The new revolution in vaporware occurred right before my “vacation”, so I’d like to like to jump back a week and talk about it.

OnLive, which launched at the Game Developer Conference, promises to deliver on-demand video games via the cloud to the PC, Mac or TV.

The company said it could provide high quality gaming on low end machines.

…

The innovation behind OnLive rests in its video compression technology which instantly streams video via the internet so that it appears “effectively instantaneously”.

“Perpetually, it appears the game is playing locally.”

The reality is that all the heavy lifting is done by remote data centres that can be up to a thousand miles away while players use a simple PC or TV hooked up to a broadband connection.

This removes the need for paying hundreds of dollars for traditional disc-based consoles made by the likes of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.

For this to happen, internet technology would need to progress exponentially versus computer processing power.  “Crappy internet” is a dark horse on the list of insults people use to make fun of the States, and we can barely get a lag-free game with the computer in front of us.  Now, I need a 1.5-megabyte internet connection to achieve an output resolution achievable by the Playstation 2?  Companies sold high-definition graphics as a necessity.  Even with the dominance of the Nintendo Wii, fifty-one percent of the current-gen market share is inhabited by high-definition consoles.  You want the next generation to take a colossal step back?  Not happening.

Even beyond logistics, assume that OnLive becomes the most important gaming tech since Atari popularized the purchasable, interchangeable cartridge.  “A library of games with no installation and no hassle!  Just turn on the television and have a blast!”  You bet your ass that terrifies me.

For all the clamor about digital downloads, I will always buy the physical media if I have the option.  In a world where the internet has wrecked the newspaper business, many people want the news in their hands.  It’s a feeling of comfort.  For me, buying the box is a feeling of ownership.  Technically, I’m only paying to license the product.  But as a gamer, I enjoy having two decades of gaming history on the top of my hutch. You’re now telling me that I need to pay a monthly subscription to play my games, and if you decide to remove a game from the service, there’s a chance I will never see it again.  What an awesome concept to sell to the fascists: They can now pretend certain video games never happened.

I went to school to learn about history, so it’s little surprise I have a soft side for protecting it.  That includes an urge to slap the fuck out of every person who gets butthurt by telling history as it was.  Remember when Osama bin Laden was the obvious choice for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, and the subscribers threw a hissy fit, and Rudy Giuliani got the nod?  You may not want to tell them Hitler won the honor, and Stalin got it twice.  The award was designed to recognize the person that had the greatest impact on the course of human events in that year.  Hating the outcome of an historical event does not give you the right to pretend it never happened, no matter how many times a star athlete is charged with murder, or how pedo-riffic a politician’s hard drive was.

Every time German parents fail to do their job, and their kid takes it out on a school, the German media has a field day with killerspiele.  (At this point, you can make a drinking game out of the German infatuation with blaming video games for this shit.)  It has nothing to do with a social recluse engrossing himself in a medium that appeals to social recluses, Counter-Strike killed those defenseless children, and it needs to be done away with.  With a centralized outlet whose content can be policed, you can theoretically make that happen.   They could now decide which video games are appropriate, as opposed to a combination of education, moral values, and the economic constructs of capitalism.  In this day and age, it is still a financial deathknell for a game to receive an Adults Only rating.  Should that cease at some point, and shooters are supplanted by tentacle hentai as the dominant game genre, too fucking bad.  In the opinion of this nutjob with a web site, it would be a greater crime for somebody to press the magic button and pretend it never happened.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 4:13 am and is filed under Censorship, Console Gaming, OnLive, PC, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.