Angled Whiteboards

As promised, in advance of next Thursday’s launch of GameTap on the Mac, here’s a visual preview. GameTap Mac fans, your future looks like this (click to gorge):

Dedicated Mac nerds will immediately note that the previously-mentioned gorgeous dock icon is sitting on that fancy new 3D dock that Apple unveiled last week as a part of their upcoming OS X Leopard release.  Obviously, Leopard isn’t required to run the Lite Player, but we couldn’t resist using it for the screenshot.

And here’s a bonus shot (again, more for the Mac folks with dogcow tattoos) showing a couple of those superslick, supereasytomake Web Clip widgets. In this case we’ve clipped out the Flash-based promo from the top of gametap.com home (with sound and motion and everything!) and the free-to-play selection from Play home. A quick F12 and boom! You know what’s on tap for the week.

I’m pretty stoked about getting to play this week’s surprise Rogue Trooper release. First I gotta get to last week’s Psychonauts, though. Too many games!

And it looks like we’re up to the year I got married in the KoF series with the genteelly-named The King of Fighters ‘98: The Slugfest. How sweet. What were YOU doing in 1998?

New games:

• Panzer Dragoon II Zwei
• Rogue Trooper
• Samurai Shodown
• The King of Fighters ‘98: The Slugfest

New on GameTap TV:

• GameTap News: Star Wars 30th
• Computer Lab: Turbo Sucks
• A Quick Hit: Static X
• A Quick Hit: Paul Wall
• Sealab 2021: The Neptunati (what’s your favorite ep?)
  

The Soup Dragons once hade a hit song called:

• Free

Obvious gaming-relatedness comes in a little before the half-way mark.

Remember a month or so ago when I talked about doing “something in beta that was so cool, so currently impossible, and so not announced yet”? That something was sitting in front of my Mac Pro at home, navigating to Joust on the website, firing up the Lite Player, and playing a number of multiplayer Challenge! games against an unwitting public.

Consider the Mac version officially announced (and dated!). I’m all set to crush (and be crushed by) some Mac folks starting June 28th.

I don’t know the word “troll”.

[Have a great vacation next week, dinah!  This one’s for you…]

So I’m out here in San Francisco at Apple’s WWDC this week. And while I’ve finally realized my life’s goal of seeing a live Stevenote, I have to admit: this stupid time-zone crap is seriously affecting my ability to hook up some late-night Twinkle Star Sprites Challenge! action. And just as I became completely obsessively addicted! What a brilliant game this is. A shmup with two-player puzzle game conventions? YES PLEASE. I didn’t even know I wanted a puzzle game/shmup mashup (mashmup?) until Twinkle Star Sprites.

As for this week, the radar must have been down, ’cause Pyschonauts made its way in!

New games:

• Art of Fighting 3
• Golden Axe: The Duel
• Metal Slug 3
• Psychonauts
• The King of Fighters 97

New on GameTap TV:

• GameTap News: Starcraft 2
• A Quick Hit: The Feeling
• A Quick Hit: James Morrison
• Sealab 2021: Let ‘Em Eat Corn
• Computer Lab: Cribs
• Confessions: Mr. Abs

The first hit is always:

• Free