Angled Whiteboards

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.

An AW reader sent this is in and we thought it was just too funny to keep to ourselves. For those of you who remember our old intro video…

And on that note, have a great weekend!

Some of you might have noticed that there’s a new button in the GameTap header. Have you seen it? Clicked it? Read it?

Well, we like love games. And we love to talk about games and the industry and what’s what and who’s who and, well, you get the picture. So, if you love games too - all games - make sure you visit the new Read section at GameTap. Our editorial team is top drawer and on top of the action. With new stories daily!

(We also changed “Buy” to “Shop”, but that’s a story for another day)

i’m typing this very quietly because i want to make sure it’s really, really real. but i’m pretty sure the mac version just went live. go to the catalog, filter “playable in lite player” games only, and get to playing. pass it on…

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.

A minor (but oh, so welcome) update to the official GameTap Forums just went live: new activity in watched forums/threads is now emailed straight to your inbox. Say you really wanna keep up with a particular thread but know that you might not be up in the forums every last second to see if there’s something new. Just click the “Watch this Thread” link:

And BOOM: any replies will be sent your way. Want to make sure that any thread you start or reply to is automatically watched? That’s easy, too. Head to Your Watches and update it with the appropriate radio buttonry: