New Game Service: Gametap

[Cirrus]

Just saw this on CNN.com:

http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/27/technology/video_game_service/index.htm?cnn=yes'

Established games? Sounds like a good idea. PC only, it seems.

[TheRedEye]

I'll bet that even though this was just announced today, they beat Infinium Labs to market.

[Cirrus]

I'll bet that even though this was just announced today, they beat Infinium Labs to market.

Yes, I'm sure, considering they have had pictures of that damn Phantom in magazines for years now. Worse yet, it sounds less and less cool with time.

They can't even get an FAQ section up on their site in a timely manner. ("Coming soon!")

It only needs one question:
Q: What the f*** are you doing, anyway?
A: We have no idea.

[MegaDrive20XX]

gametapdatass. I like that name :) It's solid and it looks like it's gonna bring alot of promise.

For some reason it reminds me it strikes the looks of alot like "Sega Channel"

[Lady Jaye]

Actually, Atari has been offering that service for a while already, PC games only...

http://www.atariondemand.com/main/titlesList.jsp

[v1rich]

According to this article, "Using emulation software, it will let anyone with a PC and a broadband connection play classic games from older consoles like the NES and Genesis, as well as older arcade and PC games"

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=599&e=17&u=/nm/media_videogames_turner_dc

[Nz17]

Yeah, I've read some interesting stuff about the GameTap. It will include arcade games as well as consoles. Its console line-up is up to and including the Dreamcast. It will have integrated ICQ and AIM messaging, video segments about the games' history, and gaming news. And (from that press release awhile back):

"Turner to date has licensed nearly 1,000 games from 17 publishers, including Activision, Atari, Eidos Interactive, G-Mode, Intellivision Lives, Midway, Namco, SEGA, TAITO, Team 17, Ubisoft and Vivendi Universal Games. GameTap will launch with 300 games, from Pong, Pac-Man and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, to Sonic and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. New titles and programming will be added each week."

It is a subscription-based service, so instead of paying for one game at a time, one can play any and all the available games at once. At first I thought it might just be a game lineup of the month thing, but it turns out that they'll add new stuff each month but keep everything they've had before.

God, I really do sound like some marketing droid. x_x

Edit: While looking around Turner's site, I found out that its having an open beta of GameTap. Go to www.gametap.com to sign up if you want. Maybe I'll post later about my experience.

[Nz17]

Candidates for the beta test must:

Be 18 years of age or older
Live in the United States
Have a Pentium III 800 Processor, equivalent AMD Athlon, or better
Have 128 MB RAM, or better
Have an ATI Radeon VE 7000 video card, equivalent Nvidia MX420, or better (On-board video cards will not be accepted)
Have a broadband connection


:angry: I hope that new processor I ordered a few days ago arrives soon. Running on 700Mhz with a crappy motherboard is gruesome.

[SoulBlazer]

Sounds promising, but will it take off?

I think it depends on how much they charge a month, if you can keep playing the games after the service is finished by you, and new games are added as well as older ones.

[Half Japanese]

Sounds promising, but will it take off?

I think it depends on how much they charge a month, if you can keep playing the games after the service is finished by you, and new games are added as well as older ones.

Your wording is a bit confusing, but it said you won't be able to play games any longer if you don't reup every month. Sounds like an interesting idea, for sure. I'm not sure how much the whole "older console games" department will lure people in, given the rampant and readily-available state of emulators and ROMs on the internet, and I doubt their emulation techniques will be as refined as some of the longer-running emulators allow. Either way, it sounds sort of like the Gamefly of PC games as it is right now, so long as they're getting newer games as well as older ones. It's going to be like online music stores, imitators will pop up and the winner will be whoever pleases the most publishers and offers the best lineup (though as the music biz has shown, this isn't always the case. My PC's not shabby, but it's not up to running anything released in the past 2 years, so I'll be sitting comfortably on the sidelines of this one. Cool idea though.

[petewhitley]

So the beta on this came out recently. You can go to their website (www.gametap.com), sign up for some spam, and they'll give a free month to try it out. Some pretty good games, but not as many as I would have thought. Haven't actually downloaded it yet; I'm pretty much emulating most of what they offer ...

[segagamer4life]

gametapdatass. I like that name :) It's solid and it looks like it's gonna bring alot of promise.

For some reason it reminds me it strikes the looks of alot like "Sega Channel"

lmao... nice, "gametapdatass".... nice.

[lionforce]

I downloaded this application a little while ago but for some reason the proper DLLs can't be loaded/updated to install the program hmmm hopefully this can be fixed :/