Sometimes beating a game is not enough. Often you want to share the results of your labors with other gamers so they can use your strategies and make their own lives easier. If you’re like me, you may just want to rub your victory in people’s faces. You could also do video reviews, or use in-game footage to make a music video for your favorite song. Whatever your goals may be, in order to do this, you have to record your moment of glory. Usually one would use Fraps to do that, but now a challenger has arrived.

PlayClaw is a video capture program by Sytexis Software. It is small (requiring only 1.85 MB of hard drive space) and lightweight (20 MB memory footprint). Like its competition, it also allows you to take screenshots in BMP, TGA, PNG and JPG formats. If you use the JPG one it allows you to use a slider to select the desired quality for the image. For video, the options are Low, High and No compression, with frame-rate choices of 15, 30 and 60 frames per second. Just as with Fraps, PlayClaw does not allow you to save videos at arbitrary resolutions, instead defaulting to either the resolution at which the game is running or half of that.

I tested PlayClaw with five different games: Defense Grid: The Awakening, Aion, Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Torchlight. All of my videos came out looking really sharp and the sound was good as well. However, I did notice that in Aion there was a problem with some strange red lines on the right border on the screen. They didn’t show up during play and yet were in the video. Also, I have a dual core processor, and I experienced some jerky frame-rates in my recorded videos when I selected to use both cores, but this is more an observation than a complaint. As soon as I went back to using just one core, the videos went right back to being silky smooth.

Audio-wise, PlayClaw did not give me any issues. It allows you to select a sound source such as your speakers, and an input line such as your microphone. This is so you can easily record not only the game sounds but also your conversations (or frantic screaming) over TeamSpeak or Ventrilo. Likewise the multiple available overlays worked without a problem. You can use PlayClaw to see your frames per second and AVI information for the video you are recording. Also, it has a special overlay to show you who is currently speaking on TeamSpeak or Vent, which is rather useful if playing at full screen.

Seemingly solid, PlayClaw can probably benefit from some polish, but generally speaking I found it to be more than adequate for it’s purpose. The full product costs $29.95 and there is a free demo available so you can give it a go before buying. Those who already own Fraps can pretty much ignore this one, but those who are in the market for game-recording software, should give this little program due consideration.