The Inevitable March of Technology

I’m a bit of a tech whore. I know, I know – hardly a surprise. I love following the latest developments… I’m an idealist at heart and love it when someone breaks through a barrier and produces something impossible. That said, even I can’t see how OnLive[venturebeat.com] can work well. For those who’ve not heard of it yet, it’s basically a service where the game input from your computer (or a dumb console they will sell) will be transmitted over your internet connection to the OnLive servers, where the game is run. The servers then stream you back an audio/video feed of the game output. Unless they plan on hosting several of these servers on every ISP’s local network (which would hardly be cost effective) I can’t see them overcoming the very real lag issues inherent in that model. I notice if my Playstation 2 games have the tiny amount of lag introduced by being upscaled on my HDTV. Sometimes even that is enough to make me want to quit playing. Maybe if all the games are turn-based strategy or board games?

The ever interesting Bill Harris over at Dubious Quality has a post[dubiousquality.blogspot.com] that mentions another very interesting problem that must be surmounted – how “spike-oriented” such a service would have to be. It seems that most people who play games would most likely play the latest game the day it is released, finish it in a week or so and then never play it again. That’s hardly a fun consumer model to tackle with the proposed service, as Bill notes. Not that any of this will affect my hardware purchasing habits much, I suspect. I’ll always need a beefy machine to do level design. It’s a hella interesting idea nonetheless, and I’m excited to see how it pans out. Word is that we’ll see the service launch sometime this year.

For any tech savants out there, I’m still waiting for the time machine to let me travel 25 years in the past so I can marry 1984 Cyndi Lauper. Make that happen, and you’ll have me for life.

They say I better get a chaperone / Because I can’t stop messing with the danger zone

My Filthy Secret

I’ve been listening to Chris Cornell’s nearly[rollingstone.com] universally[blender.com] panned[spin.com] (and apparently, even embarrassing[twitter.com/trent_reznor]) new Timbaland-produced album Scream[metacritic.com] quite a lot, and I really like it.