Don’t let your sleeves dangle. Don’t stand up too fast.
I was fairly disappointed to learn that one of this week’s new games was NOT a little-known sequel to Ecco the Dolphin (stop the evil seal!). But then I realized that I was able to change the card texture in Texas Hold ‘Em to a nifty leopard print, so…
Rogue Trooper is free this week! Go play that you non-Golds. And go play that you Golds who haven’t yet!
New Gold games:
New free games:
What would it be like if we took the launch speed and nimbleness of the Lite Player and married it to the full-featured game-browsable, controls-mappable Deluxe Player?
Sounds like chocolate and peanut butter, doesn’t it? And it turned out just as sweet. After a good 6 months of dual GameTap Players — during which we essentially rebuilt the Deluxe Player in the Lite — we’re back to a unified Player experience. And we’re pretty excited about it. Here’s what we focused on:
Speeeeeed
We’ve on-demanded this thing up. Lengthy catalog updates during launch are no more; we now pull in catalog-related stuff on the fly. This means quicker launches from the desktop (or web), and quicker access to your games.
What else makes it faster? Once you’ve downloaded a game, you’re one click away from playing it. You’ll still have access to those helpful game promo videos during the download process, but once you’ve got the game, you’re in for good. The “Play” button really means play now… now.
Access
Interface-wise, everything is heads-up. Now, you don’t have to “go” to a My GameTap platter to access things like your profile, your playlists, your leaderboard games, your challenge games, or the buddy hub. We’ve relocated all of that functionality to the top and bottom toolbars. So you’re just a click away.
Also added to the toolbar — a bonus search field — that’s right, search from anywhere. Presto, the Search ring drops and contains your results.
We streamlined the visuals of the InfoCard, and in the process found a way to provide unobscured access to Related Games. Having them not hidden behind a drawer certainly encourages exploration, and I’ve already started envisioning a Six Degrees of Bacon-like game to see how few steps it takes to get from Psychonauts to A Game of Concentration.
Finally, we’ve added a GameTap.com navigation strip so that you’ll always have immediate access to your favorite GameTap TV shows in Watch, our world-class Read editorial section, or the latest forum activity in Talk.
Community
We took 3.1’s separate Buddy Hub and IM thingamabob, smashed ‘em together, and provided universal toolbar access (alongside an at-a-glance view of how many buddies are online right this minute). Oh, and remember how whenever you’d go into your Buddy Hub, we defaulted to alpha sort? Dunno about you, but we always immediately switched the sort to online status. So, we made that the default.
We split out your active IM conversations (each one gets its own window and they can all be open at once), made all the buddy related pop-ups draggable, and created a nice little side-rail featuring the TapIcons (is that gonna stick? we keep trying…) of your active IM sessions.
As for Challenge! games, in moving the full access list to the toolbar, we also slightly switched up the ease of jumping into challenge lobbies. You used to be required to visit a game’s InfoCard to get to the lobby. Now you can dip into to any downloaded game right from the list. This also means that you can maintain your lobby status in a particular game while you browse the vault. Handy!
Control
Queue up the world with the new download manager. No longer are you limited to selecting four games to download. Add as many as you like, change the order, and let it rip. Once you’ve amassed your ultimate collection of games, use the improved storage manager (paired with the download manager in the global toolbar) to, well, manage your storage. When it comes time to make room for bigger games, you’re no longer limited to deleting them one at a time — “delete all” is still available, as is the new ability to multi-select.
GameTap’s window now behaves like a standard Windows window: resize on the fly, maximize/minimize, and everything else you may have previously tried to do (including right-click menus from the taskbar). And you can still go full-on full-screen for that pristine arcade presentation.
There are lots more little improvements and bug fixes scattered throughout (we took your overwhelming “kinda, sorta” votes and comments seriously when it came time to dealing with the game dock’s location). Make sure you get in there and explore. Seriously: the speed of getting into this thing is just amazing. Going back and forth between 3.1 and 3.5 in development has been a real eye-opener as to the weight of the old Deluxe Player. We took a load off. Now you do the same and let us know what you think.
I like weeks like this: we get an arcade shmup, a run n gun, and an RTS. Blowout does not star John Travolta and features a dude named Dutch as the main character (Dutch is voiced by the very talented voice actor Tom Scharpling). Carrier Air Wing features enemy planes that fly in very handy swooping one-after-the-other formations. And I haven’t even had a chance to start the innovative Perimeter yet.
Tip of the week: play the newly free Motocross just to hear one of the catchiest, ripe-for-the-sampling intro themes ever. (Oh, and tell me if you can get past that honkingly huge hill at the end of the first level.)
New Gold games:
New free Games: