How to play Vimana on Mac

Game summary

Vimana is one of Toaplan's most unique shooters. The level design is particularly creative, along with a unique charge shot and bombs. It gets its name from the Sanskrit word for "Flying Machine", described in Sanskrit Epics. The storyline involves a planet being attacked by seemingly indestructible alien forces that induce fear and insanity to all that oppose them. The last hope for this planet is the Vimana Warriors, two ships that are empowered by the Hindu god Ganesha to defend against the aliens and restore peace to the galaxy. The Vimana warriors are the player one and player two ships, each equipped with a shot that charges in the shape of a V. Once the shot is released, the V shape explodes forth in an arc, hitting almost everything in front of it. This sounds like it would be a very powerful weapon, but this leads to Vimana's main problem - none of your attacks ever do enough damage. Even the weakest enemies will take more than a few hits to destroy, even if your weapon is fully powered up. Bombs are similarly underwhelming, consisting of seven balls of light that rotate around your ship and guard you from shots. Once an enemy comes onto screen, a light ball will jump out from the group and crash into the enemy, likely destroying or heavily damaging it. Unlike in Fire Shark, where you can pick up new weapons, Vimana does not offer any weapons other than standard shots, charge shots, and bombs. Vimana has some bits of creativity in its levels. One in particular has moving enemy searchlights, which will fire hard to dodge bullets if it spots you. An interesting boss fires from the bottom of the screen as opposed to the top. Vimana also attempts to squeeze around 50 enemy bullets on screen at once, making it feel like a sort of prototype bullet hell shooter. Vimana was never ported to any home systems, but like Out Zone it would not have really fit onto any of them very well. The music was done by Toshiaki Tomizawa, who would later go on to make sound
First released: Feb 1991

Play Vimana on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Vimana on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.

Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.

Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).

Vimana installation steps for Mac

Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install Vimana like you would on any PC.
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