So. As I mentioned in my last podcast, I signed up for GameTap. I got it working, and I’m generally pleased.
One thing to be aware of is that it is definitely a broadband service. My cable connection at home is a bit slow and spotty, and the client does all sorts of weird things, including crashing and failing to start up. It also takes forever to download stuff. And I suspect the client of being unstable in other ways, although my laptop has issues with a lot of applications.
But the service works. You can, like, download stuff and play it. The selection’s decent, and the added content, well, is indeed content. It is aimed at (I’d estimate) 12- to 16-year-old boys, which is a little disappointing, especially considering that I’d place the primary retro gaming demographic at 18-25. But that’s fine; I don’t have to watch GameTap TV if I don’t want to (and am fast enough on the mouse to make it go away).
I’d probably recommend the service most to parents of young children. The parental controls and wide selection of educational games, in addition to the lack of access to questionable material, make it a great service for parents who want to expose their 3- to 10-year-olds to games. Once the kids get much older, though, I think they’d be more insistent on newly-released games.
Right now I’m downloading The Last Express. They’ve got a bunch of other must-tries: early Sierra adventure games, Bioware RPGs (including the phenomenal Planescape: Torment), the Myst games, and Beyond Good and Evil. Beyond that, Sam and Max: Episode 1 comes out tomorrow, and Uru Live comes this holiday season. So I’m stoked.
A problem that’s becoming more and more of a deterrent for me in using GameTap is that GT itself must be open to play games. I have to load GT’s big ass and listen to no less than a minute’s worth of ads just to play little ol’ Oregon Trail? That’s inefficient, especially since the update rolled out yesterday has destroyed all the stability in the app I was enjoying before. It took me 45 minutes to get any version of OT running, and I had to listen to those ads each time I tried to run it.
Hopefully, it’s more stable for you now, though, since you have a primary account.
I’ve heard a lot of complaints from people about the necessity to go through the GameTap gauntlet to play games, and I agree that it’s annoying. I’d like to see a slimmer client that lets you just play any of the games you’ve downloaded, especially in places that don’t have the bandwidth for the full client but have enough for the user verification process.
As for the stability difficulties, I haven’t seen it get worse with the latest update, although it wasn’t peachy before.
Is Ludus Novus dead? Hope not, I was enjoying the shows… then silence!! :-(
Not dead. I’ve just been busy lately. I should get around to another episode soon.