I’ve been a GameTap user and subscriber for quite some time now and so I thought I would do a review on their service as well as give a gamer’s perspective on what GameTap has evolved into. Gametap is an online gaming service run by Turner, a Time Warner Company. If it seems a bit odd to you that the same company that brought us TBS and TNT is bringing you games, keep in mind that they also own Cartoon Network, so on some level the company does “get it”. Anyway…

GameTap started a few years ago as a kind of legal emulation-based retro gaming service for Windows computers. It offered subscribers a completely legal way to download and play many classic arcade games such as Pac-Man and Galaga. Also, the service offered classic games from Sega and Atari as well as classic PC games. It was an excellent idea that has only improved with age.

Now, GameTap offers not just classic games, but also newer games such as Puzzle Quest, and even episodic indie games such as Sam and Max. To top it all off, GameTap about a year ago did something really cool. They started offering about thirty or forty games each month for free! What’s better than free? How about you can play them in Internet Explorer without even having to download the GameTap client program. That’s about as cool as it gets.

Are these free games crappy ones that nobody wants to play? Nope! You get rockin’ games like Metal Slug and Psychonauts. Seriously, these are classics and you can play them as much as you want without paying a dime. That’s a killer deal, in fact it’s almost as good of a deal as their subscription.

The GameTap subscription is the best deal I’ve found as far as PC gaming is concerned. Yes, World of Warcraft is a lot of fun, but GameTap is maybe even more fun, has way more variety, and is a whole lot cheaper. Right now GameTap is only $5 per month if you buy a year at a time.  or $10 a month if you go month-to-month. The subscription gets you access to an extra 904 premium games that are a lot of fun. My personal favorite is Puzzle Quest. That game alone is worth $20, or 4 months subscription. Compare that to WoW at $15/month and you quickly see why GameTap is so darn cool.

The best part of GameTap, aside from the very very very cheap pricing is the fact that there are some really great games that are worth playing on there. Here’s a few excellent examples: Puzzle Quest, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Street Fighter 2 and 3, Sam and Max, Pirates!, Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, Myst, Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Overlord, Deus Ex 1 and 2, Farcry, DiRT, Splinter Cell, and the list goes on and on.

As a gamer, I honestly can’t even begin to scratch the surface of all the fantastic games on GameTap. Of course, out of the over 1,000 games on GameTap, there is definately some real stinkers on there too, but that’s part of the great thing about this service, even if there are some bad games, the good ones are so plentiful that it doesn’t matter. Also, you never know when you’ll find a lost gem that you’ve never played before.

There are a few downsides, but I don’t think they are real deal-breakers. Not all of the games work perfectly, especially the ones on the PC side. Some early PC games don’t run well or at all in Vista, which frankly can be expected, but if you tweak your settings around enough they can work reasonably well. That being said, most games work flawlessly and there’s only a few that don’t. Also, if you’re a Mac user, GameTap has a version available for the Intel-based Macintosh machines as well. The only drawback is you don’t get all the Windows games, but you still get many emulated classics.

All in all GameTap is a great service and a great value that I reccomend to any Windows PC gamer. It is a fantastic way to discover classic games that you never had a chance to play way back when. That alone would be enough, but with the free games, the indies, the episodic games, and premium newer games, GameTap is a steal.