Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could recreate your childhood by playing the
original Oregon Trail on your computer just like you did in elementary school? Or the Hydro Thunder game that you spent hours in front of at Chuck E’ Cheese growing up? Thanks to Gametap, an online service which has been around for the past few years, you can replay the games of yesteryear and also play games released in the last few weeks as well.
Initially, you sign up for the service and pay 99 cents for the first month of the service. After that, you can pay $9.95 a month, or $59.95 for a year subscription to Gametap which gives you unlimited access to their catalog of Premium and Free games without advertising, over 1,000 in all. You can also purchase access to nearly 500 retail games like “Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader” and “Backyard Basketball 2007,” where prices range from $9.99 and up, but most of the games cost $19.99.
When you first sign up for the service, you download the Gametap software which downloads and runs the games you want to play on your computer. Once the software downloads and starts running, it begins downloading the catalog, called the Vault, from the Gametap server. This initial download takes about 10 minutes to complete as it downloads all the titles, descriptions, and cover art from GameTap’s servers. From the software, you can search the catalog of games available for download, and begin downloading whatever games you want.
To try out the software, I downloaded 5 games: Pac-Man, Oregon Trail, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Emergency 3, and Black Hawk Down. I loaded them all onto the HP laptop that Freshman and Juniors received this year and played all of them.or attempted to. I had great luck with the smaller and older games like Pac-Man and Sonic 3. Both games downloaded quickly, played smoothly and were a quite enjoyable way to kill time and avoid writing the numerous papers I had to finish. Sonic 3 was just as I had remembered playing it on the Sega Genesis with all the typical characters, villains, and trademark moves, and Gametap has 14 different versions of the Sonic the Hedgehog series to keep you busy.
I began running into problems with some of the more elaborate and newer games. When I tried playing The Oregon Trail, I could never get the game to load, and after more than an hour working with Gametap’s technical support department, we still couldn’t get the game to load, and I tried it on another freshman’s laptop just to make sure it wasn’t an issue with my computer, and couldn’t get it to work on that computer either. Fortunately, if you do run into an issue you can contact Gametap support by email or begin a Live Chat session with one of their agents, where hold times were less than one minute whenever I needed to chat with them…on four different occasions. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get Emergency 3 to work on my computer either, even after working with a Technical Support agent at Gametap for nearly an hour. Lastly, while playing Black Hawk Down, the game lagged multiple times, and while the lagging is tolerable, it is by no means ideal. I have found out that Gametap is only designed to work on Windows XP machines and is not designed to work with Vista. I have heard from those whose computers are running Windows XP that Gametap works great and all of the games that I used and had issues with worked fine on those machines. However, as my computer is running Windows Vista, I can only comment on how the service runs on Windows Vista.
The concept of a service like Gametap is a great concept overall, the shortfall lies in its execution. Fortunately, the service works on both Mac and PC, but not all the games are playable on both machines. Another disappointing aspect of Gametap is that games can only be played when there is an active internet connection, even though the games download in their entirety to your computer’s hard drive. I was very disappointed with the execution of this service especially given their large catalog of gaming titles there was a lot of potential for a great service at a relatively low cost. Instead, when 2 of the 5 games work well, 1 works shakily well, and 2 more don’t work at all on Windows Vista I have a hard time recommending a service which costs $9.95 a month, or $59.95 to Bentley students where half the student body runs Vista. Even though our campus is blanketed in wireless internet, I also can’t recommend paying for a service which only works if you have an active internet connection, which isn’t everywhere. I was truly disappointed by Gametap, and should they remedy their game play issues with Vista and give users the ability to play their games direct from their computer regardless of their internet connection I would drastically change my rating. But until then, I have a hard time giving Gametap more than 4/10.

Rating: 4/10