The Gametap Thread

[ferrarimanf355]

I was rather curious on everyone's opinions here about Turner Broadcasting's upcoming games-on-demand service, Gametap;
The official website
Gamespot Q&A- must read!
Here's a segment of the Q&A that might perk some interest;

GameSpot: What are your thoughts on interfacing with these games? Although a modern computer system can perfectly represent the experience of an old arcade game, the experience loses something when you don't have access to the original controls.

Blake Lewin, vice president of product development and innovation,  Turner Broadcasting: We spent a lot of time trying to make it as best we can with keyboard and mouse because that's our value proposition: You just need a computer and a broadband connection, and the software. However, the application is designed to read and recognize all USB controllers that we've found. So we're encouraging our users to go out as they get involved in it, go get a track ball, go get a stick controller, and amplify or expand your playground, as we say in our tagline.

So, it looks like Gametap could very well be the answer that the BYOAC community could be looking for regarding the question about an alternative to iRoms. So, I pose these questions; How much would you pay per month? Would you  build a cab around the Gametap service? And, most importantly, do you think that Gametap will elevate the BYOAC hobby to new levels, and be something that the video game industry and our community can rally around? I think it's getting off on the right foot; Sega pledged support and plans to make the entire Sonic the Hedgehog series available on Gametap, and titles like Pac-Man, Splinter Cell and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater are being mentioned, and it's going to launch with 300 classic arcade and modern console games, with more coming by the week. This could be big, folks.

Oh, and RandyT, Turner mentioned that they are talking to controller manufacturers for Gametap support, so you might want to get the ball rolling for GPWiz-49 support for Gametap. That would be icing on the cake. 

[Dire Radiant]

It has been tried before by RealNetworks. It didn't work for them either.

[daywane]

How much would you pay per month?
$0.00
per down load? not sure. per month gota pass.
Its  like the new music down load sites. by the time I down loaded a cd worth and used my Pc and my CD . I just spent as much as if I went to wal-mart and bought the darn thing.

[arcadecollecting]

I tried this in my cabinet last night and it is effin awesome.

Pros:

It's legal!
It's reasonably priced -- $15 for all the games you can play per month.
Great selection -- and growing
It's easy to use -- awesome front end

Cons
Takes about 10 seconds to load most of the classics I've tried.
Commercials during loading.
Can't reassign controls (yet)

Overall I'm happy as a clam. I was just getting back into emulators in my cabinet and collecting and configuring ROMs and emulators for all the different consoles is quite a time consuming thing and the results aren't perfect. The current crop of front ends are very amatuerish compared to GameTap's professional design. Now for $15 I've instantly got a very nice selection of games to play in my cabinet with ZERO messing around (other than making a new Mini-PAC keyset).

[Crazy Cooter]

Can you post the keyset?

[arcadecollecting]

My keyset won't do anyone else any good because I just plugged random wires from the Mini-PAC harness into random buttons in willy-nilly fashion, then configured each button to do what I wanted (mostly because the

[Crazy Cooter]

Hmmm.  They need to support remapping controls.

[Howard_Casto]

I'd say the biggest drawback is the library itself.  It's a great library, if you only like sega and atari games.  Those of us who like nintendo titles have to wait for the revolution.  Those of us who like more modern offerings from other companies are out of luck as these companies save their properties for their own special re-releases. 


Example: 

You probably won't see the Mortal Kombat series on this system.  Why?  Because MK is now sold as a tv-game MK2 and other versions are available in an arcade treasures pack and midway constantly offers these games as bonuses (such as mk2 being a hidden item in MK shaolin Monks). 

For these reasons the sf franchise and many games from the 90's probably are never going to make it to gametap. 

That and the fact that 15 bucks a month isn't reasonable imho because you are renting, not buying.  If there were thousands upon thousands of titles, like napster I *might* see it, but right now there are simply dozens so you are going to get sick of the few classics you still enjoy and the few hidden gems you might find very quickly. 

I think they need to switch to a starroms approach.

[arcadecollecting]

Ahh, but I happen to know the guy who wrote almost all of the C64 descriptions on Gametap and he says there are literally thousands of titles that they are working on adding. He's under NDA or I'd know what's coming, but he says it's a goldmine.

Anyway there's no minimum commitment. If you get bored, you just don't pay for another month. Just wait until there are another 300 new titles there to play before you cough up another $15 for a month of fun. I spent way more than that in quarters at the arcade back in the day. Heck I spent more than that on smoking cigarettes.

The StarRoms approach is a nice idea but it sure didn't take off.

[Crazy Cooter]

How well did the other services do for consoles?  Didn't (doesn't) X-box or something have some kind of subscription service?

I personally hope this goes well.  If controls can be mapped around a cabinet, I think it's a good way to go.

[Howard_Casto]

Xbox has the xbox arcade, which essentially is a marketplace to buy direct-download games for the xbox.  Unfortuanately the library isn't very big and the cost of teh games is too high.  (30 bucks for a imperfect namco 5 pack of classics)  However with the 360, the arcade is supposed to be improved upon and they actually have free games for you to play (and they should considering you pay for xbox live subscription service). 

The revolution will have nintendo's entire library for the most part.  Details are scarce, but there will be a small fee involved.  Personally this is the one I'm keeping an eye on as nintendo has a better game library than any other game company in exsistance. 

And for the record the only reason starroms didn't catch on is because they have a horrible library.  At the start they had around 40 games, with maybe 10 being fun and then they had a dispute with atari and had many of those games pulled.  Now mabye 3 of the games they offer are popular enough to get your attention. 

And I understand the whole no-obligation thing, but look at it this way:

Of course you can just buy a new month every now and again but do you honestly think that in any given month there is going to be more than a single new release that you'll want to play?  How long are you going to play it for, a weekend?  A whole week?  So you've paid 15 bucks to play a 20 year old game for a few hours, as opposed to starroms, in which that 15 bucks will buy you the game forever and you might even have change left over to buy a sleeper title. 

[arcadecollecting]

Look at it this way. A service like GameTap is like watching TV. A service like StarROMs is like buying a TV show you like on DVD. You can do either. You can do both. It's nice that you have the options. One way isn't necessarily better than the other.