Hyper Gumbo

Easily the best giveaway this year is the OnLive game system, though it comes at the price of the most annoying line. Because it is so popular, the line reaches a point where it interferes with safety and traffic, and they have to cap it, so everyone who tries to get in line gets turned away until they reopen the line. So what ends up happening is that the smart people just start milling around and forming a proto-line on the other side of the corridor until a re-open occurs, whereupon they all smoosh over to the other side. I played the game, and got the system, woo hoo.

Plugged it in once I got home, had a few quirks during setup. One port on my router is dead, and I accidentally plugged the system into it during the first attempt, so even after I noticed and plugged it into a working port, I still had to unplug power to the game system before it would work on the network. But once I got past those problems, I was impressed with the quality of what I was seeing. As I suspected, the 9.99/month plan doesn’t include all the games they advertise having most heavily, but it does have some a-list titles, if not in genre’s I usually go for. And the non-plan games list has some interesting stuff. I played 20/30 minutes of my free-trial on Dirt 3, and was amazed at the graphics quality, no noticeable lag between my inputs and the game’s response, even though I was busy uploading the pics I took to flickr at the same time. I found a game on sale for under 3 bucks that looked nifty, found out that you can’t really hot-plug keyboard and mouse when the marketplace said I needed them before I should purchase the game (one of those quirks above), but after a reboot, the game purchase went through well enough. The game does look as cool as it did during the trailers, but the mouse sensitivity is WAY WAY WAY too low, and there’s no settings to adjust for it, so actually playing the game is way harder than it should be. One of the cool things about OnLive is that any game you buy, or plan you subscribe to, is available on any platform they support, presumably only one instance at a time. So I thought I had the obvious solution to the UI issue, my ipad, but annoyingly, it’s not a game the support on that platform. It ended up being playable on my iMac though, so all is well that ends well, on that front.

But all that is just preamble to my realization of the eve. There are a ton of games that I see coming out all the time, that look really cool, but I could never play well enough to enjoy like they should be. But with OnLive, I don’t have to. I can watch someone else playing games, in spectator mode, and it’s the same quality as if I was playing it, without the carpal tunnel. And that part is completely free. All I have to do is friend some people who are good at the games I want to see played, but suck at, like BioShock, and coordinate my watching with their playing. Lazy man’s gaming at it’s finest. =p

I should send my nephew an OnLive box and some credits for Christmas.

UPDATE: OnLive says they don’t support gifting games or subscriptions yet. But they did send me a promo code for another free system, so I will somehow survive.