OnLive

The gaming arena is in constant flux with innovations on all fronts to produce games that are visually captivating and reach a large base of gamers. Having been a gamer for nearly two decades now, I remember the days of games arriving on 360K floppy disks to the more rigid 1.44MB 3.5″ floppy disks. Apart from the storage media, the graphics and sound capabilities evolved from CGA, EGA, to VGA and from the Adlib music only adapters to full speech with Sound Blaster.

With the arrival of CD-ROM to the gaming world, the games not only included some high quality graphics but also fully spoken dialogue that engrossed the gamer. The adventure genre really benefited by these advancements and performed exceptionally well.

One downside of the constant evolution of games are that for the average user, the latest and greatest games are the single piece of software that will attempt to utilize the full power and potential of their PC. This usually means that to play the latest game at a high rate would usually require newer hardware to go along with it. This need to constantly upgrade the PC to fully enjoy all of the advancements in the games is what converted me to a console gamer.

With consoles, gamers can once again return to not having to worry about the specification of the hardware but rather focus on the game content and what it has to offer. The Microsoft XBOX 360 and Sony Playstation 3 employ online networks that allow game developers to release demos of their games to entice customers to purchase the full game. I can’t speak much about the Nintendo Wii having not played with it.

However, not very game is accompanied with a demo to allow gamers to preview it before sinking the significant amount of money into a game that they might not like. Review sites do their job in guiding the buyer, but there’s nothing like playing the game for yourself to see how you like it. Game rentals fill this market need ideally and vendors such as Gamefly allow gamers to rent games to avoid spending money on games that they might not end up liking. Even for purchasing gamers, renting sometimes makes more sense since it allows the gamer to play the game through and then return the game in exchange for others in the queue. Unless a game has a large re-playability value, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pay the premium price for a single play-through.

With the introduction of OnLive the gaming industry is ready for it’s next paradigm shift in the way gamers play games and most importantly interact with other gamers. OnLive brings the ever present concept of social networking to the gaming world is such a cohesive way that it aids rather than hinders in the whole gaming experience.

To qualify as a paradigm shift in the way gamers consume games, OnLive had to deliver something truly unique and ground breaking and their server-based game delivery to the PC browser and to your TV through the MicroConsole does just that. The games are housed entirely within OnLive’s servers and all processing is done there with hardware capable of scaling to meet the games need. The only requirement on the user’s side is a broadband Internet connection that will stream the game.

By off-loading the games hardware requirements to OnLive’s servers, the users PC or Mac doesn’t necessarily have the most expensive hardware available today and with the MicroConsole, the console gaming experience is preserved. Additionally by housing all of the gaming content on the servers, OnLive allows a variety of social networking functionality unforeseen before like the ability of users to be spectators on other ongoing games on the server. Additionally, gamers can now quickly join in ongoing games with multiplayer capabilities.

To truly appreciate OnLive’s offering, it is necessary to view the demo shown at GDC ‘09 below. Once seen, you will also agree that OnLive is poised to take gaming to a whole new level and spread it to an even larger mass.

OnLive Developer Walkthrough Part 1

OnLive Developer Walkthrough Part 2

OnLive Developer Walkthrough Part 3

OnLive Developer Walkthrough Part 4

Cheers

Gears of Wars PC Edition

Owners of Epic’s Gears of War were in for quite a interesting predicament when they tried to play the game on January 28th. Turns out that the DRM that came bundled with the program had a digital certificate that deactivated on that date and thus rendered the game useless.

If we’ve learned anything from the debacle that was Spore’s DRM, which limited you to only 3 activation of a single copy of your game, is that unrealistically restricting customers who spend their hard-earned money on your software is usually a bad idea.

To this day, there are games that I purchased in the late 90’s that I will install and play just for the nostalgia or to relive an absolutely wonderful story. I paid for the game so why would anyone restrict me as to when and how far apart I play the game?

This obviously begs the question as to why Epic would put an arbitrary drop-dead date about 3 years after the release of the game. I know that Gears of War is a trilogy and the second installment is available for the XBOX 360, but this is surely no way to forcing paying customers to grab the second installment.

These kinds of boneheaded issues is why I’m a wholly converted console gamer now.

Cheers

XBOX 360 RROD

The dreaded RROD (Red Ring of Death) has hit my XBOX 360 console. A few months back I experieced the disc unreadable error while playing Mass Effect. The error was quite annoying as it happened at key parts of the game where I didn’t have a checkpoint to revert to. However, I could take the disc out, restart the console and continue playing.

Since that time, I haven’t had the time for any gaming and with the release of Fable II I thought I’d spend some time with the X360 again, and now the disc unreadable error has progressed into it’s inevitable end resulting in the RROD.

Thankfully, with Microsoft’s new policy on the RROD, though my console is out of warranty, I have been setup with free repairs and will likely get a different console than the one here (hopefully a newer console. ). Unfortunately, the turn-around time for the repairs will run right into my vacation, so I will only be able to play Fable II and other games after I return in December. Shucks!

Cheers

The demo allows you to take control of the Apprentice through the Tie Fighter factory hunting for a Jedi master. You come pre-equipped with force push, lightening, grip and of course your trusty lightsaber. The game is set to be released in a couple of weeks, so a demo is appropriately timed to hype the game in addition to the plethora of videos readily available on any gaming website.

My initial impression of the game didn’t make me want to buy the game immediately, however, I’ve been a fan of anything and everything Star Wars and will likely buy this game and learn to enjoy it. The force powers are impressive in execution and implementation. The lightsaber skills are equally nice, however I felt the controls were a little imprecise. Virtually anything and everything in your environment can be manipulated with force powers to become a weapon and that being the case the targeting reticle constantly tracks the numerous crates and objects lying around as opposed to the Stormtrooper shooting at me.

Another aspect of the game that had me at a disadvantage was the need to use the force powers as much as possible to quickly eliminate your enemies. However, I found myself spending more time trying to dash over to each individual Stormtrooper rather than strategically having a crate drop on his head. Perhaps better use of the force powers will yield a more enjoyable experience.

Bottom line, having played through the demo a single time, it wasn’t as good as I expected but no where near as bad as I feared. I think with a few play-throughs and a better use of the force powers this game might turn out to be quite enjoyable. I guess we’ll find out on September 16th.

Check out the video of the entire demo level in Part One and Two.

Cheers

Sony has cut the price of the PlayStation 3 by $100, or 17 percent, in the United States, a move that should boost the video game console’s lackluster sales.

The PlayStation 3, which includes a 60-gigabyte hard drive and a Blu-ray high-definition DVD player, will now cost $500, or $20 more than the most expensive version of Microsoft’s Xbox 360. #

This is definitely a start and now if the game catalog were to get better perhaps Sony might have a chance after all, no?

Like a wonderful blast from the past Ubisoft is set to release this awesome classic on XBLA with updated graphics and probably a new story. I just can’t wait for this one!

Another classic find of mine recently was the open-source version of Star Control 2 called The Ur-Quan Masters. I have vivid memories of the countless hours my friends and I spent in melee with the variety of ships. I had never spent much time in the game itself, but having since found The Ur-Quan Masters, I’ve take the opportunity to check out the game as well and am really enjoying the quirky humor.

Unlike POP, this is a true to it’s origin port to make the original classic work on newer machines. The game runs under Windows, MacOS X, Linux and BSD. One of the best parts of this game was the awesome music for each race in the game. Listening to this music again just brings back a flood of wonderful memories.

Cheers

Through all that mess, I still actively bought, installed, tinkered and played many PC games. At the same time, in the console market, the Nintendo Entertainment System reigned supreme. My father did buy an NES console for my brother and me and we dutifully played through Super Mario Brothers and were amazed that 8-bit graphics.

At this point in time, the PC’s with their SVGA graphics capability severely outpaced the best pixels that a console could throw up on the TV. Additionally, the variety of games available for the PC in a multitude of genres kept me happily ignoring the console for quite some time.

During this time, my brother managed to get his hands on a Sega Genesis, Super NES, Nintendo 64 and XBOX. As you can imagine this trek took us from the early 90’s to early 2000. Throughout this time, consoles were considered by me and many others to be an interesting distraction with no comparison to the PC when gaming was in question.

This premise held true until the release of the Sony Playstation 2 and Microsoft XBOX which finally made PC gamers stop for a moment and take notice. My first exposure to the XBOX came when I decided to borrow my brother’s console to play Jade Empire. I was very quickly blown away by how brilliant the game looked on my 50″ Samsung DLP HDTV. I went to play a few other games and was equally impressed by how far the consoles had come.

During this time, I continued to play PC games but with less frequency and had found that the variety of games and genres were shrinking. Also, I found that I was buying games with less frequency and in the time between purchases some component in my PC had been obsoleted and thus playing that new game not required it’s purchase but also a new PC component.

The basic summary of changes include a console in black, a HDMI port, 120 GB hard drive, but still no official word on the small 65nm processor which supposedly runs cooler. The only “upgrade” here that I would even remotely consider is replacing my stock 20 GB hard drive with the larger 120 GB variety.

I currently use the component cables to connect my X360 to my TV and optical audio cables to get the games surround sound. With an HDMI option I would just need to run a single cable to get everything. However, since I already have 2 HDMI devices plugged into my receiver I would need to invest in some sort of an HDMI switch to get this 3rd device going. In my book, that’s just not worth the extra money, not to mention that the XBOX 360 Elite already costs about $479 to start with.

Perusing a few of the gaming forums seem so to indicate that I’m actually in the minority of existing X360 owners who has no intentions to trade in their existing X360 at a loss and fork over lots more money to get the Elite version. Many of these people also don’t have a TV that have HDMI inputs, so this must be the true definition of a fanboy.

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And now, we have a woman with a black eye to show for what happens when you’re not careful playing Zelda.

Nintendo has responded to the complaints of a wimpy strap by providing a beefier version. But what can they possibly do to protect themselves from people using their Wiimotes as swords. You don’t need to swing the remote that drastically to accomplish what you want on the screen, but in the heat of the moment, can you control yourself?

I’m going to continue sticking to my theory that after enough damage is caused either to in-animate objects or other humans, people will start returning these consoles. I don’t think Nintendo really thought about how these controllers would be used.

Cheers

The Wii allows users to use its Wiimote to control the action on the screen with realistic motions. The controller employs a simple strap put around your wrist to ensure that the controller doesn’t go hurling out of your sweaty palms. However, turns out that this single safety device is prone to breaking causing the Wiimote to become a finely guided missile headed for none other than your beloved HDTV.

If you think it takes the strength of an overactive adolescent or adult to cause this strap to break, think again. There are reports of little girls enjoying a game of Wii Sports bowling or tennis causing this sort of damage.

Perhaps creating a controller that players would have to swing around wasn’t such a good idea after all?? Nintendo does make a “classic” controller for the Wii, how long do you think it will be before people start flocking back to that?

Cheers

[Via Engadget]