The Ugly Side of OnLive

[Shawn Zipay]

The service, having just been revealed at GDC this week, is already facing some harsh criticisms from those who have actually tried the service. Shacknews didn't hold back anything when it came to their impressions of the streaming gaming service.

But unfortunately, the illusion faded along with the loading screen. Once I was in the game itself, I immediately noticed the unwelcome signs of blocky compression. It wasn't so compressed that it was entirely distracting from the gameplay, but it was also worse than I expected. The visual quality was high, but the experience was marred by the considerable amount of splotchy pixels.

Playing around in Rapture, I found that response-time lag was mostly unnoticeable--mostly. When turning quickly, there were disappointing moments of hitching here and there. It was an impressive technical accomplishment, but at the same time unquestionably inferior to playing from a disc.

I asked OnLive representatives whether the connection at GDC was indicative of the optimal connection experience, and they replied in the affirmative. They stressed that three OnLive connections have been run on a single 6mbps Comcast connection in their tests, but I wondered whether any of that mattered.

They were impressed with the OnLive interface and the "brag" feature that lets you save small clips of your best moments.

With the fees associated with annual subscriptions and payment of the microconsole, the Shacknews team would "rather put the subscription cost toward an upgrade of my Nvidia card."

Feel free to read more over at Shacknews.

[Guest]

Re: The Ugly Side of OnLive

The one thing that is going to really hamper onLive is ISP's putting caps on bandwidth, comcast already does it, not sure who else. if playing a single player game is going to be costing people their monthly bandwidth cap, I don't think they're going to go with onlive, espically if it's throughput intensive, as it seems to be. Even multiplayer games are going to be taking up a lot more bandwidth to play (not sure what mulityplayer games use in terms of bandwidth, but pretty sure it's not 1.5-5mbit). Hopefuly they can work something out, like a bandwidth monitor to let people know how close they are to the limit. Other then that this looks very nice.