barely fatal

Just recently I decided re-visit gametap.com to see what they are up to, and looksy there, they are still around. On Gametap you can download games directly to HDD – through their player, that means “emulated”, or should I say DRMed to hell and back.

The idea is that you sign up for a monthly subscription of their Premium or Classic packages which go for 10 and 5 bucks respectively, in order to play the games. Biggest problem is, while the price seems reasonably low, most of their games are old-ish, like 3 years at best and mostly older. They have a very few newer titles like GRID (of course “Premium-exclusive”), but not as many interesting or high-rated ones.

But, if you’re into some classics like Psychonauts, Deus Ex, Tomb Raider Legend, Just Cause or American Deer Hunting 2000 and maybe don’t have the latest high-end machine, this might be a place worth looking at: They also have a free-to-play package. Unfortunately they have just announced that most of the more interesting titles will stop being free soon and the “fresh” replacements are a sorry excuse. So my new visit to their site will probably be a short one – currently there’s nothing I’m willing to pay for (or that I didn’t finish years ago) amongst the other old titles.

One thing I noticed, the last time I tried this they I had to download their software in order to start downloads and play, now they have a browser plugin. Now that’s a step back. I mean the idea is all well meant and nice, but it took me half a day to find out what to make of an error message that prevented me from playing (the message was totally misleading). The plugin is also slow and unresponsive, shows wrong data at times, and you cannot configure where the downloaded data is supposed to go to. Guess what, my c: partition is kind of filling up –> registry hack required.

They have all Sam & Max, Overlord, Pirates!, DoW 40k Gold, Freelancer, Titan Quest … hm maybe if I ever run out of other media and finally decide to give up on finding a new girlfriend after all …