Be Excellent To Each Other

Very weird, I have a 7Mbps connection, and didn't experience the same problems you had

Hang on, they have no European servers yet, so of course it's not going to be perfect - how can you judge the service with extra trans-Atlantic latency tacked on?

Because it's already quite good?

$20 for world of goo when you could buy it for a penny a little while back.

And a large selection of old games at new prices.

Hmmmmm

LOL @ Installing update as soon as it's fucking installed.

Well that lasted long.

Just had a nose at the games list to see if there was anything that I'd play and wondered why Borderlands was in the puzzle category. Turns out that no matter what you select from the dropdown, Borderlands is there.

Only good game on there is Trine.

I'm still not massively convinced by this. The article Craster linked to says that the graphics are noticeably worse... and then in the next paragraph says the power of the Cloud can make the graphics infinitely better than the current crop of consoles. Odd.

It could end up being the way forward, but at the moment I'm not interested.

Bandwidth, rather than latency, seems to be the problem I'm having. And that to D.C. is still above the recommended figure.

It's the difference between detail and resolution. The graphics are "better" as you basically have the detail slider ramped all the way up. Unfortunately the resolution slider is only midway...

No -- it's streamed at a nominal 1080p (I think...?). The image degredation is from bitrate caps on the stream, so it takes the form of crunchy, over-compressed images with macroblocks and whatnot. This doesn't really have a parallel with anything that's locally rendered.

Well yes, I was going for a simile against traditional PC graphics! I didn't make that clear though

Wow, I didn't realise that OnLive had already... um... 'gone live'. I'll have to give it a quick blast when I get home tonight. I'm especially interested after what you guys have been saying so far about it, as I'm finding it very tough to believe something like this can have so little lag as to be genuinely playable.

It's certainly got lag, but it's not as bad as you'd think.
Playing it from a good computer made me think "hrn, this is a bit ugly". Playing it from work makes me think "holy crap, this is fantastic".

It actually works quite well though the latency is certainly noticeable. So for a relatively reasonable connection like mine I think that the usefulness of this service will probably be restricted by game type. I tried playing AvP and whilst it looked fine (not great sat right in front of a PC monitor but at a normal distance from a telly I reckon it would look pretty good) it wasn't all that fun due to the delay between moving the mouse and the crosshairs moving around. Unfortunately I can't really think of many games I do enjoy where anything like this kind of delay wouldn't be a compete deal-breaker. So right now I think this is truly technically impressive but fairly useless on all but the quickest connections.

So, is this live in the US already then?

If so, is it working?

Yes. Yes.

UK release imminent and to entice members, first game only £1; if bought before 9th October.
http://www.onlive.co.uk/games/featuredg ... =top_games

Interesting. Is there any subscription cost, or can I really just buy a brand new game for a quid?

Looks like you buy the game outright, or rent for 3 or 5 days and certain games per month

If the pound thing is all you have to pay, we should all get the same game, some form of multiplayer lark, and have fun.

Do you need the console then? Hotukdeals have got an offer on where if you pre-order saints row 3 for it, then you get the console and pad worth 70 quid for free.

What console? I thought this was all played on a typewriter?

There are two ways to use the system

Via your curent PC almost regardless of the spec (since its just streaming video and audio to you and your streaming 'control' information to it)
A dedicated console (which is tiny and is basically just there to stream things both ways.)

I do remember one of the big things of it before was that on a mac or linux box you would suddenly have access to all those pc only games - also given that your system is simply streaming content both ways you could in theory run it on just about anything (I seem to remember someone running some really high end pc game on an ipad)

Has it got achievements?

If this tech works and the next console gen goes the same way (and whither Steam?) I am looking forward to sitting on holiday and playing nextbox games on my laptop.

it is basically Citrix with a few bells and whistles....

They had betterbe shiny bells and whistles, as pretty much every place I've used Citrix for any decent length of time something has gone horrifically wrong.

Works pretty well from my quick testing. Looks a bit fuzzy like playing a YouTube video but possibly good for many things. Seemed reasonably responsive but I didn't test out any FPS.

So far so good.

I was just using it as a point... We might be going that way again.. dumb terminals and a citrix /terminal emulation solution...

I might give it a bash this evening.

And then try OnLive.

<reaches for the mind bleach>

Vaseline would work better, if you want to avoid chafing.

I imagine this would make my Internet cry.

It's not called shittricks for nothing.

I put this in the bargains thread, but if you pre-order AssCreed:Revelations from OnLive for £35 and get the OnLive console for free

http://www.onlive.co.uk/go/assassins-cr ... evelations
http://www.onlive.com/game-system

Well, I did it, just to see what the console was like.
The game was £35, and you get a code for the console (which you buy from https://www.onlive.co.uk/store). It knocks £69.99 from the overall price, leaving you to pay £6 postage, so £41 in total.

Even if it works completely as intended though, you've now got a copy of AssCreed:Revelations that:

• You can only play when your net connection's running
• You can only play when their servers are up
• Probably won't look as good even as the console versions because it only runs at 720p and you'll have some level of compression artifacting
• Won't be quite as responsive as playing it locally
• Won't get you any achievements (I don't know if you care about such things?)
• Can't be swapped or traded when you're done with it
• Won't be playable online with your Xbox chums

All that, and it's not like it's any cheaper than buying the Xbox version or whatever. I'm struggling to see the justification here, unless you've sacrified £35 to the pure knowledge of seeing how well it runs? In which case science and I salute you, you mad fool!

What's that big list about? I get new shiny. D'uh.

I salute your pioneer spirit, Sir Grimothy

I was just curious as to your reasoning for buying the game on that platform. I realise now of course that I've expressed that curiosity via the medium of 'shitting all over your new purchase' which is pretty bad form. Sorry about that.

I've played quite a bit on OnLive, and I have to say I'm constantly impressed - when you stop and think about what they've achieved it's mind-blowing.

interesting...let's see if they can keep up if it becomes a succes..

Hmm, tempted at that price. How painful is this likely to be on my tinpot 2mbs max ten miles from the exchange broadband? It says this is the minimum...

You can go to their website and give it a try on your PC for 'free'

I can see they have been updating it quite a bit because on my machine before it just used to stutter and die during the opening video however it now plays that okay (i've still not had the chance to try a game but when i get the time i will)

Most games let you play for 30 minutes for free (but you can't save). And you can check out the Brag Clips too, which are works of genius.

Thanks Zaphod/Grim...

That was remarkably smooth, although i suppose being midday on Monday didn't hurt. Grr shiney cheapness, may have to give it a go....

Well, it's arrived, and I had a go with it last night.
First, I had to sync the controller by plugging it in with a USB cable. Fair enough. Then the console started, and download an update. Then it downloaded an update for the joypad(!), which I had to plug in again.
And then it was off. Obviously, it's exactly the same as it is on the PC - except you're using a joypad. And that's perhaps the biggest failing - some PC games just don't work with a pad (and one didn't work with the pad at all). FEAR3 even showed the keys you should press (as in, keyboard keys) to open doors and such. In fairness, the joypad controls are pre-defined, and the pad itself isn't that bad (it's a bit heavy, and the d-pad is, predictably, shit). But that's a bit of a shame.
On the plus side, a) it worked, and b) it looks much better on a TV a few meters away than it does on a monitor next to your face. Graphics whores will still pick fault, but it looks more than good enough. Most impressive.
The 'console' itself is tiny, barely bigger than a Nintendo DS. It has no moving parts, so it's silent, but it does run hot - the (tiny) instruction book warns you not to touch it during or after play (it also tells you not to microwave or incinerate any of the components ).
They could do with some more games to choose from, and to make them work better with a joypad (although you can plug a keyboard / mouse in if you want to, but that's defeating the 'console' object somewhat).
In conclusion, though, it's very interesting, but probably not worth £69. I'm fairly sure, however, that it's the future of gaming.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/ap ... d-la-noire

Well, gosh. That certainly makes things interesting...

The day Microsoft develops a way of me being able to play my 360/720 games through my iPad at work with a controller will be the day my productivity falls off a cliff.

Does it have to be microsoft? This is pretty much what Onlive are doing now.