GameTap hitting 1000 games and upcoming info

There were quite a few press releases from GameTap this week so we figured we'd roll it into one post. The basic news is that GameTap, Turner Broadcasting System's "broadband entertainment network" -- we prefer to just call it a gaming smorgasbord -- will hit 1000 games available to subscribers on Nov. 15. If you're a weekly reader of our GameTap Thursday posts you know there's definitely a strong hit or miss quotient to those titles, but the point is that there are still 1000 available games to subscribers on-demand. A good portion of the games are new titles, while a majority are classic games you can't normally play without dragging out the old consoles from mom and/or dad's attic. GameTap also keeps a pretty solid list of free games available for non-subscribers as well (which we always list on our GameTap Thursday posts also). Now let's get to the info dumping ...

• Clive Barker's Jericho is available Tuesday for GameTap subscribers. Keep an eye on Codemasters games because this will become standard ops. due to the GameTap/Codemasters deal from July.
• Sam & Max season two starts Nov. 8 with Ice Station Santa. Season one's episode Abe Lincoln Must Die! is available for free now.
• Myst URU Online's final episode in the season one story arc begins Nov. 1.
• The first three Hitman games will be free to play for non-subscribers on GameTap coinciding with the November release of the movie.
• A new season of the Re\Visioned series starts soon, which previously took a fresh look at Lara Croft. There's no announcement on who the character is for the new series yet.
• GameTap is also getting into GameTrailers' retrospective (which we love) territory with looks at Hitman, Command & Conquer, Sonic and NiGHTS.

That's pretty much the basic GameTap info dump at this point. We know GameTap has a lot more up its sleeve and will continue to change dramatically in the next year. It's slowly, but surely, becoming a virtual console in its own right. Coincidentally, you can already get a lot of the (non-Nintendo) Nintendo Wii Virtual Console lineup on the GameTap service without that pesky monetary hit each time.

Update: There's typically a lot of questions regarding controllers for GameTap. Just because it's a PC-based service doesn't mean you have to use a mouse and keyboard. Here's a link to "officially" supported controllers (including the Xbox 360 controller) and you can map out the buttons however you want.