Get your Champion on (get your Groove back).
January 25th, 2007 by xamountYou know how you guys have been all eagle-eyed with the email announcements and the Coming Soon ring? Not letting any game slip through the cracks? Well it’s certainly helped us step our game up. So this is pretty sweet: we’ve got an Angled Whiteboards EXCLUSIVE easter egg for you, our devoted readers (and your friends, and hopefully your friends’ friends…).
Hidden in today’s new catalog is Interstate 76. Only you won’t find it in the New Games ring. In fact, you won’t find it anywhere under the name Interstate 76. Head to the search ring, search on “Groove Champion” (star of the game), and BOOM. There’s your game. That racing/hot-rod week is still on the books (now slated for late Feb.), and we’ll be officially releasing all the originally promised games then. But you can play Interstate 76 all you want in the meantime.
Do us a favor though: we’d LOVE nothing more than to continue to pull this kind of stunt off with you guys. Please spread the word about this stealth release — so that our numbers guys see a bump in play for a game that supposedly isn’t even out yet! After all, how viral can one little UI blog be?
January 25th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Awesome, can’t wait to get home to try it out
January 25th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
That is tight. I dig a good easter egg hack.
January 25th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Oh man, I SO
January 25th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
My little ascii heart has been thieved!
This is great, you guys rock.
January 25th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Thanks for the tip.
January 25th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
I love this easter egg! Thanks. Oh and Xcom AND Sim City coming soon? Gametap is awesome!
January 25th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
I had specifically requested both X-Com and RealMyst from Gametap before so it is AWESOME to see that you guys really do listen to user requests.
Speaking of which, I’ve got a UI one for you guys..
How about on the “My Favorites” ring having the client keep track of what your “most favorite” game is (by tracking how many times you play them) so that your “most favorite” defaults to center position when you pull up the vault?
January 26th, 2007 at 12:55 am
This is an awesome little bonus for the blog readers. Spreading the word to the guys at EvAv as I speak(type).
Definitely seconding the major kudos on getting X-Com onto the service. As if this thing wasn’t sucking enough of my time down already. You guys definitely have my sub into the foreseeable future.
January 26th, 2007 at 9:20 am
@macnbc
Extent Tech has a counter of how many times you run a game inside each individual folder of games locally stored. I think your suggestion would be rather easy to implement.
Thanks for the easter egg. It’s neat to see stuff like this.
January 26th, 2007 at 11:05 am
re: times played
Cool idea. We could also capture how long you’ve spent in a game. You might spend a lot more time in a windows game, with a lot fewer relative starts. Also, ’starts’ is how many times you open the game volume, not necessarily how many times you play the game. Nevertheless, this is great personal feedback to give users, regardless of how they want to use it.
Next month you’ll see some new ‘favoriting’ options (we think you’ll like them). This isn’t included, of course. But it’s now on the list for one day!
January 27th, 2007 at 1:10 am
Yea, this is a good idea; but I was playing this before this post came out.The total number of games always gives it away.
January 27th, 2007 at 10:56 am
Speaking of requests, I would really like to browse through games based on when gametap releases them. There were a couple of weeks that I didn’t log in (holidays and all) and I’d like to go back and ee the recent featured new games.
January 28th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
[…] Those crafty types at ‘all you can eat’ subscription PC gaming site GameTap (or more particularly, XAmount, who co-runs unofficial in-house GameTap user design blog Angled Whiteboards), have revealed that there’s a special Easter Egg in the latest GameTap update, if you look real hard. […]