OnLive giving away Amnesia for free today

@Dirty Did you remember ?

@Dirty

Do what now?

@Jawmuncher same and same. Potato sack bundles eh.

@Vidaluko

You know what? It's not a that bad! I started to get interested in OnLive when they promoted a free Micro Console with a Duke Nukem preorder. So I messed around with the service all weekend. I'm seriously surprised at just how well OnLive works...I mean it actually works! At the very least this is a cool way to check out new games. Unlike most PC/360/PS3 demos, OnLive lets you play 30 minutes from the full game. I honestly don't understand why everyone doesn't do this.

At work my PC is crap BUT I get around 30Mbps; OnLive works like a dream there. If you didn't know better you'd think you were playing a local game. At home things are a little different. I get around 14Mbps and experience (very) occasional lag. 2 times my game locked up for a few seconds. It's not a deal breaker by any means, but it's a little jarring.

SO yeah....I don't know I'm still kinda torn here. I want OnLive to succeed because it's really neat! I wouldn't mind a stream anywhere Netflix like service for games. It would be kinda awesome to seamlessly go from my couch at home to my PC at work. On the other hand this could ONLY be a supplemental service. I would never buy new games for OnLive since I wouldn't actually own them (or have the ability to use mods).

tl;dr I'd give the service 9/10 streaming internets.

@NaeemTHM

That's all fine and dandy save two questions.

Amnesia TDD is ~1.01Gb, how long playing it over Onlive until you have surpassed that in streaming?

With essentially every ISP in the world chomping at the bit to meter Internet usage .... Onlive sounds less and less appealing by the day,

And while a free game is fine and dandy, why would I want to pay for games I can not access if my internet connection craps out?

And "that won't happen" or "if it does you probably don't have power so it wouldn't matter" hold about as much weight as "the PSN could never go down"

@Scuffles

*shrugs*

Like I said in my post above, OnLive is more of a supplemental service in my opinion. By no means do I think it's a replacement for PC/home console gaming. Works great as a Netflix like gaming service however.

You've got a free game and you're using a free service to play it. Not sure where to fault OnLive here. If one day my data get's capped, yeah sure I'll probably never use OnLive again.

@NaeemTHM

Well to answer how long it will take it to chew up 1.01+ GB of bandwidth. ~30min turning (I'm going to assume ~6hrs game) a 1.01gb game into ~12.12gb stream give or take.

And if you only play it for say 1hr a day that still chews up a decent 2.02gb give or take. 3 days a week, there goes the better part of 10gb (~9.something).

I'm not super bandwidth conservative or anything but that isn't promising.

I will give them that the mouse latency became less noticeable as I played. I'm not sure if the connection was clearing up or I was just learning to compensate for it. Tho its not like the game is demanding.

And the graphics were decent, at least on par with the steam demo I played earlier today. However as my screen is prohibitively dark I did miss the ability to change the gamma setting from within the game.

@Vidaluko
It works really well if you have a solid, stable connection. At my school, the dorm Internet just barely scrapes by the 4.7 mbps minimum for using the service so, while it's mostly playable, it'll maybe get blocky for a second or two from time to time because of lost packets or not enough bandwidth. But in my school's computer labs with its 100mbps connection, OnLive is pretty amazing once you realize it's a video stream. It's really responsive and it looks good (but not amazing).

@Scuffles That is the biggest load of horse pucky I've ever heard. Where are you getting these numbers from?

It doesn't matter that Amnesia is 1.01GB, because you're not downloading any of the files. You're not streaming that content to your computer you're streaming a VIDEO of that content being played somewhere else. In this regard, the bandwidth usage on onlive wouldn't be much different than watching something on netflix.

@NaeemTHM

I don't know what you do, but are they hiring?

@OneManFreakShow

Get the game so that way when you are brave enough you can play it

@OneManFreakShow

Depends.

I'm talking about the diapers for grown ups.

Watch someone play it in the OnLive Arena.

@OneManFreakShow You stay out of the water.

@PersonOfSorts I'm on a pretty decent connection 12mbps, and I'd agree. Most of the games look fine, I don't have that vaseline look... but even that tiny input delay or me is noticeable.

It's a really cool service and I think it overall works really well, but it's not replacing anything for me.

@PersonOfSorts

Agreed, I got Homefront and even on a fast network (90-100 mbps) I was still getting noticeable annoying lag.

@TotalTortilla

Isn't it just your OnLive password? That's what it asked me for.

@TotalTortilla I second this problem of needing a legal disclosure password

@Collymilad85 Good call, I just saw legal and assumed that I did not have that

@Collymilad85 My bad, replied to the wrong person

@Collymilad85

You haven't even scratched the surface yet. If you play carefully, you might not even catch a glimpse of a monster until a coulpe chapters in, and when you do, hoooollie crap.

Probably the scariest game I've ever played. At some points in the middle, I could only take 20 minutes at a time.

@MLS

Yeah I can imagine hehe.

I've always preferred this type of horror though. Even in that 10 minutes the sound of footsteps getting closer scared me more than any game I've ever played except maybe a few bits in Silent Hill 2.

Not bad for 10 minutes :D I know this game is going to be stressful but i'm thinking it will be worth it.