I read a bunch of reviews on it and most were bad, but since it's free to join and try I gave it a shot.
I'm on a 2mbs connection, but my wireless only gives me about 1.2.
Needless to say it worked great and I didn't have any problems with it apart from having a limited selection of games to chose from.
There is some slight compression artifacts when you play, but oddly I didn't notice any lag. It seemed almost as if I was playing the game on my own machine.
I tried it and was very impressed, I expected it to be superlaggy (I live in Europe and OnLive hasn't started its service here yet)
Once it actually started (it refused the first couple of times because my latency was too high, in the end it let me on a "Wi-Fi beta" though) it ran fairly well. Lag was minimal. The graphics quality was generally okay, (comparing Borderlands on OnLive with the same game on the PS3) it smeared a bit during rapid camera motions and after while it took a second or two for the screen to get back in focus.
The Unlimited play option sounds quite promising ($9.99 a month for access to 40 games, I assume they'll be adding more titles as time goes by) but I don't think I'd buy games for it either.
- Ok, you must admit that was the most creative cussing this site have ever seen -
My biggest concern about OnLive is if I purchase a game and they suddenly decide to pull the game from their servers for whatever reason, how am I going to play it. I mean if you buy a digital download from Steam, you actually download and install the whole game on your computer, the only thing you're doing with Steam is asking it for permission to play. You can actually go offline and play games in offline mode.
I agree with the statement, OnLive is just more of a cool tech demo than a viable replacement for any form of real gaming. Especially when the games are still full price.
Yeah, I don't see any reason in buying games for OnLive.
Fun fact, to achieve a lower latency, instead of just taking the video and sending it off to a single encoder OnLive splits it into 16 smaller chunks and send them to 16 individual encoders. Yes, I'm a nerd
- Ok, you must admit that was the most creative cussing this site have ever seen -
My biggest gripe is that they don't run their games on maximum graphics nor do I get high definition. So the main reason I'd want it - saving hard drive space, faster loading, and no concern for computer specs, I wouldn't be getting what I'm ultimately striving to get when I try to play these kind of games.
i personally believe that this is the future of gaming in like 10 years lol. my internets isnt fast enough for this even though i upgraded to the fastest thing possible in my area.
but just imagine the power it has if EVERYONE has fast internets: you dont need to worry about hardware anymore, people dont need to worry about folks pirating their games anymore AAAAAAAAND
just imagine what will be possible with portable devices. OH look my phone/handheld got this hardware and can play THIS. it wont really matter anymore. i could be playing my xbox 5000 game on my phone on the go or just play android and iphone stuff on the same device if everything gets send to the phone via a server.
thing is: apple would of course be against such technology.
also there are a bunch of areas without internets so you would be screwed but just imagine it anyways.
I played OnLive today for about an hour and a half.
Didn't have any lag at all, and %100 connection the entire time.
Actually while I was playing the picture cleared up at one point where I couldn't see any compression artifacts at all.
I only played Unreal Tournament though, the multiplayer was fun because everyone is in a virtual Lan game, so there is 0 ping for all the users.
When my trial period ran out I just started the trial over and played another 30 minutes.
I'm seriously liking this, and I like it even more after trying it out on my old 800mhz laptop.
So in the future I see extremely cheap hardware, and everything in the cloud. $100 for a laptop that can play modern console games seems awesome. I really hope they make a handheld if wireless internet gets better.
I think this might very well be the future of gaming once the services matures a little bit more.
I can imagine every computer hardware manufactoring companies such as intel AMD and nvidia being really nervous about this, if the service takes off this will cut most of their profits and will most likely lead them to bankruptcy.
Casualties of the revolution I suppose.
If they really get their tech going and could guarantee within reason that a 3G connection would always be available and sufficient (Yea right, but that's allowed since I'm hypotheticalizing here) and then release a super cheap portable with an appropriate pricing plan for the games and connection... I'd be interested.
Perhaps I wouldn't buy one (GOTTA OWN MY GAMES, DANGIT), but having my socks blown off from the sheer calamitous awesomeness, I can deal with.
I could see it being "the future". (Assuming the ability to make awesome graphics in tiny, cheap packages doesn't take off faster) If they got the pricing down. It'd have to be something mind-blowing to make up for NOT OWNING THE GAMES.
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Edited by OMC