onlive full PC games running on the Joojoo : Assassins Creed 2 and Unreal Tournament III running on a tablet! Hell yes!

The most important thing to note is onlive works! That it works on thegameveda uber pc and  joojoo tablet is just part of the silver lining on this digital cloud that threatens both hardware and software industries so reliant on revenue from the yearly grind of upgrades and daily downloads/updates!


There are so many what ifs with onlive , what if hardware is now irrelevant , who needs to upgrade their mac or pc every year? Does that make Intel nVidia AMD and Apple irrelevant? Will Steve lose his job ?What happens to the iOS and Android App store model when no one needs to download anything ever again?What happens when onlive offer more lucrative deals than Apple or Google or Sony Nintendo or Microsoft? 


If Steam turned pirates away from torrents , onlive could eradicate present forms of software piracy by giving people with very little time and patience the ultimate convenience : no downloads.


However back on planet Earth from my first days testing Onlive , it simply rocks on the Fusion Garage Joojoo with Windows 7 Ultimate ! I can now play any AAA high end pc game instantly . The more I mess with onlive the more I see how it changes the way we game . Steam are going to have to follow these guys or as they say evaporate.....

Lets see how onlive will change your gaming ,that's apart from making a humble atom cpu tablet the equal of a 24 core quad gpu l33t rig , well at least that's how your going to feel when you start playing high spec pc games on hardware that every tech review blog considered obsolete even before it launched! 


Wait till they get a load of me.... 


Over a year a go when I first got my Joojoo it was the promise of  the cloud , with streamed games that interested me. onlive and gaikai , in particular , I even wrote to the Fusion Garage  CEO telling him of onlive's promise ,oh how he laughed.... With the cloud, local storage , your gpu ,cpu are irrelevant, you need never look with envy and absolute astonishment at those of us who waste 10 k on PC and Mac hardware. A year on and my joojoo is loaded with a 64gb ssd 4gb ram and running Windows 7 Ultimate. I thought I might run some quaint old pc games from Steam on its nVidia Ion and intel Atom 1.6ghz cpu . But here I am running and playing fully up to date  PC games ,the same ones we spend thousands upgrading our hardware for . There is no reason why you cannot do the same from a $200 netbook!


But onlive is not just a simple game streaming service , it has been designed to change the way we game, change the way we purchase , and even manages to raise respect for gamers , with the gamers themselves awarding achievements as opposed to the traditional trophy and achievement systems used by consoles and Steam.

The Onlive Front End /Menu

The first thing that hits you when you boot up the onlive app is the lightening fast interface and menus .

The front end is alive not the dead pan almost plaid look of Steam , or the coloured with crayons Xbox Live interface , and more accessible with many more  live video stream icons than the now clunky Xmedia bar of the PS3 . This is a sleek interface designed for the future , not apeing 80s scifi movies  or reorganising Youtube . If they let you watch real tv channels using the onlive front end believe me you would throw away your remote . And where it really comes alive is using a tablet touch screen interface . 

onlive brings persistent game saves ACROSS devices , thats pcs , macs , my joojoo tablet , any windows or mac tablet , netbook , pc , if your toaster runs Windows or Leopard or will soon run Steves Apple Simba you can game on it with onlive . So the game progress I made on my desktop can be continued from on my joojoo Windows tablet , or my technofashionista Mac friends , or even a HDTV ! 


It is astonishing when you pick up an atom powered joojoo tablet click on a button and instantly start playing FEAR2 right from the point you saved on your desktop pc .....

Then we come to the  Arena which is a Coliseum for gaming gladiators ,you can even cheer for good game play.The Arena means Social gaming is now real time and  IN GAME ,  your friends are out there playing,out there watching,and cheering you on  , if you think they need a hand hit the play button and  you are  instantly there IN THE GAME .... And the nice thing is you can opt out of everyone in the world watching you fail in Braid ,or World Of Goo....

The front ends speed means Game surfing, the equivalent of channel surfing  is a now a reality ,oh and this simply shines on a tablet like the joojoo .You can watch games being played on the iPad too , but on the Joojoo can you actually play them as well : check it out in the video below , do you remember when they said joojoo could not do full screen video ? or handle flash transitions?   Take a look at the beauty that is game surfing  - on a full os 12.1 tablet with a frankly gorgeous display!

Welcome to game "channel" surfing through 1000s of games , no need for reviews of games , from sites or blogs , now you are watching actual players play , and doing so instantly , this is faster than Youtube , much faster than game review sites , you could even have your compadres show you what they think is so cool in a game , then hit the play ,trial or buy now button and you are with them in seconds.


The great mistake that Fusion Garage made was to build a cloud tablet without any cloud applications or cloud servers ,one year on they are about to mess up again by focusing on Android .But the joojoo running Windows is now a viable games machine thanks to onlive.
And of course you can with use of the Microsoft controller dongle use a wireless Xbox 360 controller to play the games ....or stick with the usual mouse keyboard arrangement. What is missing is a touch screen game controller overlay , but this will come ... 


Right now a shot of a game Unreal Tournament III  ,videos of this and Assassins Creed 2 , Batman , AVP and more  to follow tomorrow ! as I have run out of daylight  :


 so here we have Unreal Tournament 3 running on a Joojoo faster to load and run than the majority of desktop pcs.....bet you are glad you held on to that joojoo now aren't you?

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onlive brings 2 weeks of free stream instant gratification no installs games and demos

Wow now this is new a window open on my desktop , with  buttons I click to instantly play full retail games , not on my uber pc , but out there somewhere 2nd star to the right on some server being stress tested for the next two weeks . Pretty much all the expensive hardware in my PC has just been rendered moot by the promise of onlive.

So to Steam or Stream ? Well it certainly is novel to just click and have a game open up without downloading , or waiting , or even really going through all the thought processes associated with what to do whilst waiting for said download . Now I just don't care how big a game is , I can just click and it will launch , fascinating , liberating . This is something totally new , for as someone with 100s of Steam games, and around 30 years of others knocking around , this is frankly the beginning of arm chair game surfing , just like channel surfing 100s of tv programs , I can now start to approach games in the same way .  

Now you can check ANY game demo on the service instantly no more waiting seconds for your 300 MB connection to download the data , well if you are in Korea that is ! 

You may have a monster game collection , but you never have time to install reinstall , etc now do you ? And what about the hard disk space , well fugedaboutit all those worries as onlive promises to do away with those now ancient problems . 

Onlive could offer a cure for my addiction of buying or rather collecting Steam games but never bothering to play them as I cannot be bothered to download them , and even more addictive rush of getting something cheap in the sales .

Whoooah taking a moment here to breathe, is this the end to endless pc and mac hardware upgrades or fanboi arguments ,gaming where the only thing that matters is your Internet connection ?

And you could take your Onlive dongle anywhere where there is a fast enough connection and play full retail games anywhere there is a hdtv , most of which now come with built in wifi modems . 

All of this gameplay shattering game changing promise hinges on one small tiny question....Does it work? Well I am going to find out 

For the next two weeks onlive is free , so if you have an Internet connection that can handle it , go for it , I wonder how fast Crysis will run? Will the big boys and girls desert Steam ? You can see EA and Actiblizzard milking a system like onlive , where you no longer buy Fifa or Call of Duty but you subscribe  , like a phone contract ! But all that nonsense is yet to come ....

And for now  tomorrow I will be testing onlive not on my uber desktop , but my folly of last year Joojoo Windows 7 and Toshiba Libretto tablets ...... Seriously this will let me know if a lowly  netbook can now provide the same gaming experience my uber desktop or your high end gaming laptops do , you gotta love progress now don't cha!

here is the email being sent to onlivers , come on join the party test this thing on anything that can run it!

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The most powerful portable gaming device on the planet : whose abilities increase and running costs decrease with time

I have in my hands the most powerful gaming portable pc on the planet , and it has nothing to do with the hardware inside it . 


The Toshiba Libretto W100 as you all know is a tablet from the future , legend has it  only 50 to 100 of them were sent back in time by Toshiba scientists from the year  2525 to 2010 .... 

And so having obtained one of these from a Ms Connor  somewhere near the Texican border ,  I decided today as promised to marry this device with onlive  THE game delivery system of the  future... 

You may have heard tech blogs go on about Alienware M11xs that set you back 4g , or the concept dual screen portable pc mockup erhhm soon to be maybe released for too much money Razer Switchblade.... here is the video it shows hardware running the over decade old Quake 3 , and the not so intensive World of Warcraft .. meh! say we all!... for today I have been playing the likes of Batman Arkham , Unreal III , Assassins Creed 2 and many more  thanks to onlive and the Toshiba Libretto ( I knew I bought it for some reason) .So dude save your money any netbook , laptop  , or folly like the Toshiba Libretto W100 outdoes the Switchblade and any Alienware  too : here let me show you how another week of my life has been totally wa...devoted to games...


first for illustrative purposes this is a MOCKUP VIDEO of the concept that is Razer Switchblade : 

Now lets get to some real high end portable gaming , on the ultraportable dual touch  screen 7 inch Windows 7 Toshiba Libretto W100   , which when running onlive  makes your epenis hardware so obsolete  it is hilarious and not in a mean Ricky Gervais way! Remember folks you too can play any of these games , from onlive! No need to battle T800s to get your hands on a W100 ... and absolutely no need to pay 1000s for a gaming laptop:


On with the show: The Libretto W100 has one of the fastest wireless modems going ,  I get 5mbps from my 50 meg connection when downloading Steam games , so onlive should be no problem : Apologies for my svga camera! the actual display resolution in game is razor sharp , indistinguishable from a high end pc check the still pics above! or try it for yourself !


The onlive interface running on W100 , like on the joojoo tablet , really shines on a touch screen , here in an even more portable fashion , you can hold this in your hands ,like a Nintendo  DS or 3DS , just remember to have flame retardant fingers as that top screen and its cpu run HOT!  But not as hot as normal, as the games are being streamed , your hardware is actually not going to heat up like it normally does every time a flash anim starts in a browser. So a pleasant side effect of using onlive , is that your netbook/tablet/pc/mac actually runs cooler . How do I know this , well when I have a Steam game chugging along on the top screen of the W100 , I could cook you breakfast off the back of it, but with onlive its just has a fuzzy warmness . Of course this is negated by the fact that I now use it longer and the heat eventually builds up any way !

Heat is no problem if you consider that for control the best device is stil an external keyboard and mouse for fps , and or a Xbox 360 wireless controller for everything else , this as you will see is a lesson I learned as I tested more games : The Libretto will let you hook almost any control device to it , and many onlive games are optimised for joypads.

Steve Jobs (get well soon dude) should also note absolutely no fingers need to be filed down as you can see from me using the coming soon section it is absolutely possible to use a 7 inch tablet , which also packs  2nd 7 inch screen and runs a full pc OS! and I did not even mention Flash!

so lets try a game how about Unreal Tournament III on the Toshiba Libretto : no install just click and play or touch and play with a tablet


First some static screens with a 5mp camera , to give an impression as to  how sharp the game actually looks , the videos are svga!

it's all too bea-ut-iful....

The first test I did was Unreal  3: with the touch screen keyboard : the small screen is difficult to film with a lo res camera , see it in real life the picture is razor sharp , as good as your/my l33t rig ! 

So the touch screen controls for this game are not that great , and I cannot be bothered to remap them , so time to play Unreal Tournament 3  with a wireless keyboard and mouse on the Toshiba Libretto : Result : awesome ! Why wireless ,well we need to stress onlive , the great worry with streamed games , especially high speed FPS games is controller input lag , and the good news is even with a wireless keyboard and mouse there is none that I can perceive . 

Und now ,  Unreal Tournament 3  split across 2 screens in the open book vertical orientation of the Toshiba Libretto W100 , totally useless but people will ask for it so here it is 

As you can see onlive on the Libretto W100 can handle any Unreal 3 engine game  :


But how about games based on  proprietary engines? Rebellions Aliens Vs Predator is a graphically intense power hungry game  on a desktop , here it flies on the Libretto ....

look Ma its 3d without glasses :

ok it's motion blur ! onlive is good but not that good !

I tell you this onlive  ....it's...Voodoo magic, man:

they come out at night mostly...mostly....
lets check survivor mode  first a static screen to show you the detail before my feeble camera shows you the video 

Mafia II one of the most gpu intensive games on the best of hardware , here it is on a 7 inch ultraportable!

Lara Croft Underwear ... Sorry Lara Croft Underworld  :

A very cool feature of onlive is persistent game saves and instant game continuation  independent of devices/hardware . So when I took up Lady Crofts offer of following her round a..sorry follow her around ........for one of her adventures , I started on the Fusion Garage Joojoo , a day later when I was testing the game on the Toshiba Libretto I continued from the exact same point as I left off on a completely different device , and later on the same day I decided to pick up with Lara on my Desktop ! My devotion to Ms Croft truly knows no hardware bounds.....thanks to onlive ! You can do something similar with Steam , but not instantly , and you have to insure your hardware is up to spec , I could not have done the same with Steam at all with a game this detailed , and I would have spent a day redownloading !

and here is still to give you an idea of how sharp it actually looks : 

So here I leave Ms Croft stranded on her boat , but do not fret , I will pick up with her from the exact same place on my desktop or joojoo...

Next we have Rocksteady Studio's  Batman Arkham Asylum GOTYR  , this is a game which pushes the Unreal III engine on the fastest of hardware , now we are going to see it running full spec on a 7 inch ULV cpu powered tablet ! Just another example of how  the Toshiba Libretto W100 became the most powerful hand held gaming device on the planet thanks to onlive

And now onto  the new Prince Of Persia adventure :

It is frankly liberating to never have to worry about installing , downloading , patching or even having to tailor each games graphics settings , if only they had onlive in the DOS era , think of all those hours wasted on  making cfg and boot disks! 




Not bad lets stress test onlive and the Libretto a little , next I use onlive to mess around in the Arena and play a game in the top touch screen whilst browsing my blog in Internet explorer 9 on the second lower screen : Could you do this on your desktop without windows closing and minimizing or locking ?


 I fail miserably at Ninja Blade on the top screen , I am playing with a simple wireless keyboard and mouse ensemble .. should have stuck to the 360 pad!

ok stress test over how about a little sojourn in tropical Panau 

Avalanche's Just Cause 2 is just  one of the finest games you can play , now in the fine palms of your hands: smile , the Hestonator would be  impressed by my use of tablets!

Time to Red your neck a little in Borderlands

Now we jump to Assassin's Creed 2 , just click and play its magic , just think Brotherhood is on its way to the PC will it be first really big move for fans from Steam to onlive , quite possibly I do not really want to keep installing 22gb games !

Frontlines - I have had this game sooo long on retail and Steam , but thanks to onlive I am going to play and finish it ! woooah children its just a click away .....

Why so many tests and videos across 2 tablets and a desktop? well you got me I like games , and also because with a cloud based streamed game service ,you want to check how many actual dropouts and crashes occur , now did you see any? over the entire 3 day test ? onlive is real and works , you are probably more likely to see one of your traditionally installed pc games crash to the desktop than one you are playing onlive . And just think no drivers or patches to apply ever!


The ultimate console and games machine thanks to onlive is NOW COMPLETELY HARDWARE INDEPENDENT , you want to play the most complex PC games , instantly you can ,fed up with buying Steam games one at time , you can pay a subscription fee and never have to torture yourself with another week , weekend , or mid week sale decision again ,  it has taken time but in the short space of a year gamers are set to embrace the Cloud , and services like onlive are showing the way . If you do not have the broadband to run it , lobby your government and demand it, and in all likelihood if you are at all serious about games you will already have the Broadband speed required , now you can free it from downloading and switch to streaming instead!


You will have heard a lot about revolutionary hardware at this years CES  ,  there are all the usual suspects with new consoles , gpus , tablets and cpus , that have you locked into that constant cycle of upgrading . Well onlive is your liberator , it is the most revolutionary thing to happen in the history of video games . 


There is no way to emphasize greatly enough the changes that the Cloud will bring  a  service like onlive is only a herald of what is to come . A time where software publishers are the power and hardware , whether pc mac sony Nintendo or Microsoft is irrelevant . 


This is why I believe that the next Playstation , the next Xbox , the next Nintendo , or the mighty  fabled Apple gaming machine , may not be based on hardware at all , just a very fast broadband connection to streaming game servers , where we subscribe , I ranted  about this here long ago . Sound like science fiction ?well , the tech is already here with onlive as you can see has been keeping me occupied over the last week .

Years from now , whilst toasting marshmallows and radroaches round the campfire you will sing songs and tell tales remembering you were present at the death of  traditional video gaming and the coming  of the Cloud People ..who liberated your video gaming tribe with their magical onlive and also happened to save the rain forests in the process.

Now lets wait and see what Dave Perry and GAIKAI can come up with ...


Viva Onlive ! embrace the People of the Cloud!

Steam is dead long live onlive ?

Another day of testing from my humbled joojoo tablet , and I find the whole concept and execution of onlive ever more impressive and addictive. 

Note I am stress testing onlive , using an Atom and Ion powered netbook tech based Fusion Garage Joojoo Tablet , over a wifi n broadband connection (onlive recommend wired connections ). It is a 50 meg connection , and if the xbox 360 and PS3 find it adequate so should onlive! 

And it does , onlive does have some glitches , occasional  warnings of network drop outs - that do not happen - it seems they er on the side of caution ...  but in no way does this detract from your gaming experience and when launching a game is virtually instant  ... closing and relaunching the game if you do have a problem is no major hassle!

So addicted as I am to the onlive Arena , I decided to test it for as long as my cameras small sd card could film it , the length of the video having nothing to do with my new found dependence on clicking every live game in sight .... 

You can also see how easy it is to jump into a game , I am controlling the game with a USB mouse and keyboard , and the thing to note is , there is no controller input lag , that many people worried would follow onlive , in fact check the times I use the touch screen to fire , tomorrow I test this on the Toshiba Libretto , which thanks to onlive just became the ultimate portable games machine , sell that Alienware now dude...whilst its still worth something! 


the low res camera I have does not do justice to the detail of the games or the speed , check the difference in the static pic above , and the video below , but you should be well on your way to changing your own video game habits , once you have gone through the video..

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STEAM vs Onlive : A case of who streams wins?

  

The 2010 same old same old  end of year/ Christmas Steam sale was shockingly blown away by the magic of instant no install play anywhere Onlive gaming and a freeplay fortnight that liberated many a jaded core pc gamer from having to download gigabytes of game data and more importantly freeing them from a constant hardware and software upgrade cycle.


Jump to 2011 and Steam vs Onlive is now a weekly duel , for your gaming time , last week this took the form a battle for the digital skies as Iceman  Steam  faced off against Maverick onlive  Every week two tribes are warring over the digital game delivery turf ..... who will win ? .. You will.... 


Take last weeks Tom Clancy's Hawx 2 sale on Steam , 50% off sounded like a good deal , but I could not  be bothered with downloading another 12gb of data , hold on , clicking on the onlive icon I can play the game instantly . No install no drivers , and I can play from desktop , joojoo(see below) and Toshiba Libretto ..effortlessly. Frankly the game is not that great so I will take the instant demo on the Joojoo , and not even bother with booting up my desktop pc.... 


There you go think of the time and money I just saved , thanks to onlive.


check me playing Hawx 2 , note the use of the joojoo touch screen to target and launch ordinance 

Welcome to the future , 2011 is going to be full of similar happy dilemmas , and as onlive picks up more AAA content , eventually lets say a Call Of Duty or 8 , you know that this is the way you will chose to play. 


Steam is awesome but for many the grey lining Gabe's cloud is the lack of real competition,no other digital game delivery service comes close when re  AAA game distribution.Retailers even threatened to think about maybe sometime in a parallel dimension refusing to stock games that required Steam , but that was last year ....


The arrival of  onlive changes all this and with new games appearing every week ,for the first time in years I have a choice , to go for the traditional download and install , and have to upgrade hardware or just click the onlive icon and play near instantly a demo of the game , which I can take any where  and play across the many devices  I have lying around or can scrounge from passers by...


The great seed that  Steam planted insheeption style into the brains of core gamers is the revelation that really you never own anything digital , even the the Bluray/DVD spinning in your ageing BR drive has a shelf life , and now we know in essence even physically bought games are only leased - as long as companies keep gaming servers going .  When games get too old they will all be abandon ware anyway google any of your grandpas favourites , and you will find them out there in the cloud ,more than likely you will find them playable in a browser...on your phone!


So whilst the casuals are making with the funny eyes with Nintendo 3DS games I can play full spec pc games on  almost anything with a Windows , or Mac based OS thanks to onlive.

Needless to say you need a Mac or Windows based device at present , if you go for a tablet this year and are serious about serious pc gaming then make sure it runs Windows , it is worth it to see full spec PC games run magically on your tablet without installs , hardware or software worries... or ever having to download an app..


Is there room for both Steam and Onlive ,at the moment yes,  but as our pc gaming habits change from the endless hardware upgrade and software upgrade routines that Steam requires ,Steam's market share will dwindle . And this is a good thing what made Intel great was competition from AMD , nVidia and ATI drive each others progress , and now Steam has onlive to contend with this can only mean benefits for gamers .... 


I can see a scenario where core gamers collect games on Steam but also purchase them on onlive for convenience , yes gamers are that crazy... they build 10 k gaming rigs to browse websites and play dos box games....


To counteract onlive ,  Steam must go the way of streamed gaming , as the games companies it relies on will see a far more beneficial return from completely cloud based games services like  onlive and the rise of browser based gaming ..Browser based gaming is no longer just minimalist facebook social gaming but full blown PC games , like the recent Beta of Battlestar Galactica online shows .


It is likely that the greatest advance in PC gaming , like all the best revolutions , just very quietly  happened,  and soon gamers will demand the  release of all major PC games through the cloud , whether on an updated Steam or onlive , or through a humble browser ....  and just think you will be able to status update your grandkids that you were virtually there in amongst the thick of it... And they said freedom isn't free !







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