Gametap?

[allyourbase]

I was wondering how many DPers frequent gametap.com for dropping in and hitting up some gaming. Anyone? I've tried it free lately and find it pretty fun at work at my desk, etc.
If so, what do you find yourself playing most often? Are you into their service?

[Kitsune Sniper]

It's a great service. I tried it out while I was on vacation!

Too bad it's US only.

[roushimsx]

I still use it from time to time and love it to bits. Awesome value and killer game selection. I've still got a large pile of games in my gametap queue that I have to play

[nintendoeats]

Actually, certain portions of the service work outside North America. You can download games that don't require an account, which means all the free games that don't have age restrictions. Unfortunately, this means the Fallout (the one game I was really interested) is out of the question: its rated M. Psychonauts is free though. can't argue with that.

[Kitsune Sniper]

Actually, certain portions of the service work outside North America. You can download games that don't require an account, which means all the free games that don't have age restrictions. Unfortunately, this means the Fallout (the one game I was really interested) is out of the question: its rated M. Psychonauts is free though. can't argue with that.

... I can't do that. It complains about me being in Mexico and won't let me do a thing.

[Jorpho]

Actually, it's been available in Canada for some time now. Most of it, anyway. (As I recall, the old Sierra games weren't available, for instance - but it's been a long time since I last checked.)

It sounds like an excellent idea, but as I have Far Too Many Games already, it doesn't really interest me.

[nintendoeats]

... I can't do that. It complains about me being in Mexico and won't let me do a thing.

have you tried just installing the gametap client and signing in as a guest? it worked fine for me. just don't bother trying to create an account.

[allyourbase]

^

that might work. I don't sign in, period. It seems like that might work, my mexico-based friend. Its worth it even for 'shock troopers' or 'metal slug 2'

[otaku]

I used it for a month or two but I don't have an arcade stick for pc so it kinda sucked. I loved playing metal slug online though.

[Kitsune Sniper]

... Holy crap. Looks like they removed the region requirement! I'm playing Elevator Action!

[TheRedEye]

I work for GameTap. It's pretty hard work.

[allyourbase]

what do you do there, theredeye? do you enjoy it?
are you aware of any new games coming for the 'free' section?

[TheRedEye]

what do you do there, theredeye? do you enjoy it?
are you aware of any new games coming for the 'free' section?

I do a little bit of everything, mostly all of the writing (game descriptions) and community management (forums, blog, twitter). I also do some gameplay evaluation, help define our strategies, and am about to get involved in PR. I enjoy it in some ways, though it is by far the most frustrating job I've ever had. Sometimes that's good, though.

We add new free games to the online browser play section every week, tomorrow is Kizuna Encounter for the Neo and some C64 games. Metal Slug X is also free for a week only, and the new episode of Grimm is free for the first day.

I can start updating this thread as part of my daily rounds, if you guys are interested?

[TheRedEye]

... Holy crap. Looks like they removed the region requirement! I'm playing Elevator Action!

I don't think we ever had a Mexico region restriction for the free games, with the rare exception of games we specifically can't license in Mexico. Mature games require a log-in, though.

[Kitsune Sniper]

I don't think we ever had a Mexico region restriction for the free games, with the rare exception of games we specifically can't license in Mexico. Mature games require a log-in, though.

A long, long time ago I tried to play a few of the arcade games, but it always said that I couldn't access them because my IP was located outside the US. I also tried to get an account but it complained about my location, too.

Maybe something changed in the meantime, but I have no clue. All I know is, at least, I can play the browser-based arcade games now. I wonder if I can play those PC games, though... I wouldn't mind paying a bit of money to have tons of PC games available.

[jfroco]

Hi all,

I signed this week and so far I'm pretty happy with the service. You can create sub-accounts so all the members of your family can have accounts.

The only problem I had was that I couldn't pay using Paypal so I had to use my credit card.

I use the xbox 360 controllers and work great.

Best regards

JF

[whoisKeel]

How exactly does it work? Do you pay per game, or is it a montly subscription to play anything and everything?

[roushimsx]

How exactly does it work? Do you pay per game, or is it a montly subscription to play anything and everything?

Low monthly subscription and an all-you-can-eat buffet of game titles. You can play anything on the service, though if you're just a free member then you can only play the free titles (duh!). Sometimes games get cycled off for whatever reasons (low response from the userbase, licensing reasons, etc). Like jfroco said, you can create a subaccount for other people in your household to use the service as well, which is really nice.

I miss a bunch of the EA titles and I'm going to miss Combat Mission, but because of GameTap I went out and tracked down another physical copy of the game anyway. Graphics aren't quite as awesome as they were back when it came out (and lord was it praised for its graphics), but it's a pretty badass strategy game. Hey, the THQ and Eidos offerings are pretty choice, at least.

Anymore I don't play on the service as much as I used to, but I like to keep an eye out on new releases on there. The Grimm series was a major disappointment (like a dumbed down and over simplified Katamari clone that never really evolved into anything special), but there's so damn many good games on the service that it's more than worth the cost to sign up (go for the annual rate!). Shame I've been so busy working on my backlog, though I think I'm going to migrate some of the recent gametap games into the queue (I'd love to finally get around to playing Kayne & Lynch, for instance).

Oh, and you can't use mods and fan patches with the games on the service. The content is locked at whatever the companies provide them (typically with the most recent official patch).

[Chainclaw]

I used to have Gametap, and I really liked it, but I canceled my subscription when EA pulled support. The games I played the most were the hard to find EA titles. Once they took away Sim Tunes, I lost interest in the service.

[Nz17]

Wow has GameTap gotten bad. I haven't tried it again until recently, and it seems ever since Turner sold it to Metaboli it has gone severely downhill.

It used to be you'd download and install a dedicated client and play games that way. It wasn't the best, but it worked well most of the time, and you could watch videos while waiting for a game to load. Then somewhere along the line they changed it to entice people in with a selection of games to play for free. Then they dropped the "fat client" and went for a browser-based approach which used a Java plugin. But at least that would have been better than what they have now, because being Java-based you could use it on any combination of browser and OS as long as they were collectively capable of running the Java browser-based plugin.

But these days we now have a new "browser based" plugin. However it only supports Internet Explorer and Firefox under Microsoft Windows. And even then, it just uses the ActiveX or MozPlug-based addon to then install even more files to the local computer. And the site seems to only work properly under IE. And if you can get the browser+addon+plugin combo to work, the games run slow as molasses. I tried it on a fairly modern 2-year-old laptop computer and it was so slow and had such a low number of FPS, the SNK arcade game Athena was unplayable. I could understand if we were talking the newest, most demanding games having performance issues, but we're talking computer and arcade games from the 1980's! And while GameTap's tech is supposed to support Windows XP and newer, every time I tried the plugin on XP it either wouldn't work at all or would crash immediately on startup.

And if you like the videos/video series that were previously featured on the service, all of those are gone. It seems Metaboli must have just bought GameTap to try and push its DRM'd pay-to-download PC game offerings. I think of it as the French equivalent of G4 buying TechTV just to get TechTV's distribution network and gutting it by killing all the good shows.