Game consoles as you know them could become obsolete sooner than you'd think. Imagine a supersvelte thin-client box that streams HD games in real time over the Internet. Pay a subscription fee and it can run the latest games at reasonably high resolutions on your TV, PC or Mac. We just saw--and tried it--for ourselves. It's called OnLive.
This box (that fits neatly in the palm of your hand) has a couple USB 2.0 ports, Bluetooth support, optical audio and HDMI out jacks. That's about it. The OnLive "microconsole" doesn't have much in the way of juice (CPU-wise), but it just let us play Crysis at 720p on an oversized HDTV. It blazed through a couple races in Burnout: Paradise City and GRID.
Oh, yeah, and not only is it doing all this with minimal hardware overhead, it's ultra-fast Cyberdyne systems-type servers (currently set to launch officially in late 2009; beware the terminator apocalypse) takes full advantage of cloud computing. Beyond stashing your saves so that you can play your games anywhere you log in, the game graphics are rendered hundreds of miles away and then shot to you via ultra-optimized internet packets.
What did
GamePro Senior Editor Sid Shuman and PC World Senior Writer Darren Gladstone make of the performance? We were able to quickly toggle over and spectate matches of other players or record 15-second "Brag Clips" of some greatest hit moments. The games loaded surprisingly briskly. And there was almost no perceivable lag (trust us, we looked).
The main drawbacks: You need exceptionally fast 5 Mbps speeds to attain HD 720p visual quality (standard def video can come out over 1.5Mbps lines), and the video compression smears out a bit of the graphical lushness. But as a whole, OnLive made for a mighty impressive demonstration of what may be the future of video game distribution. And we wouldn't be surprised if straight-up HD videostreaming wasn't far behind. Should GameStop (and other retailers) be terrified...?
OnLive: The Future of Online Gaming?
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