I’ve been giving GameTap a trial run and I have to say that I definitely like what I see!

I’ve wanted to try the service out since I first heard about it a couple years ago, but they don’t support Macs, so I was kinda out in the cold. I’ve substantially upgraded my PC since then so I decided to see what all the hullabaloo was about. Turns out, GameTap has some very high levels of awesome.

I came for the Sam & Max, but it was the large variety of console and arcade games available along with the option of playing some of these games online that really drew me in. For example, remember playing Combat on the Atari 2600? It was always kind of a bummer when you didn’t have someone else to play it with since it was a multiplayer only game. Well, now, you can play it online, with anyone! Sometimes the lag can be a bit much, but that all depends on who you’re playing against. Sometimes you have a good connection and a nice smooth game; other times, not so much. The nice part is that neither player really has an advantage due to latency issues since the game renders frame by frame according to network speed. The bad part about that is, a game can end up looking like a slide show… which is not very fun at all. At least it’s nice to have the option!

This isn’t supposed to be an in-depth review or anything like that, I just wanted to post what I was up to and give my opinion on GameTap. From what I’ve seen so far, if you have a PC and a broadband connection you really owe it to yourself to at least give the service a try. As for what I really, REALLY think of GameTap, though? Well, I don’t exactly want to say anything along the lines of “this is the future of gaming”, but I think if you look at what Valve is offering with Steam and what Microsoft hopes to bring with Live! Anywhere, there’s something going on in this “games as a service” space that is very exciting and raising a lot of questions that are worth investigating. Seriously, though, I find myself really getting into this thing. If you have GameTap and you want to play a couple rounds of whatever, my username is Deiru. Look me up.