GameTap for the Macintosh

I write a lot about games for the Mac, because it’s my platform of choice. Within the past several years, the Mac’s transition to the Intel platform has, slowly, begun to yield fruit for the Mac gamer’s table. The most recent evidence of this is that GameTap has brought its “Lite” player to the platform.

What does “Lite” mean? Well, in part it means that the games are launched via a web browser interface rather than through the GameTap “rich client.” As a frequent GameTap user, I can’t complain about this. The practical result is that I can start the games faster, rather than waiting for the fairly heavyweight client to start up.

The other side of “Lite”, of course, is that there aren’t as many games. More or less, the Lite client has access to all emulated games from older platforms, but not Windows, Dreamcast, or Saturn games. Since GameTap is using Transgaming’s emulation technology, you can play DOS games (hey, Betrayal at Krondor!), which is a nice surprise. Yes, I know one could use DOSBox to play those games, but it’s a relief to not have to worry about configuration, performance, or even keeping track of the files: it’s all just click-and-play. If Gametap can manage to roll out the ability to play Windows games in the Lite player, I’ll never have any reason to launch the rich client at all. Here’s hoping.

There are a few other drawbacks to the Lite player, as well. There’s no full screen mode (GameTap says that is coming later in the year), and mouse tracking in some of the DOS games can be a bit persnickety. Performance was not an issue on my MacBook Pro. Those of you with PowerPC based Macs won’t get to join in on the fun, unfortunately, but can instead look at this as yet another good reason to upgrade.

If you already have a GameTap subscription, being able to play on your Mac without rebooting into Windows is a great convenience. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, you should definitely take a look at the list of available games and decide if there are enough titles that interest you to join. If Windows titles were available, this would be a slam-dunk 5 star review, but without that feature I have to rate this as “merely fantastic”.