Soooooo... TW found out that GameTap actually put the new remake of the old Tomb Raider game up for grabs. I've played the old Tomb Raider games when they first came out on the first Playstation. I liked it, but it was kind of confusing (probably because I was only 11) and I didn't have a Playstation, so I never actualled owned it.

But GameTap has Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which is the old game restored to brand new modern graphics, and lemme tell ya', that thing looks awesome. One of the coolest games ever. You just... run around and explore with minimal storyline intrusion! If only Uru was this good... (Ahem.)

I got to the second "world", so to speak. I quit for the night and watched The Mothman Prophecies with TW and Ed on Skype. (That's a pretty good movie, too. It's really not as scary as all the reviews let on. Although it definitely cashed in on creepiness. Think of it like a really big episode of X Files.) And then I decided to play some more before I went out to the shop to work!

I load up GameTap, wait through the annoying splash screen animation, navigated to the game, pressed Play, watched the ads... and watched the ads... and watched the ads... and then I started to wonder why the "Start Game" button wasn't lighting up. It usually does so within a few seconds. But this never did... I restarted GameTap to no avail. I restarted Vista to no avail. I ran diagnostics to no avail. And then I decided to just download the DVD image and play it outside GameTap. (After all, I have a subscription to GameTap, so I'm technically renting Tomb Raider forever until I cancel.) So I open up Windows Explorer to check how much harddrive space I have left and... I have 6 gigs free. That's exactly how much I had BEFORE I installed Tomb Raider.

So I checked GameTap's folder and, sure enough, the Tomb Raider folder was empty. It had around 20 megs worth of stuff, which are probably my saved game files that I have no hope in heck to extract and get my progress back. GameTap somehow, for some reason, erased 2 gigabytes of a game I was actively playing. I checked the GameTap forums and it appears that this is a rather common bug. Of course, lots of people say they never have a problem (including the unhelpful moderators), but seeing three hits on the first search page isn't promising. Theories include GameTap erasing games to make room for new ones, which is wrong, because I only have Uru and Tomb Raider installed and I had plenty of harddrive space left. I didn't even TRY to download another game after that.

The fact that the GameTap interface repeatedly crashes in Vista (it didn't used to before the last few "upgrades") and the fact that it randomly erases games for absolutely no reason, and the fact that Uru alone is not at all worth 10 dollars a month (4 less that World of Warcraft, which I play more or less every day), I think it's safe to say that I will soon abandon the stupid thing all together and just BUY the games I want to play. That way, even XFire will correctly register what games I'm playing instead of just "GameTap". As if I want to be registered as playing GameTap as my number one game, yeah...

But, as I said before, GameTap/Myst Online has one more chance... And that is if the next Myst Online episode was as nice as the last one. Better hope Er'cana has some nice upgrades or it won't pass the test.