OnLive Test (Darksiders)
0In this video I play Darksiders without owning a copy of it or even having the game installed on my computer. It's all run through the cloud-based on-demand gaming service OnLive, from which you can buy the game, use up a 30 minutes Free Trial of the full version or purchase 3-day or 5-day passes which lets you play the game for a couple of days before access to it is removed. The last option is by far the most appealing one to me, as it allows players to effectively rent a PC game and play through it in a few days time. This would seem to be perfect for those short and linear titles you might want to check out but wouldn't pay $30-50 for (FEAR 3 comes to mind, which is available on the service right now).
A lot of industry analysts predict that OnLive launched before its time and will not find a sufficiently large (paying) user base to sustain itself over the long haul. Indeed, as it stands there are noticeable technological shortcomings with playing a game "on the cloud"; you get a max resolution of roughly 1280*720 and there can be quite a bit of input lag (which is why OnLive probably works best with a gamepad rather than mouse and keyboard). That's not particularly great if you've got a powerful rig like mine and have become used to 1080+Ultra settings and a silk-smooth frame rate on everything, but the mere possibility to stream a full modern retail game (and within seconds of having booted up the service, no less) is still more than a little impressive.
Regardless of whether OnLive becomes a failure in the end or not, I really believe cloud-based services represents the future of gaming. It's just terribly inefficient and stupid to require every single user to aquire an expensive computer or console to be able to play games when there is already this powerful data-sharing technology at placed called the Internet. Sure, the average connection speeds these days (especially in developing countries like the US ;) may not be enough to sustain this business model right now, but who knows, maybe ten years from now the term "video gaming hardware" is tantamount to a server park somewhere in the middle of nowhere?
Test OnLive (for free) at:
http://www.onlive.com