Angled Whiteboards

GameTap’s free games don’t get nearly enough love, but the guys over at Defunct Games are now doing a weekly article featuring what’s free to play on GameTap. And man, are they good. Each game gets a brief write-up, a link to a (sometimes) full review and recommendation on whether you should play it. While I can’t agree with all of them (Joust gets a “Probably Not”?), this is a weekly write-up you should not miss!

Oh man, I love this.

This mookie fella has decided to take the wheel (OBEY THE WHEEL) to its logical extreme: he’s playing and blogging his way through every game in the system. Here’s the post where he kicks everything off. As of this writing, he’s knocked out a good seven games.

Buddy, please, I’m begging you. Stick this thing out. I’m already plenty entertained by your high-concept exercise in writing. In fact, playlist this thing. You’re making me want to follow along and rate ‘em up right there with you.

Keeping 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.

So, in January we submitted GameTap to the Horizon Interactive Awards in the Entertainment and/or Video Game Category.

The Horizon Interactive Awards is a prestigious international competition recognizing outstanding achievement among interactive media producers. The awards showcase the best web site design, cd-roms, dvds, video, kiosks, video games and other interactive media.

Anyway, knowing they were going to notify the winners on May first (and having heard nothing), last night I thought I’d go and see who did win (since we hadn’t). I google the url, get to the home page, look for the category link, and…

Wait.

What’s that? Why is there a screen shot of us right there in the page? In that side-scrolly winners area? We won? We won? We won! We won best in category!

This post is dedicated to the fabulously talented and creative people I work with here at GameTap, who every day bring their best to work.

It’s nice to win.

I’ve had an item sitting on my Angled Whiteboards to do list since we launched 1.8: “figure out how to turn the Gotta Getta Game feature into some sort of recurring fun-ness.” Leave it to the Something Awful goons to beat me to it.

Presenting the brilliant Let’s Play GameTap thread.

(Every week or so, we round up what others are saying about GameTap and present a sampling of the chatter. Let us know if you see other GameTap-related posts out in the wild!)

• Giovanni is Canadian.
• The Headspin Blogger has some interesting thoughts about 3D UIs — and correctly describes GameTap as missing 1/2 of a D. Where did it go!?
• Nexy needs to just do it.
• teopcigart throws in some interesting thoughts re: Sonic 2 and muscle memory.
• Jared is playing GameTap and reading about the continued XBLA shake-up. They do go together kinda interestingly, huh?
• Jeff finally reveals what he’s been writing all this time. Pretty cool backstory!
• Jonathan placed 4th in the ad-hoc Street Fighter Alpha 3 Jinmaster tourney.
• Evyn! is! not! happy!
• peterb is, though. He does a nice job of spelling out some of the GameTap selling points that we don’t always make so obvious. And a “whooshy and pointless” interface is a positive for him.
• Dwight at the Houston Chronicle does up a nice, insightful piece.
• Darren reviews the feature set enhancements behind 1.6 and 1.7.
• rene_hope reminds us that sometimes it’s the smallest of things that can make or break you.
• agentgray started up another fun Evil Avatar thread.
• Simon at the fantastic GameSetWatch blog continues to show us love. Thanks!
• Colette at Destructoid reviews us as only Destructoid can.