Redmond (WA) - In a conversation with TG Daily, Microsoft defended itself against claims that Windows Vista does not run 90% of the games on the market today. However, while largely dismissing on one of big negative headlines flanking the launch of the new operating system, Microsoft conceded that the game rating process isn't perfect and there's at least one fix in the works.

Click through the Windows Vista launch gallery ...

The flashy launch parties aside, the Vista launch was mostly a mixed bag of media reports and user reactions. Some hiccups are to be expected, but Microsoft obviously was caught on the wrong foot with claims that Vista "breaks" the majority of games, mainly due to new installer requirements, DRM technologies and parental controls.

Rich Wickham, director of Games for Windows at Microsoft, spent some time with us and provided the Microsoft side of the story. In a phone interview he mentioned that he did not quite expect this kind of reaction: "Security is really critical with Vista. Having a secure system is a priority for core gamers, casual gamers and the hundreds of millions of people who will use the operating system. And we put security right into the middle of it. To see someone attacking the security improvements was a surprise for us."

Other than Alex St. John, chief executive officer of WildTangent, Wickham said that casual games are actually running "great" on Vista. He told us that his team has been testing "more than 1000 games over the past 18 months," including casual titles from the Pogos and Yahoos, which apparently are working fine in Microsoft's labs.

But, Wickham explained, new security features in Vista are changing the way games are loaded onto a PC and that some titles may be blocked from downloading to a user PC: "It is absolutely right that Vista's security features make it more difficult for certain programs to be downloaded to a PC," he said and added: "Vista does not allow things to be downloaded in the background as it has happened in the past. We are giving users the choice to decide what goes on the machine and what does not." As a result, users may choose to block downloads that previously would have been downloaded to a Windows XP-based PC.

However, WildTangent's St John especially targeted Microsoft's new parental control features, which can deny access to game titles and sounded a bit half baked in his descriptions. We weren't able to confirm this claim, but according to St John, Vista prompts a user (with a limited user account) to delete a link to a blocked game without providing information that this specific game was blocked. In such a case, that game would disappear in the file jungle of the hard drive.

Wickham responded to the claim and actually confirmed that "in order to effectively block content which parents have deemed inappropriate, Windows Vista will prompt a user to delete a shortcut on the desktop if the game or program is blocked by parental controls in a limited user account."

"However," he added, "if the game was installed by an administrator for all users, which is the recommendation and the predominant situation, the game itself will not be deleted from the hard drive and the shortcut will remain."

Wickham admitted that losing a link in a limited user scenario is a "known issue" and Microsoft is working on a fix. He stressed that that a deletion of a link will not happen, if a game is loaded into the Game Explorer of Vista. "Developers can easily utilize the game definition file, which has been available through the SDKs for years free of charge, to ensure their games will appear in the Games Explorer," he said.

Read on the next page: ESRB can be an expensive hurdle for casual games