tempest in a teacup

http://gizmodo.com/5566680/onlive-streaming-game-service-launches-first-year-free

So I guess I can say what I thought about the beta!

Long story short, it sucked.

I got invited to the beta once a server farm near me was spun up, and I immediately gave it a try. Unfortunately my concerns with the service, which I outlined over a year ago, turned out to be pretty dead on.

My two main concerns were 1) input lag and 2) picture quality. And neither fared particularly well during my time playing. I tried both Prince of Persia as well as Unreal Tournament III, and even in a single-player game like PoP the input lag was noticeable. However it couldn’t hold a candle to the mess that was UT3, which had something like half a second of input lag, completely messing up my aim and movement. On top of that it was prone to lag spikes, during which my screen would freeze and I’d be teleported a vast distance forward five seconds later. Last year, OnLive’s CEO claimed to have some sort of magical technology that would minimize the impact of round trip times on input responsiveness – I really want some of what he was smoking.

As for picture quality, I stated in my earlier entry that they had to be using some sort of compression to get the data size down to manageable levels. And lo and behold, that’s exactly what they’re doing. The feed you get is 720p in name, in that it consists of 720 horizontal rows of pixels, but it lacks the characteristic sharpness that you would get from running a game at 1280×720 on your own machine. And of course the compression artifacts get worse as your connection experiences hitches.

A new and exciting complaint many people have about the service has to do with its pricing model. You need to pay a subscription – but you also need to pay full retail price for any game you want to play, which seems completely boneheaded to me. I know there are the variable costs of servers to deal with, but surely if you’re going to buy large numbers of copies of a game to run on a server farm, that entitles you to some sort of bulk licensing deal?

In the end I’m sort of left wondering who this product is meant to serve. PC enthusiasts are just going to laugh at it and leave it alone, while people who might want to try some PC games are going to end up with a substandard experience, shorn of all the things that make PC gaming awesome – better graphics, more control options and customization. They might as well just stick to their consoles instead.

So I’m playing Super Mario Galaxy 2, backlog be damned. And it’s a pretty good game, just as I expected it to be. Sure, extra lives still grow on trees much like the original game, but the stages are inventive and it usually takes me a few tries to figure out the exact timing or trick to beating them.

One thing that I’m not glad about is the persistence of the silly motion controlled-stages.

Sure, there are fewer of them, and I’ve already gotten all the gold stars in all of them, but they still reinforce my held notion that the Wii’s motion control is a dead end for games on that system. There’s perhaps one use of the Wii remote’s motion sensor that I’ve been able to tolerate, and that’s its use as a pointing device (in games like Resident Evil 4, or any number of Wii FPSes).

Super Mario Galaxy, on the other hand, has you do stupid crap like hold your Wiimote vertically and tilt it to control a giant ball that Mario is balancing on. These stages are nowhere near as interesting as the pure platforming stages, and the controls aren’t anywhere near as precise as they need to be. It’s at times like those that I wish the game supported the Classic or GameCube controller.

After my experience with the Wii, Sony and Microsoft’s motion controllers have me more apprehensive of the kinds of crap they’re going to try and pawn off on the gaming public. I’ve heard rumblings of a motion controlled version of Sonic Riders for Natal…ugh.