in a bit. Hit the jump to read the full release, that came with the subject line: Vista is Breaking Games. Brian Crecente

Microsoft Vista Failing 70 Million Online Gamers and Developers

WildTangent offers a 100% Windows Vista-Ready Games Console to Ensure Casual Gamers Have a Positive Gaming Experience

REDMOND, WA - January 29th, 2006 - As Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows Vista launches, the new operating system is breaking online games and disrupting gameplay, not only its own games on MSN but also at RealArcade (NASDAQ: RNWK), Yahoo Games (NASDAQ: YHOO) and AOL Games (NYSE: TWX). WildTangent offers the only 100% compatible gaming solutions with the WildTangent Vista Ready Console available for free download at WildTangent.com giving gamers access to over 300 popular gaming titles. Vista's incompatibility with most downloadable casual games, including those on Microsoft's own gaming portal demonstrates the enormous challenges facing many small game developers with getting their games to work with the new OS.

Alex St. John, CEO and co-Founder of WildTangent, and one of the principal creators of Microsoft's DirectX technology believes that Microsoft has gone overboard in making Vista so secure that the security restrictions have broken most online games. "WildTangent has spent the last year preparing for Vista. We worked with nearly every major casual game developer to get their games tested and compatible with Vista in our network in anticipation of these problems," said Alex St. John.

Gamers can download a free fully compatible Vista-ready games console at www.wildtangent.com and continue to play games regardless of which operating system they are running. The WildTangent games console will also ship on 25 million new Vista-ready PCs and laptops from Dell, Toshiba, HP and Gateway in 2007 ensuring that popular online games will be available and work on Vista PCs purchased from these OEMs.

In addition to breaking existing games, the security restrictions of the new operating system will rely heavily on ESRB (Electronic Software Ratings Board) ratings to block children from accessing inappropriate games. St. John believes that this represents an additional hurdle for the smaller games developers since most of these games are family appropriate but lack expensive ESRB ratings. "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." WildTangent's new Vista-ready console includes a parental control solution that ensures parental control over downloaded content without blocking access to family appropriate content that happens to lack an ESRB rating.

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