New this week.
May 31st, 2007 by xamountSooooo, stuff starts happening today, and it’s cool. Why ’starts’? It’s May 31st and today we start rolling it all out. Begin by launching GameTap and upgrading it to the Deluxe Player. You’ll obviously need it to access today’s superfun batch of games. But the update also introduces a number of anticipated new game discovery features, enhanced search, publishable playlists, AND the handy new Lite Player. Plus, we migrate your saved games to be compatible with the new players.
We CAN’T WAIT to detail more of what’s new in the coming week(s), but right now we’re kinda crazy busy hooking up the hoses and tubes and whatnot. (In other words, don’t be shocked and bewildered if you hit a few broken links in the new gametap.com.)
Ultimately, the really important stuff? The lists below. And all of THAT is working just fine…
New games:
- Art of Fighting
- Metal Slug X
- Panzer Dragoon
- Metal Slug 2
- The King of Fighters ‘95
- Tomb Raider Legend
New on GameTap TV:
- Computer Lab: Boon & Tarbo (season three is here!)
- Confessions: Grand Theft Auto (first in a new series)
- Sealab 2021: Dearly Beloved Seed
- A Quick Hit: My Chemical Romance
- A Quick Hit: Tokyo Police Club
- GameTap News: Treasure Island Z
- Tapped In: SG-1000
May 31st, 2007 at 1:18 pm
LOL! I see the games counter now has four digits. Before too long, you’ll end up just changing it to say “billions and billions of games served”.
May 31st, 2007 at 2:38 pm
It seems that Canadians now have access to the Sierra catalogue.
May 31st, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Where’s Ultima 6?
It’s been in the coming Soon list for months and still isn’t live, and now it’s just plain gone. It’s not listed anywhere at all anymore.
I can’t say as there’s a single other release besides Metal Slug I’ve been looking forward too lately, and now it’s up and disappeared.
May 31st, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Panzer Dragoon
May 31st, 2007 at 9:16 pm
WTF? That wasn’t my reply. Summary:
Panzer Dragoon, yay!
Twinkle Star next week, yay!
User ratings, yay!
May 31st, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Sorry, guys… the 3.x client still doesn’t cut it. It’s still a loud, gaudy memory hog… Better luck next year!
May 31st, 2007 at 9:38 pm
Thanks for checking in there, GreyWolfSC. Did you happen to give the Lite Player a go?
May 31st, 2007 at 10:48 pm
Ultima VI is still listed on the Coming Soon list in the Gametap TV section. So its still out there.. somewhere..
May 31st, 2007 at 11:16 pm
I just wish Panzer Dragoon ran better than it does. I have an Nvidia 7600 GT, 3GB of RAM, a (distinctly outdated, probably the weakest part of my computer) P4 that runs at 2.8 GHz, and the game is nearly unplayable, probably actually unplayable but I’m sorta masochistic like that- it’s getting less than 8 frames per second. Oh well, it’s that fun anyway.
I suspect this is a glitch caused by some combination of my video card and Vista Ultimate, but GameTap has been intermittently failing to draw- the screen “freezes” at a random place (disproportionately often while trying to page through game instructions, and never during play but it can interfere with starting a game). It’s still active as sound effects from mouseovers show, but nothing’s getting drawn. Switching full screen on or off tends to bring it back to life, though, so there’s a workaround… known issue?
May 31st, 2007 at 11:46 pm
Dinah/Xamount, I was about to go out and purchase Tomb Raider Legend when you added it to Gametap.
Also wanted to go out and purchase a Saturn with some games. But seeing your lineup here, made me put my wallet away.
June 1st, 2007 at 12:02 am
Kistaro, try updating your nVidia card’s drivers. Try using the beta drivers even. I’m using Vista with nVidia beta drivers and that’s the only way everything will work right for me. The current certified ones just were too glitchy.
June 1st, 2007 at 1:03 am
I can’t figure out how to get the lite player.
June 1st, 2007 at 7:31 am
duggie — go to gametap.com and find a game where the Play in Lite Player button is lit up (on the game page). Click that button to launch the game in the Lite Player.
If you’ve already updated your Deluxe Player to 3.0, the Lite came packaged with it and the game you picked will simply launch. If you haven’t, or you don’t have GameTap installed at all, you’ll go to a page where you can download the Lite Player. Download and install it, then return to the web to launch the game.
The Lite Player is built to play games from the web. It doesn’t have any way to actually find a game to play - for that, you need the web.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:57 am
Just tried the Lite player. It only seems to work with the games on the web page. I’m a subscriber, isn’t there a way for me to play games without a client that looks and sounds like a circus? As it is now I only play Myst Online and use the standalone client.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:16 am
See above. The point of the Lite Player is to work in tandem with the website, so just pick your favorite games out from the website and make a playlist there, and then you can run games via Lite Player.
Or just run the Deluxe Player and hit the mute button.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:05 am
Well, the entire site is hosed right now. I can’t get it to search, browse, or anything in between. And the “Connect” link takes me to the admin panel for the forum software?!
June 1st, 2007 at 11:11 am
:( Lite Player is useless. Please, stop making me watch the spinning ball of TVs and the commercials for flash animations.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:26 am
I believe you’re only supposed to be seeing commercials in the Lite Player if you’re a free user, I don’t think paying subscribers get them. Are you a gold-level member?
June 1st, 2007 at 1:51 pm
I’m not using Lite Player, because it is useless.
June 1st, 2007 at 5:00 pm
duggie and grey wolf: What do you two want anyways? A text-only website? You know the lynx browser works with the website. Oh, but it doesn’t know how to launch the players.
Seriously though, complaining about a multimedia site for a broadband service covering video games being “loud” is like complaining about a rock band being loud. It just is what it is. If it really pains you to look at more than five graphics on the screen at once though, get firefox, and switch your page style to No Style for the site.
And in regards to the Lite Player, if you still have a personal complex with using it after that because it has the UNMITIGATED GALL to play 10 to 15 seconds of an ad for another game on the service while your game downloads and mounts to a virtual drive, well you should really just evacuate the internet this very instant.
(Sorry, x and d, but this just burned me up.)
June 1st, 2007 at 9:19 pm
The client is a bloated piece of junk, period. And the web site isn’t finished. There are errors all over it, and many parts of it still don’t work. It even SAYS beta on the banner! If you’re running an internet media company, you don’t leave your customers with only a semi-functional beta of a web site as the only option. I’m just glad the only game I’m interested in on GameTap has its own launcher.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Batz, save yourself. I think Greywolf just enjoys bashing on the Gametap interface everywhere he goes.
Which I do think is a little interesting considering how he seems to enjoy Uru, when I know a good many people who sincerely believe it has one of the most user unfriendly interfaces ever put in a game.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:45 pm
Yeah! More “Computer Lab!”
June 2nd, 2007 at 10:45 am
I’ll bash it till it’s good.
Companies that don’t listen to their customers and put out half-finished products have a way of going down the drain.
June 2nd, 2007 at 11:00 am
The new client seems to be working fine for me with one exception - it seems to leak memory like a sieve. After about 10 hours running overnight just downloading a few games it was up to about half a gig in process size, and started throwing errors. They were something like ‘error allocating memory for FRAPS codec’. Restarting it, It seems to leak a few hundred K of memory every time it shows a video.
This is basically confirmed because when I did something (I’m not sure what) that stopped the videos playing, it stopped leaking. Just an FYI, I’ve reported it through the normal tech support channels, but I have no idea whether or not information like this has any way of filtering through it.
June 2nd, 2007 at 11:08 am
Thanks for the report, Skip. One more place to report these kinds of issues is the new Community Support forum. Our dev team still is pretty swamped with stuff right now, but they’re trying to keep an eye on that area as well.
June 2nd, 2007 at 12:49 pm
GreyWolf, if you think Gametap isn’t receptive to customer response, then you obviously haven’t been paying attention. The only reason I’ve become a fan of them is how directly and honestly I’ve been able to interact with their developers, and have my suggestions and ideas listened to. Many of the changes between 1.7 and 1.8 were directly because of user suggestions.
Your issues with the client are simply your personal preference, and not an issue with the client itself. I happen to enjoy having a fun flashy client to navigate around, but that’s not for everyone. Hence the lite player. Just because YOU don’t like something doesn’t automatically make it bad.
June 2nd, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Never mind… You people won’t listen. Don’t come crying to me to renew my subscription when the boss says numbers are down… I’ll be giving my money to someone else.
June 2nd, 2007 at 4:22 pm
The Gametap deluxe player does have a very nice interface. Things work fast, and smoothly. I don’t really have a problem finding my way around it. Though I do agree with GreyWolf, sometimes the constant, and repeating sounds get on my nerves. In that case I just mute the client.
I also agree with GreyWolf about it being a memory hog. My pc is a bit on the low end. I can’t help it, and I can’t get a new one. Because of that I can’t play a good number of the games that Gametap makes available. So when I play Uru I make sure to run it without Gametap. I’m not looking for people to say “Oh, that’s too bad.” that’s just the way things are.
I’ll offer a few of my own suggestions based on the above. Maybe you can make these happen.
Suggestion 1: Could you put an interface in the client so that we can pick our own sounds from our own collections? I’d love to hear the linking sound from Myst every time a game finished downloading.
Suggestion 2: The Lite player is a great idea, and a good step in the right direction. Maybe you can change things so that gold members who are logged into the site can launch any game in the Lite player?
Suggestion 3: Please please please make the memory stamp of the deluxe player smaller when it is minimized for playing other games if you can! Or work on suggestion two.
Thanks for reading. I can’t wait to see what updates you have planned for the future!
June 2nd, 2007 at 6:01 pm
GreyWolfSC:
Yes. That’s nice. No one cares. Shove off.
June 2nd, 2007 at 7:56 pm
@Deepsleeper: I have just as much right to voice my opinion as you do, thanks.
June 2nd, 2007 at 8:29 pm
You do. But that bit where you said “people won’t listen”? It’s true. You’re on the blog of one of the developers. Move to a forum that’s less biased and try again.
June 3rd, 2007 at 10:12 am
WTF, I just downloaded the lite player and I see nothing, I heard a lot of crap ..but see nothing at all.
Also, a bunch of links on the site just error out.
June 3rd, 2007 at 11:53 am
No, it’s just that most people don’t like people who have their complaints answered and then ignore the answer because they feel they have to be right. All of your complaints have been answered, just because you don’t like the answers doesn’t mean we’re ignoring you.
June 3rd, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Woops, directed to GreyWolf and DeepSleeper, not you gamerdawg. I swear your post wasn’t there when I made my reply.