by Remember Onlive? that online gaming company which promised a full on gaming experience no mattter what your hardware or platform as long as you had a decent internet connection has sold it’s assets to an unknown party at this moment. I took at look at Onlive a good while back and found it to be impressive but mainly for those rocking a fibre or unbundled connection in metropolitan areas to reduce lag.
All of Onlive’s staff were sacked in an evening meeting according to reports but then immediately rehired by the unknown purchaser of their assets.
As I mentioned Online set-out to bring high quality gaming to everyone despite their local hardware configurations. Even us Mac users could enjoy titles only available to those in the PC world BUT with the added advantage of high res graphics all the time. To be honest it worked to an extent. On my home connection of 400k down, 30k (ish) up and running Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction lag was pretty un-noticable up until that moment you needed to really needed to do something with pin point accuracy. If you were foolish enough to use the service over Wifi to introduce another, albeit minuscule amount of lag, things would mount up. Mount up enough just to create that frustrating delay when you didn’t need it.
Not only were you streaming the game but others could watch and talk to you whilst you were gaming. Quite a few times I’d be playing late at night and then for some pesky young kid start making noises or hurling abuse just at that time when I really didn’t need it. Think Twitch.tv yet slightly more interactive yet more annoying.
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