Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Well, as we talked about in past podcasts and the lost podcast that was episode nine, we all have been impressed with Gametap and the hooks that it has to get you to sign up. Well, after enough Gametap commercials, combined with the ghostly wasteland that was Star Wars Galaxies, I decided to take the plunge and sign up with a gold account on Gametap. And I can honestly say that it is well worth the fee to join the service.

For anyone that has been under a rock, or avoids anything Turner media related, Gametap is an online gaming service. It is similar to a rental service, but everything occurs online. There is no media shipped to you and no need to worry about late fees. You pick the games you want to play, download them to your hard drive and delete them when you are done. It sounds fairly simple, but it there is so much more to it that makes the subscription worth the money

To sign up for the service, you just have to set up a TapID and decide on a free or a paid account. There are some distinct differences in the two. The free account will allow you to download the Lite player and play through about three or four dozen games on the service. The Lite player is a windowed player, so you cannot play the games at full screen. But the games for free are not all that shabby and seem to change from time to time. The gold membership is a simple $9.95 a month or $59.95 for a yearly subscription, giving you the full year at half off the regular price. This gives you access to the deluxe player that can be used full screen and allows for all the games on the service, numbering just under a thousand games.

Once you get signed on to the service, you will find the service is laid out in a nice and orderly format. You have the GameVault circle which is where you browse, download and launch the games on the service. The Gametap TV circle gives you access to animated shows, game trailers, exclusive videos and news shows focused on games and entertainment. My GameTap is where you set up your preferences, add buddies, and give info about yourself. One thing I found was that I never really got lost in the service. It is easy to get around and find what you are looking for and the ever present context menus at the top help you get to where you need to go.

The games range from the obscure to the very popular. Some of the selections that I saw that caught my eye were the Carmen SanDiego games, X-COM, the two newest Tomb Raider games, ToeJam and Earl and many others. The games come from several platforms including the 2600, Dreamcast, Windows, DOS, Genesis, Neo-Geo, the Master System, Sega 32x, Commodore 64 and the arcade classics. It is a wide platform of games to choose from and many hits from yesterday as well as a fair amount from present day. It was not lost on me that Nintendo has not provided any content to the service, which is understandable, considering they have the Virtual Console to market, but it would have been nice to add some Mario games.

Getting a game from Gametap is easy enough. Once you select a title by clicking on it, you just click on the Download Game link. You can download games in the background as you browse, but you can only download three games at a time. When the game is done, you just click on the game title and press Start Game. When you no longer want a game, you just click on the Trash Can icon in the bottom right of the game screen. It will even keep your saved games if you want, just in case you come back to the game later.

The service does not stop at games though, as it also offers a full spectrum of videos to watch. The video service has several categories, like game trailers, entertainment news and animation, just to name a few. The animation channel really caught my eye as it offers a fair amount of Adult Swim programming like every episode of Sealab 2021 and Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. They also have the Lara Croft animated series that I raved about a few weeks ago in a podcast. The videos are clear, but sometimes stream a bit choppy. They also do not have a huge amount of videos, but it the library is growing and new titles seem to be added on a regular basis.

The future hook to the service seems to be the original content that is coming to Gametap first. Last year, Telltale experimented with the service by putting the Sam and Max games on the service first before releasing them to the public, which garnered huge success. Other games coming soon will also come to the service either first or same day as retail such as American McGee