I understand it to be essentially virtual PCs streaming video to your box. WIth all the fun that entails with latency and nonsense. Can it be any more than that? I mean the idea is sound, I don't think the tech is there quite yet, especially on the archaic UK broadband infrastructure... I can jump on my destroy BT soap box at that point.

Does anyone "rely" on their BB service yet or is it still an acceptable loss?

I tried this out when the demos were doing the rounds and was amazed at how well it works.

It's completely and utterly a waste of time for fighting games, but I played Mass Effect for a while and had no issues at all.

They were making a huge deal of this at Earl's Court last week, they had SF4 and various other games running. There is no way this should work as well as it should - but it does.

That's the thing isn't it. It should be a broken mess. There must be some magic code in there somewhere.

Agreed on the fighting games point, but less reaction based games and more casual shooters, will probably play fine. The thing is I don't have a PC that's up to much these days, so the little hardware box might be an interesting alternative to forking out oodles of cash on a new PC.

Isn't this systemic of the end of western civilisation though? If you are playing a game that doesn't require reactions.... Surely something is, well, up. Doesn't this solve a problem we shouldn't need solving, if there aren't any games that require a slow drudging tedium that will be fine if the Internets screws up... You get my point. Might be good fo Yahtzee?

Hardware accelerated video streaming should always be fine, its just the only way we've seen streaming in the mainstream so far is freaking embedded MP4s in a flash file, y'getme? If you know what each end is doing and can be sure of everything then is should be fine, I think even your Freeview HD box could have a good stab at whatever this is doing?

It's funny how this "Cloud" stuff is just full circle to mainframes, I like the idea, I think its an interesting and bold move but it does kinda represent the plataux of gaming and also the end of western civilisation and so forth etc etc etc cravats.

Yeah I getya. It's the variability in the latency that's the problem.

At 30 fps, frame refresh is about 33ms. If your latency to OnLive is below this then I suspect that lag won't be a problem.

Looking at a forum... (http://onlivefans.com/showthread.php?3306-Ping-Testing) it seems that some people are getting good pings (although clearly you would want to be pinging the actual OnLive server, not some random server).

There's no way you can keep that reliable though, the internet just isn't designed that way. This isn't cable TV.

Perhaps that's the solution. Virgin Media should buy up the service and then roll it into their set-top boxes. That would give them complete control of the hardware and software layers and might let them deliver on the promise of this. Then again Virgin can't even get me all my TV channels, so that might be asking a bit much.

Looks like I might be getting one of the OnLive Micro consoles for nowt . I will post up some impressions if/when I get my grubby little mits on it.

Cool, how'd you manage that?

I have a friend who works for British Telecom in their Online marketing division (whatever that is called). She's working with OnLive to cross promote their service and BT Broadband. I'm assuming she has appropriated a unit for me through work.

It'll be a few weeks before I can get my hands on it, so don't expect any immediate impressions.

Since I snagged a micro-console for free I think it is only fair to pimp the fact that BT are doing a deal for all their broadband customers to get 3 months access to OnLive for nowt. I'm not sure about the ins and outs of the deal, but that does sound worth having.

My initial impressions of the hardware are that it's really well put together. This feels like a quality product and they've obviously thought hard about the end user since the packages includes everything you need to get going including a rechargeable battery for the controller and some duracells to keep you going if that runs flat. The controller is a complete and blatant copy of the 360 controller and compares favourably so far, the dpad may even be better than the old 360 one, but this will need some testing out in-game. The extra buttons on the front of the controller are a mystery to me at the moment, but I'm sure all will be revealed.

Hmm on actually using the controller now for an hour or so the d-pad is a bit bobbins. Not that that matters as the game catalogue is analogue-stick-tastic. The pad I would say is akin to a very good 3rd party 360 effort. Strangely the system downloaded an update for the pad and reflashed the firmware in the pad. Heaven only knows what's going on inside there. I don't think I'm aware of another pad that has a firmware. Now to the service...

I'm on Virgin broadband 10MB package, so all of my observations need to be taken in that context.

Tech wise whatever magic they're using to compress the video is incredibly impressive. 95% of the time you're going to get a sharp smooth picture that is every bit as good as what you might expect from using a normal fat client home console. However the video does suffer from 2 problems:

1. During video playback there is the occasional slight pause or stutter in playback, it's barely noticable, but it is definitely there.

2. During actual gameplay the picture will sometimes go to a super low quality mode (think real player circa 1997) This usually happens when the video is changing rapidly (i.e. rotating view). Obviously this is the system trying to cope with wither poor connection speed, lost packets etc. This is pretty annoying from a a player perspective.

I'm outputting in 1080p, no idea whether knocking this setting back will make any difference or not, but I'll try that tonight. I'm guessing this is just a client side thing and the actual information coming down the pipe is the same.

Control wise again things are nearly there, but it's those last few percentage points that mar the service somewhat. Digital input feels without lag. That is I press a button and something happens as you'd expect on a fat client system. It's the analogue control that I'm having issues with and I haven't yet decided whether this is the pad, the software or me. What I think is happening is that there's some quite clever stuff going on under the hood to translate my analogue inputs into the game. This makes the controls feel a little spongy to me. Almost like you're not moving enough, so you put a bit more stick in and then it's moving too much so you come back a bit. Sort of like it/you are hunting around for the sweet spot. I need to delve into the settings to see if there are some options to mess around with this and report back. It's also something I think you could get used to with practice.

In short I'm very impressed with this. It's not going to replace the fat client systems yet and I think we're some way off this being workable for twitch gaming, but I can see this having a lot of appeal to the mass market. This could well be the future of gaming.

One final point of commendation is the community elements of the system. Certain games allow you to record short video clips (using the special buttons on the pad) which are then stored on the server and can be shared. This centralisation of game content sharing is an excellent move and takes things a step further than the current services offered by Microsoft and Sony. That's the beauty of this thing really I can sign on to it from any client and all my games, settings, saves etc. are there ready for me.

Oh and Alpha Protocol looks quite interesting...

So you're playing Alpha Protocol?, the game might be quite important to how working it works... I mean, some PC games just don't jive if you were infront of the freaking Matrix playing the game. The digital input sounds pretty impressive! (Maybe it uses AI to guess which button it thinks you are going to press?)

All the theory means there is no reason why this shouldn't work, I just think the infrastructure as it stand in this country at least might not be up to it. Ideally you'd need to have onlive servers at the ISP you are using to minimise latency... The super chop sounds totally reasonable on the circumstances.

I tried:

Alien vs Predator (the new one)
Just Cause (original)
Alpha Protocol

Many of the games give you a 30 minute trial, which is a nice alternative to a demo as I'm actually playing the game and progress is real, so no need to retread that ground if I decide to buy.

Pricing is around £7 a month for a pack that includes 100 games, including those listed above. Although there are a lot of indie titles in that catalogue. That to me doesn't seem that bad when you compare it to a WoW subscription for example. I'm going to get my free month in and probably spend some time with Alpha Protocol as it's hitting the right notes with me already. Some early touches have made me smile e.g. you get the typical PDA with some attractive female agent giving you suggestions from the start. About 20 minutes later you meet her in the flesh (so to speak) and she asks you if you remember her name. Then it's up to the player to recall the right response. If the scripting is this good consistently then it will keep me engaged.