The Bloj

GameTap review

Posted on December 19th, 2005 by Tim.
Categories: General/Misc..

A few things have happened at blog lately:

1. The Chrises have been blogging a storm (or at least, Liuigi has been)
2. The sidebar is now approximately as tall as a negative asian.

As a result, I’m writing a review of GameTap.

So I downloaded gametap today, with rather low expectations. They offer a 14-day trial, although they require a credit card, which they will charge if you go past the end of the trial period. After the trial period is over, GameTap costs 14.95 a month. Once I registered with the service, the download and installation was straightforward.

My first surprise is that GameTap starts full screen, and stays full screen. Luckily, it has the option of minimizing the window easily, which is pretty much necessary, since download times within the application can be pretty high for the PC games they offer. However, there is no option for windowed display, which is a little bit annoying for people like me who like to play games and be on AIM at the same time. Especially the style of game that is most common with this service, the typical arcadish game that’s entertaining for a quick game or two before stopping, it would be nice to have the option of running in a window.

The user experience is impressive and seamless. I was slightly confused at the interface at first, since the games can be browsed through several different categorizations. For the most part, the interface is very clean, aesthetically pleasing, and easy to use. Unfortunately, the interface is too simple in some places, at the cost of functionality. The first instance of this I noticed was the lack of configuration options for gamepads/joysticks. There is a simple setup for each game that prompts whether the user wants to use keyboard/mouse/joystick, but there is no configuration of key bindings for keyboard or joystick. This is definately a problem with gamepads, which can have dramatically different button and axis layouts. I ended up abandoning the use of my XBox 360 controller with GameTap in favor of keyboard, which was much less enjoyable. The second oversimplification of the UI is the lack of any screen resolution configuration. This is, in general, a good thing for most people likely, since most arcade/console games were meant to run at a lower resolution. However, the screen resolution GameTap runs at is probably around 800×600, and this looks fuzzy on higher resolution LCDs (since it gets interpolated).

The game selection in GameTap is better than I expected. The selection of games is somewhat predictable, with most titles focusing on the type of games you would find in an arcade. Games are present from many consoles, including Atari 2600, Genesis, Commodore 64, and other old systems. Noticibly absent, however, is Nintendo. This is unsurprising, since there are many rumors that Nintendo will be offering some similar type of service for their older titles through Nintendo Revolution. The PC games available are mostly unremarkable, although more than a few notable strategy games are included, such as Homeworld and Caeser 3.

Running the PC games was somewhat interesting. Running Process Explorer showed the game I was playing (Caeser 3) running off some sort of virtualized X:. The image name was X:\Game\c3.exe or something. This tells me two things: Firstly, that GameTap is running nearly original versions of the PC games (definately not recompiled from source versions), and secondly, that the original game data is stored unencrypted in memory at some point in time, and thus could theoretically be copied to an unencrypted location. Doing so would probably not be worth it though, since most of the PC games available on gametap are available in the 5-10 dollar bargain bin.

Overall, I think GameTap is a great marketing idea on a way to capitalize on existing IP. The application is well written, and the selection of games is impressive (with PR claiming the collection will increase to 1,000 games). At 14.95, however, this subscription is comprable to an MMORPG subscription like WoW. Is it worth it? Right now, I’d be hard pressed to subscribe. However, if more classic PC titles were added, and a larger variety of games were available, I would be much more tempted. In addition to this, a few enhancements to joypad configurability would greatly increase my odds of subscribing to GameTap.

It’s 2 AM. I wonder if anything I just wrote was coherent.

~Tim

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