OnLive Gives You Games to your TV, PC, or Mac

The Game Developers Conference had a lot of surprises last week, and one of them was a prominent display of OnLive. If you don’t know what OnLive is, just think of it as an infinite playlist of video games.

Sounds like dream come true, doesn’t it? Allow me to sweeten the vision. These video games would be streamed directly to your PC or Mac. Just picture playing a video game, but it is on YouTube.

Oh, it gets better, as you can get a tiny device that will stream the video games to your television, as if you downloaded a flick from Roku. In fact, that is pretty much how it works, as it instantly sends your controller actions upstream, and the results go back downstream at blinding fast speeds.

OnLive gives a user a chance to demo the game before you buy, and you should be able to purchase it. Not a lot of memory is required for this PC application, just about 1 MB.

Another advantage to OnLive is the Community. One of the things that makes OnLive very interesting is that there is a bragging option. So if a gamer does something that he or she thinks is totally awesome, he or she can hit a button and it will record the last fifteen seconds of gameplay on a Brag Clip. The entire OnLive community can then get a piece of the action. Granted, I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in a video game worth bragging about, but I’m sure this is important for some gamers.

The community also gives gamers the chance to spectator other players as they play games. This comes in handy when you are interested in buying a game and you would like to see it in action. It also comes in handy if you already own the game, and you are stuck on a certain place and you need to know how to get past it. Just watch another player who knows what you have been through.

For those of who think this is too good to be true, you aren’t the only one. There have many criticisms saying that the service simply just won’t work. OnLive has gone on the record several times saying that the service will work perfectly, as it has been under development for seven years.

One of the doubts that I had about this service is how you can play this. I mean, if you want to play a game on the Wii, then you might need a Wiimote and Nunchuk. I noticed that the device for streaming OnLive to the television comes with a controller that looks like something Sony would put out.

But there are those who don’t doubt OnLive as much as its critics, and believe that OnLive could change video games as we know it. After all, Netflix and other various video streaming programs have made traditional video stores a thing of the past.

I don’t know, but that seems a little too optimistic. I mean, are we really at the point where I don’t have to go to the store, and look at all the games behind locked plastic doors?

Source