Two weeks goes by pretty quickly around here. As you might be able to tell from the complete and utter lack of GameTap-centric posts around here, I really haven't been able to spend much time with the all-you-can-eat game buffet since last writing about it. This in-and-of-itself is a problem, since a service is really only worth about as much as you can use it, but I'll blame a sudden surge of outside pressures and obligations on my failure to fully exploit the free trial period.

To compensate, I'll keep to the plan for another two weeks and see how often it gets booted up. I actually spent much more time with it than I intended, allotting several precious hours to play it. Hours that were previously earmarked for projects that allow me to pay for services like GameTap.

Today though, I managed to work through a number of titles that I didn't realize GameTap had ..on tap. For instance, classics that haven't aged as nicely as I hoped like Alex Kidd in Miracle World and the Genesis sequel Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle - both available (as well as Alex Kidd & The Lost Stars). Castlevania Bloodlines is also available any time I want it, as well as the elusive Contra: Hard Corps. I was surprised to see that Uplink was also posted, especially since it just became available on Steam a few days ago for the same price as a month of GameTap - $9.95. And in fact, this brings up a bit of a quandry I have with the service (GameTap, that is - not Steam).

See, since GameTap is a service and all, you don't have access to the actual game files or anything. That's all fine and good if you'd doing console gaming and so on, but what if you're playing a PC game via GameTap, and you want to buy that title later on? Unfortunately (at least as far as I can tell), there's no way to migrate any save games over to a purchased copy. And that's a bit sad, since with Uplink I'm already in the GameTap client and already have the game downloaded and everything.

And what about the dozens of older adventure games on GameTap? I'm finding these games by the handful each weekend, and it sure would be nice if I could take my GameTap progress with me whenever I actually do acquire a retail copy of some of these aged games. It's a small thing, but it definitely keeps me from playing any more Uplink at the moment (well, there's that and the fact that due to a bug I can't complete the second tutorial).

There are a few other kinks in the client that just started appearing. For instance, whenever you commence downloading an very large game, you're given the option to download it in the background, and the continue browsing the GameTap playground. However, if it's a smaller game, you're not given that option. I presume they believe that the download will be finished before you can bat an eyelash, but the reality is that today it took a number of minutes (plus a few failed downloads) before I was able to boot up some of these smaller games.

On a similar note, it appears that the client doesn't download the game instructions along with the game, so if you've downloaded the game already, but want to quickly check out the instructions right afterwards, well let's just say I hope you like GameTap's 'loading' icon.

After tonight, despite my minor gripes, I'm still feeling pretty good about the service. I keep discovering new titles and have an increasingly long list of games in my 'favorites', however I have yet to spend much more than an hour with any single game. The games I have spent the most time with have all been PC games, all of which have exhibited bugs that range from severely irritating to 'crash-to-desktop'. For now, I'll presume that these were isolated incidents, but I'll certainly try more extended gaming sessions before I decide once-and-for-all whether to stick with the service.

Next up: my GameTap 'wishlist'!