OnLive Off To a Slow Start
OnLive Menu
OnLive is Steve Perlman’s latest technological gem. A service that boasts the ability to stream live gaming to your computer, allowing you to play graphically demanding games on the lowest of low-end computers. Although this may be a promising service with ground breaking technology, it is off to an awfully slow start.
To start, the community is fairly small, from my experience playing competitive games such as Unreal Tournament 3 or Splinter Cell: Conviction. A major issue to this service is that it is not cross compatible with the PC platform. At first glance, this may not sound like an issue, but that means the only players you will be able to play with are those whom are apart of this service. On Unreal Tournament 3, I have been playing roughly since launch on the multiplayer modes. Maybe 5 times out of the week I will be able to find a match, and in that match, only two of my enemies will actually be a real player, while the rest are artificially controlled.
OnLive is a service that boasts about not only it’s gaming capabilities, but its social networking possibilities. Unreal 3 is a wasteland, and you will be lucky to find a match most of the time. Splinter Cell: Conviction is even worse. I have, to this date, never found a match being hosted on the game. The only multiplayer matches I enjoy are with my personal friends.
There may be those of you who will stay true to the service and claim that multiplayer games are not what defines a great experience. So then one may indeed bring up the lack of many AAA titles from the video game library. On the website, they display Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins. Two of the biggest and most sought after role-playing games of this generation. However, they have not even been added to the service yet. So when one is lacking the ability to play a decent multiplayer game, they may be impulsed to go and check out some of the RPGs available. It is too bad that this is not the case in this situation.
However, OnLive is not a complete sham of a service, to be honest. It does pull through with its promised features. It does provide a smooth gameplay environment. At the start of the service, many lagged and experienced compression issues. At the moment, the compression issues have ceased and the gameplay seems smoother than ever. The ability to play a game that is so graphically intense, such as Unreal Tournament 3, on max settings, and it not even being installed on your computer, is a truly amazing thing. The technology is sound and the implementation is nearing excellence.
OnLive does hold promise, yes. I hope that this service will receive more support from video game developers and producers. Maybe then more AAA titles can be released on this service and the community can grow. The day that one can get into a competitive multiplayer match without having to wait hours, or maybe be able to enjoy cross-platform gaming, will be the day that OnLive will dominate as a video game service.
