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OnLive


deanb
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http://www.onlive.com/This is a service I'm pretty interested in. Not yet out in the UK, but I'll be giving it a serious eyeballing when it does.

 

Anyone here using it? Interested? What are your thoughts on the future.

 

 

Oh yeah if you Pre-order Homefront you get the Micro Console thrown in for free, which is a pretty sweet pre-order deal Not often the game comes with a console. Normally the other way around.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GamasutraNews/~3/czyVtnYt4yc/OnLive_Offering_Free_Microconsole_With_Homefront_PreOrder.php

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I've tried it. In my experience the latency is too high to make action games very playable, with about 1/3 to 1/2 second between hitting the control and seeing the result on screen. Also the video quality isn't great. The graphics are fine, but the compression makes everything feel soft. I tried Just Cause 2 on OnLive, then I tried it on my 360 connected to the same monitor and I was shocked at how much clearer everything was on the 360. So you're better off playing on a console than playing on OnLive.

 

I think the tech is promising, but it's not quite there yet.

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I have the OnLive Microconsole and a few games for it. It works very well, and Just Cause 2 runs perfectly for me. I think the real test of its value will come when we go into the next line of consoles. Since OnLive is basically a streaming service, no further upgrades will be necessary.

 

You can actually try it out for free and see how much you like it.

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It's certainly possible that they've upgraded the service since I tried it over the summer.

They definitely did. The service was bullshit when I did the beta over the summer. They're constantly adding data servers and features to the console server-side, so the experience has been improving for me almost on a month-to-month basis. It works really well now, and I can actually play some games like DiRT 2 with the same accuracy a normal console offers.

 

They have some crazy things planned for the future. You can already watch OnLive games from your iPad/Xoom, but they're planning on doing much more than that later on this year. There will even be some games that release exclusively for OnLive, and a movie streaming service also on the way. It seems like the company makes quite the profit from the service; streaming high-quality video to the consumer is apparently dirt-cheap, and they get paid every time someone plays a free 30-minute trial for a specific game.

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Ah, found a workaround for the login problem: I went to their support page, that let me log in, which also logged me in on the main site.

 

*Edit* - or not, it signs me back out again as soon as I try to get to the client to d/l it.

 

Well this is really fucking frustrating.

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Ah, found a workaround for the login problem: I went to their support page, that let me log in, which also logged me in on the main site.

 

*Edit* - or not, it signs me back out again as soon as I try to get to the client to d/l it.

 

Well this is really fucking frustrating.

That really sucks. Are you American, or are you logging in from another country? I've heard that people from other countries had trouble logging in to download the service, so they used some sort of IP router to make the site think they were logging in from America.

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  • 1 month later...

So, I was pretty bored this afternoon and was checking my Youtube subcriptions when I saw an OnLive review from Classic Game Room and decided to give it a spin. Registered, downloaded the app and ran the thing, getting a huge warning at the beginning that my latency is too high.

 

So, I decide to test it anyway, choose AC: Brotherhood and start playing it. The game was... disturbingly responsive. The input lag was very low, and surely lower than newer games I've tried running (Dead Rising 2 comes to mind). In the 30 minutes I've played, I got two 1 second chops due to my Internet acting up, but otherwise no problems whatsoever.

 

The scary thing is, only after I played AC did I find out that there are no EU servers and that I was streaming from the US. Seriously, I was totally "meh" about OnLive and expected it to be crap. If this gets to the EU and they expand their game library, I'm willing to pay up money.

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  • 5 months later...

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/559794736795412501/2AAC49D13C89641F932619F241EDB8A7F0D5709D/

 

It plays fairly well. The looks leave something to be desired when compared to running natively on my PC. The cutscenes, but never in the game itself, did sometimes stutter a bit. Just a singular stutter n techno-sound, not like bunny hops kinda stuttering. Probably to do with loading maybe.

 

I wanted to see if it did save states too so just quit midway, gonna see what happens when I load up tomorrow. For a pund it's not bad, and the £6.99/month isn't too bad either. (I pay £5 a month for Lovefilm which gets me 2 games a month). If your PC isn't that great, then it's a good service. Better than nothing. I wouldn't recommend it on fast paced stuff though.

 

Oh a complaint would be that the reticle is a bit hard to see. ('cept when it flashes yellow on an enemy)

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I'm with BT broadband (onlive's official UK partner) at the moment and they give you 3 months free of the playpack and using it doesn't count to your broadband allowance so I'm pretty chuffed. I've had a go of it and sometimes the picture is a bit pants, but playing dirt3 it was surprising how responsive it was. Depending on how up to date it keeps its games roster then it will be good for trials instead of downloading demos.

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I really like OnLive. I think they handle their business intelligently, and as a consumer, I like to see more options flourish when it comes to playing the latest game. I'm especially interested in their supposed "OnLive exclusive games" that are coming soon. Also, the way they offer the multiplayer aspects of games like F3AR and Homefront as part of the package is an intriguing experiment. In general, OnLive appears to be willing to take some crazy risks in order to get noticed and get people on board, and I can respect that.

 

There's only one problem; in terms of pricing for the latest games, either the price would have to come down or the quality would have to get to a near-perfect status for me to even consider buying brand-new games on OnLive, or pre-ordering them. Other than that, I enjoy using OnLive, its PlayPack system and the few games I bought from them on the cheap.

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RPS likes OnLive more than me, but I think that article does a good job of explaining the benefits and shortcomings. They recognize all the problems I had, they just aren't as bothered by them. That article did convince me to hook up my laptop to my TV tonight and give OnLive another shot in "console" mode. I've previously only tried it in a more standard "PC" setting, which RPS agrees is nigh unplayable.
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I think it's interesting, but they really need the video quality to come up. My 360, let alone my desktop, puts OnLive's visuals to shame; it's just so muddy.

 

how does it compare to streaming a HD video? I see the quality changing quite dramatically depending on what speed I'm getting from my broadband connection, unfortunately it is quite bad quite often.

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