After futzing with GameCam and its simpler cousin GameCam Lite, I have to say that I’m pretty dissapointed. When either program is running, you can get good quality screenshots and movies (but no sound) with minimal fuss and a simple interface (see the entry “Screenshot blues” for examples). For a free download, I count that as a success. The unfortunate part is getting the program to run.

GameCam is touted to work on DirectX 7-9 as well as OpenGL renderers, overlaying a simple remote on one corner of the screen that allows users to start and stop movie recording while they play the game. I tried the app on a handful of games including Deus Ex: Invisible War, Tron 2.0 (more on Tron in a later entry), Civilization 3, and Mechcommander 2. Deus Ex and Civ3 are both listed on the site as “supported and tested” and both worked well after minimal setup with the easy to use GameCam Profiler. Tron 2.0 and Mechcommander 2? Not so much.

Although both are DirectX games (one 7.0 and the other 9.0), neither one worked at all. Fire up the GameCam, launch the target game through the Cam interface, and the game launches with no GameCam available. No error messages, no stalling or crashing, just your game with no new options. According the the website, this is typical when the cam’s not set up right.

There seem to be three major categories of critical errors:

1) GameCam is pointed at the wrong executable. I think this is what happened to Tron 2.0, as the file “tron.exe” points at a menu launcher and not at the game app itself. Unfortunately I lack the programming savvy to figure out which is the real executable as there is only one .exe file available.

2) A hotkey overlap. The GameCam uses hotkeys to control most of its functions; if one of these keys overlaps with a hotkey from the target game, GameCam fails. The website lists some common remapping strategies for popular games, but I get the impression hotkeys are the least of your worries.

3) Driver incompatibility. Yeah - it turns out some drivers make GameCam crap itself. There’s no real way of knowing what will and won’t work and, much like Jokerbrand products, it’s not always one driver: sometimes it’s combinations of compatible drivers. There’s no solution to this problem that doesn’t involve app support.

The support for the app seems eager but understaffed, not surprising given this is a free app for the most part. (There is a registered version that costs $25 and comes with more bells and whistles, but I’m poor and lazy) Dropping them an e-mail with a complaint like “Yo, foo, GameCam be whack on TRON 2.0, fa’ shizzle” sparks them into finding a fix, but it takes time. It also makes you seem more hardcore so you can get mad props from your peeps.

The bottom line is that if you stick to the list of tested games published on the site, GameCam is an easy to use utility that allows you to take screenshots without getting in the way of the game. Unfortunately, if you venture into unexplored waters, don’t expect this app to work.