Exposing my socks to the world

Almost forgot, I have a movie up on the front page of MachinimaHQ. Here’s a direct link

Ever since I heard the first rumblings of GameTap I was intrigued. They were offering me the opportunity to play lots of old classic games on demand for a monthly fee. I actually was able to get my hands on a demo of the service that they had set up at E3 and decided to give the two week trial a try.

Getting started with GameTap was relatively painless. After coughing up my billing information, I was able to register for an account and start downloading the launcher.

Once I finally logged in to the service I was able to see what (at least part of) the fuss was all about.

GameTap is divided into three areas: My GameTap, GameTap TV, and the Game Vault. The Game Vault is (obviously) where you’ll be playing your games, My GameTap allows you to change your account settings, and GameTap TV is where you can watch on demand programming, some original and some not.

Odds are that the Games section is where you’re going to be spending the majority of your time. There are currently upwards of 500 games to choose from with the promise of new games to be added regularly. In the couple of weeks that I’ve had the service new games have been added at least two times. The breadth of the games that are available on the service is impressive. There are of course games from the Genesis and the arcade, but there are also representatives from the Commodore 64, Atari 2600, DOS, Game Gear, Intellivision, Neo-Geo, 32x, Master System, Windows, and even Dreamcast games. There don’t seem to be any games for Nintendo’s systems available on the service, but I would venture a guess that’s because those games may be featured on their own Virtual Console service that’s touted to be a part of the Wii experience. So no Super Mario Bros., or the like, unfortunately.

Once you choose the game you wish to play, you are then taken to a screen explaining what the game’s all about, and should you still want to play, it begins downloading the game while showing you the controls and showing you commercials of other ‘stuff’ that you can check out on the network, like a new game or show or whatever.

If you’re thinking about trying out the service, I can not emphasize enough that you will want to get a controller to play these games. For some of the simpler games you could probably get away with using your computer keyboard as a controller, but to me it just ‘feels’ wrong. Of course, playing the arcade version of Street Fighter II with a game pad doesn’t feel quite right either, it’s a whole lot easier than trying to pull off a Shoryuken with the keyboard arrows.

Of all the games I played, they were all emulated pretty well. On some of the larger arcade games that I played the sound seemed to stutter a bit, but I’m going to attribute that to the game loading in the background as I was playing it, as the stuttering lessened significantly after I had played around with the game for a while.

Load times for most of the games on GameTap are pretty low. Understandably, loading the Dreamcast or Windows games is going to take a lot of time, but you have the ability to put the games in a download queue in the background so that they’ll still download while you pick some other games to play. You can have up to three games in your queue at a time, and most of the game’s assets (data required for the game to run) will be saved locally on your computer to lessen the time you have to wait to play the games again in the future should you want to do so.

GameTap TV is the part of the service where you can watch shows about video games or Space Ghost Coast to Coast. They seem to put up new content on there every so often, but honestly I didn’t watch a whole lot of it.

My GameTap lets you look at and change your account settings as well as creating Sub Accounts for restricted access (like if you have kids and want them to have restricted access to the games, for example). I have little no use for most of these features, so I didn’t spend much time goofing around this menu.

The main complaint I have with the service is that should you decide you want to cancel your account for some reason, you are required to call the company to do so. You are able to sign up and do other account management on their site, but just not cancel. I’m lazy enough that I didn’t bother to cancel my account in the trial period, and had to pay for another month. I suspect that I’m not alone. It seems a bit underhanded to me for them to have an easy way to sign up and make you jump through hoops should you decide you are through using their service.

If you’re into the classic games, you might want to give it a shot. The current monthly fee is pretty reasonable for what you get. Most of the games on the service will run just fine on just about any computer, you should be aware that if you want to run some of the Windows or Dreamcast games, you’ll want to have a pretty beefy PC for a decent experience. Oh, and the broadband. You’ll need the broadband. I wouldn’t want to try and download Beyond Good and Evil over a dialup connection.

So, right, it’s been two months and this site has vanished off the face of the planet in that time. Where did it go? What have I been doing?

Turns out, lots of stuff.

A few months back, I sent off several job applications in an unusual format. One of these was ultimately successful and I had to pack up my things and make the move across the country (this site stored in the back of the truck, of course). I moved in with a friend and immediately put the site back on the Internet so I could tell people about my exploits. Unfortunately, the Internet Service Provider here blocks port 80 on their service, and as a result the site was up, but nobody could get at it unless they were on the same network as it.

So I decided to weigh the different hosting options since wouldn’t really make a whole lot of sense to pay for another Service Provider just for the sole purpose of hosting my site from a beat up computer next to my bed.

After a lot of me being lazy and 1) settling into my new job and 2) having a spare moment to get everything set up.

After contemplating all my research, I decided to go with a Virtual Private Server since it allows me to run a server without actually running a server. It’s pretty neat.

If you’ve been coming here for any length of time, you might notice that the site looks a little different. That’s because I have stopped using Movable Type for my Content Management System and have instead begun using Drupal. Movable Type was pretty nice, but shortly after I decided to start using it the authors decided to try and make a living by selling their software (which is pretty much what happened with PHPNuke when I started using it), and upgrades were $70 (or free if I wanted to have a less functional package). Drupal is significantly more free than $70, and it seems to have all the features that I want, and even some that I didn’t know that I wanted.

Converting the last 4 years of posts into a format that this new software can understand was not an easy task, and there are probably some chunks of some of the entries missing, but I’ll be finding and fixing them as I find them. This also means that Google and the like have not re-crawled my site, so any links you might be following from there are going to almost certainly not work for the time being. However, the content you want is probably still here. If you can’t find it or find something that seems to still be broken, shoot me an email and I’ll see what I can do.

This time the site’s up and the whole world can see it. Neat.

Crummysocks.com has a new look and a new content management system. What does that mean? Well, not much, really. A lot of the links to the site will be broken, and I’ll do what I can to fix those as they come up. So come on in and poke around. You might find something you like.