And the winner is?
May 4th, 2007 by xamountKeeping in mind that many of the details of the recent announcements have yet to be fully revealed, we thought it would be fun to get a quick sense of what everyone’s looking forward to the most.
I’m most excited about:
May 4th, 2007 at 10:07 am
the SNK games hands down. Scandia is starting to go bad removing classics in their Arcade.
May 4th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
What a hard decision.
I spent a few minutes trying to decide on just one, and eventually just gave in and went the “All of it” route.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
It has to be the classic SNK games… I’ve been wanting to play Metal Slug for so long…
May 4th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Chalk me up for the SNK lovefest as well. Now if only we could get NG Pocket Color games (preferably with some kind of Challenge! mode); I picked up Card Fighters DS and it is seriously making me miss the superior original game.
May 4th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Looking forward to all of the community realeted features, but I am psyched for some of that SNK action.
May 4th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
I’d be more excited about “Untethered retail game store” if I really knew what it meant. More details plz!
May 5th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
I’m really excited about the community features: profiles and message boards. Can I add a “I’m now playing Uru Live and Sam & Max” GameTap gamercard on my blog?
May 5th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
I’m not a big fan of ad-supported anything, but that part’s optional, and the rest is pretty cool.
May 5th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
I voted for Tomb Raider: Anniversary, but I hesitated when I saw official message boards as an option.
May 6th, 2007 at 12:54 am
ergh, to be completely honest, none of that sounds that great to me.
The ad-supported free gaming is probably the biggest deal there, in terms of expanding the service. Everything else doesn’t look very exciting.
I’d like to see the existing bugs fixed and the challenge system improved. It’s way too fragmented right now. We all have the same games, there should be shared chatrooms where you can more easily find people actually ready to play any game. There is a wide selection of good co-op games, but nobody wants to sit in the chatrooms waiting for somebody to show up or spam everybody with invites in every game.
By far the single biggest most awesome improvement to the multiplayer would be the ability to leave/join games in progress. Beyond all hope awesome would be a turn-taking system for street fighter style games where you take turns challenging the current champion like you would in an arcade.
May 7th, 2007 at 9:13 am
I’m happy to see you guys working on community building tools (forums and game rankings). The tomb raider games and free client are great, but the community building stuff is really what will enhance gametap over time.
Now if you could just work in support for external mods and access to game .ini hacking so we can make widescreen work in games and get the extra content available for stuff like planescape:torment and all the other games with rich mod support, gametap would be perfect.
May 7th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Tempus, I don’t think developers would like subscribers having access to the game files, since it would make it easier to pirate the games.
May 7th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Totally offtopic, but thought I’d bring this to your attention:
http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29570
I thought this was addressed in a recent update? Can’t seem to find anything about it now, though.
May 8th, 2007 at 6:52 am
Thanks, Slack3r78. Cupelix is right: the update addressed new installs only.
May 8th, 2007 at 9:11 am
re: protecting the games from piracy and mod support:
Valve and other online game services manage to provide access to protected games but still provide access to .ini files and mod support, so my hope is that gametap too will find a way to deliver this, it would be a huge benefit to subscribers.
May 8th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Hey guys it was a fun gettin to meet you. but yes i cant wait for it i want it all now see you around the net
May 10th, 2007 at 3:13 am
Yeah, it should indeed be possible to craft a system where the game files are protected, but you still can use mods and such.
They already have a CD-ROM emulator in GameTap. All they would need to do would be to modify the emulator so that anytime a file was accessed, the emulator would first check a directory on the hard drive to see if it’s there, and only go to the disc image if there’s no such file on the hard drive. Essentially, a directory from the emulator’s point of view would span over two places: the disc image and the directory on the hard drive. The emulator would merge the two in an appropriate fashion whenever the game requested files or directory listings from the disc image.
The tricky part would be replicating the appropriate directory structure on your hard drive. GameTap would need a setting that specified a “root” directory for that structure in order to make it work with Vista, though, since a lot of mods end up in the game’s directory in Program Files, and Vista doesn’t like that.