WT Anybody! Tornado Jockey On VMware Player (WinXP)

Описание: I will be honest; I think that Tornado Jockey is one of the greatest games ever made! Forget Unreal, this is my new jam! You get to play a tornado! How awesome is that. OK, maybe not for the people on the ground. In this game, you play a tornado secretly being controlled by Joe Biden and Deep State using their mind powers, along with those of meteorologist and underground Lizard people secretly run the government and.......

OK, I will be serious. You get to play a twister that reeks havoc on the surrounding countryside as you destroy farms, houses, airplanes, while also battling UFOs. This game is all over the place, and it's awesome. You must destroy all the intended targets before time is up. Just make sure that the billboard doesn't hit you in the face and knock you homemade tin-foil hat off in the process!

Anyone who is familiar with OEM systems in the early 2000's should be familiar with WildTangent! On one hand, for internet-distributed games, they were ahead of their time. They were more "complex" and elaborate than the Flash games that were just starting to show up around this time. These games were generally launched from a web-browser shortcut, which would then load the WT WebDriver before launching the Genesis3D game engine, thus making use of 3D acceleration. These games were geared towards the casual PC user who wanted something more than Solitaire but wasn't going on a Q3A Deathmatch.

At the same time though, the WT games were also poorly optimized, performance hogs, and its web driver with a questionable security model. While not flat-out spyware, the WT games demanded a lot of personal information that could then be sold to other parties. The company, WildTangent Game Studios licensed there games as trialware that were bundled onto various OEM systems like those from HP and in this case, Fujitsu-Siemens. The WebDriver game engine, Genesis3D, was often licensed to various companies that would then make product placement games, from the likes of Pepsi, Dodge/Chrysler, etc. While product-tied games were not a new thing (many games from the Atari 2600 were product-branded games), one starts to feel that the advertising was much more in there face to the point of being shameless. However, many of these games were actually quite enjoyable though.

In order to play these games, you need a system with 3D acceleration supported. And since there would be no way in Hell that I'm installing a WT game onto my host system (which given their age anyway, wouldn't probably work on Win11 anyway), it was time for the VM. Well actually, the recovery disk for the Fujitsu-Siemens WinXP system came with several of these games already. Since VMware Player supports WinXP with 3D acceleration, I went with that system instead.

VMware Player 17 is virtualizing a multimedia PC with a single core allocated to it. The host is a Ryzen 5 5500 6-Core processor running at 4.2GHz. There is 512MB's of RAM allocated to it, along with a VESA Compatible display adapter with 3D passthrough acceleration enabled. Windows is running at the screen resolution of 1024 by 768, 32-bit color depth. A High-Definition Audio Device is installed along with an AMD PCnet network adapter for ethernet support. The Fujitsu-Siemens OEM version of Windows XP SP3 is installed.