It’s seem like yesterday Onlive was kicking off their game streaming service for PCs and Macs. In the last year Onlive has launched their standalone Micro Console, and the service now has 100 titles available for gamers to play on there PC’s, laptop’s or TV’s. Prior to E3 Onlive announced that they will begin offering a universal controller and that they would be gaining support from various intel based devices including tablets, TVs and various movie players.
While at E3 we had a chance to sit down with some of the folks from Onlive and not only did we get our hands on the new controller but we got to see it in action on an iPad 2, HTC Flyer and Motorola Xoom. We also got to see and hear about some of the companies future plans.
First the controller itself is exactly the same as the one currently bundled with the MicroConsole. The only change is the new radio inside that allows gamers to sync it with their devices or sync to a PC via the included USB dongle. But the real magic of the universal controller showed when we fired up these tablets and were able to jump right into any of the games in the Onlive library, as if we were home playing. I was quite surprised at not only the image quality on the tablets but the lack of lag between with the controls even over wifi.
But there was another surprise in store for us besides the universal controller. Onlive was also working with game developers to create touch versions of games, so you can game on a tablet without a controller. We were able to try out From Dust from Ubisoft and again very surprised at how responsive the game was and how easy it was to use the touch controls.
But the fun didn’t stop there, we got a chance to see/hear about whats coming further down the road. First and for most the web browser. You’ll be able to surf the web via the internet backbone connected Onlive servers at a blazing speed. Web pages don’t load they just display. With such fast network connections at their server center you’ll be able to access any webpage in a blink of an eye from any of your Onlive supported devices. That means Flash on an iPad!
Also down the road they plan on branching outside their software. Soon you’ll be able to directly link to your brag clips and even live gameplay, and your friends won’t need an Onlive account or the software to view the links. You will start to see this first via the Facebook integration that they recently rolled out.
It was great taking to the folks at OnLive, they have a very strong drive to provide the best possible experience for their gamers. They constantly are tweaking the software, and tweaking the games to get the best possible experience. On top of that drive, more and more publishers are striking deals with OnLive and the selection plus PlayPak offering continue to expand.
