Why OnLive is amazing (and why it isn’t)

A few weeks ago, I managed to try out OnLive – the new Cloud Gaming service which launched in the UK last month. I’ve known about this for a while, and have been looking forward to having a go with it, but I’ve had some serious scepticism about certain aspects of the service.

My first impressions weren’t amazing. Having created my account and installed OnLive onto my PC (running Windows 7), I found that I couldn’t get onto the service right away – the servers were full. Given that it was the first few days of the new service, it would be harsh to damn them for that, but it does highlight one underlying flaw of the cloud gaming model – the fact that is it possible for the service to be over capacity. Presumably, this will be mitigated as the early period dies down, and the company grows, but it is a possibility.

I got on within about half an hour, and loaded up a free trial of a few different games. I had some difficulty, being on a WiFi connection (though not a particularly slow one), which made getting things started quite tricky, but not impossible.

I tried out a few different games – notably Batman: Arkham Asylum – which I’ve played to death on the PS3 – and Borderlands – which I had never picked up before. Even with a fairly basic connection speed, the experience really worked. The games played well; the video quality was nothing to write home about, but I think it was still better than my fairly old machine would have handled Arkham Asylum – though I’m interested to see how well it up-scales on a better connection. Having the OnLive menu overlay, one of the great things about consoles, worked really well. The biggest ‘wow’ factor came from the instant start-up of a game – no waiting around on install times. Trying out a game was painless.

A day or so later, I picked up a Full Playpass of Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Augmented Edition) for £1 – a start-out bargain. Again, it played really well – the odd bit of pixilation, but nothing severe, and it looked reasonable. I was quickly hooked.

But it’s after this that I came across the major limitations of the service. Firstly, since I was using the connection at someone else’s house – with capped data usage, I had to be very cautious about how long I used the service for. It really eats through your bandwidth. Secondly, as I keep mentioning (can you tell it’s bugging me?), since I have not internet at the moment, I can’t get back playing for another few weeks.

As I say – these are limitations rather than flaws, and something you just have to accept if you want to use this style of service – but they are frustrating. OnLive isn’t for those with capped data (and, to be fair, the kind of person who will use OnLive will probably be the kind who wants unlimited use anyway). Likewise, it’s my problem being offline, not theirs. But neither of these would be issues if I were playing a ‘real’ copy of the game, not to mention the usual murky sense of ownership of digital content.

These were some of my original misgivings about OnLive, and I’ve experienced them both pretty swiftly. Despite that, I still absolutely love the service. I can’t wait to get back on, and that’s a good sign. I’m going to write about this again in a few weeks, when normality is restored, and come at in from a different angle, when I should have had a pretty speedy new broadband connection put in.

L.A. Nah?

When I first heard about L.A. Noire, I was pretty excited, especially given just how incredible Rockstar's last offering was – Red Dead Redemption was really incomparable, and genuinely pushed the boundaries of gaming as entertainment. Now, you could at this point, rightly, say that L.A. Noire has been out for some time now (in fact, it was released way back in May), but I've got enough thoughts about the game that I want to air out that I'm going to talk about it anyway!

L.A. Noire is the baby of Team Bondi, and published, as I said, by Rockstar – a relationship that's come to the fore over the last month, as Rockstar announced that they won't be publishing Team Bondi's next game – a dispute over the working conditions at the Australia-based developer. (IGN article here)

The style of the game itself is fairly close to the other flagship games Rockstar has released over the last decade – sandbox, third-person action, with a large part of the game built around driving. Despite once again switching horses for cars, L.A. Noire is more like Red Dead Redemption than Grand Theft Auto, in that it sets out to create atmosphere above all else, in this case painstakingly reconstructing 1950s Los Angeles, and, as you work out from the title, drawing heavily on the film noir genre. The similarity of the title to 'L.A. Confidential' is no coincidence either – the game is stylistically and thematically very similar to the film.

In contrast to the other GTA-style games though, the gameplay is about detective work rather than action – in fact, it's perfectly possible to skip the action sequences entirely if you have trouble with them. The two main mechanics are investigating a crime scenes and interrogating suspects. These are, broadly speaking, well executed, but the interrogations in particular have some frustrating issues, which I'll come onto in a moment.

Investigating a crime scene involves walking round the area, listening for the telltale music jingle when you stumble across an investigable object. There are also random items thrown in, unconnected to the case, which struck me as being a good idea – it would make separating out genuine clues from random garbage harder. But this idea isn't really followed through. Picking up one of these objects, it is possible to tell immediately whether they are bona fide evidence for the case, or just yet another cigarette carton thrown in for flavour – either from a spoken comment from the protagonist, Cole, or simply because of the absence of the on-screen help prompt, reminding you how to examine an object (and do we really still need these to appear after 4+ hours of playtime?). This leads me to question their inclusion at all – they don't serve to make the case more challenging, only the investigation more time-consuming.

The interrogations, though, are where the game was meant to shine – this was one of the big innovations of L.A. Noire, making a detective game be about detective work, rather than degenerating into the usual run-and-gun action game. But this is also where some major frustrations start to set in. Even now, I'm not sure whether these interrogations were badly designed, or if I was just bad at them – though I know I'm far from alone in having problems with them! There is a certain feeling of randomness to the interrogations – whether you're watching the suspect for tells, working from your evidence, or blinding guessing, it can yield about the same level of success – it's just hard to know what the game is expecting from you. 

This feeling is compounded by not knowing exactly what Cole is going to say. Calling 'Doubt' on a little girl because you don't think she's telling the quite whole truth leads Cole to threaten to drag her down to the station and have her up on charges... This just adds feeling of an extra level of removal from Cole's actions. 

The single biggest problem with the gameplay, though, is simply that it's too repetitive. I played through the game in just a few extended sittings, and while the plot is, for the most part, really strong, the gameplay can come to feel like something you've just got to get through. Investigations general follow the same kind of paths, and exploring crimes scenes and interrogations rarely vary from the normal formula.

The same is true of driving in between locations. There is the option built in to fast-travel by having your partner drive, and I found myself using this most of the time (if I hadn't, I'm not sure whether I would have stuck through the game for as long as I did at once). It's great to be able to push ahead with the investigations and plot without lengthy driving sections, but it also means that much of the feeling of the city, which Team Bondi spent so long recreating, is lost. There simply isn't enough to do outside of investigations – unlike the games which have come out of Rockstar in the past, where it's tended towards there being too much to do. Sure, you can follow up on dispatch calls over the radio, but these can actually be done through fast-travel as well. You can hunt out the Hidden Vehicle garages, but, since you don't seem to be able to save these vehicles for use, all that means really is that you can use them for whatever mission you happen to be on. Or joy-riding (though, as an LAPD Officer, the rampages that gave GTA games such replay value are off-limits).

I mentioned that the plot was a real strong point – and this is true. It's extremely compelling and largely well-written, but it does start to come apart in the last third to quarter of the game. As I said before, one of the innovations of L.A. Noire was to make it a game about detective work first, rather than action, and for the most part, Team Bondi has been successful – and this is precisely why the last mission in particular feels like such a let down. Obviously, I don't want to spoil anything, but it feels like the game takes a very strange direction, and becomes a bit rushed or blurred – I was left at the end feeling as if someone had turned over two pages at once.

Then there's Cole, the protagonist through whom you explore the game world. I found it very hard to play as Cole – this partly stems from the way that his backstory is revealed, piecemeal, in flashbacks after each case, meaning it's only later it the game you start to get a proper understanding of his character. I said before that there's a feeling of removal because you can't quite know how he's going to act, but it goes deeper than that – the bottom line is that I found it almost impossible to like Cole. I don't believe the developers intended for him to be all that likeable – he's a flawed character, certainly, but I do think that they've underestimated how important this can be in a game that's a story-driven as L.A. Noire. The player needs to get behind the character in some way, which I found I just couldn't do with Cole. This needn't mean they have to be a good or bland character – just look at John Marston.

This has developed into a rather extended picking-apart of L.A. Noire's faults, so let me bring it back in and clarify my position somewhat. Yes, L.A. Noire has some big flaws as a game, but I think some of these are actually magnified because of its general quality. If it were a worse game, I don't think people would need to focus quite so much on these problems – they could dismiss it more out of hand. With the exceptions already mentioned, the plot is fantastic – well written and compelling. The facial capture technology is a pioneering development in videogames, and well-implemented within the game. A lot of people have criticised the disparity between the body animations and the facial animations, but I didn't find this jarring while playing, though I did find it, bizarrely, quite hard to tell a lot of characters apart at first. I'm not sure if anyone else found the same thing.

So, in summary, L.A. Noire is a game I'd strongly recommend – though it might not sound like it. For all its flaws and frustrations, it's definitely worth playing – by the time the novelty of the gameplay has worn off, and it will, you should be engrossed enough to want to finish it. Team Bondi have nailed the atmosphere (helped hugely by the awesome soundtrack – worth a listen even if you don't play it), and it looks fantastic. I just still can't decide whether I like the game or not.

Google+ - does it have that Spark?

So, I’m starting up this blog to put down and share some of my musings on various aspects of the internet, technology, and entertainment – hitherto confined to dozens of comment threads and message boards.  So, given that just about everyone else on the internet is talking about it ad nauseam, where better to start than with my impressions of Google+ because, hey, it’s good to stand out and be original, right?

 So, I was lucky enough to get onto Google+ right at the beginning of the Field Trial, and my first impressions of the network were very positive.  The interface looked good and handled well (barring the odd hiccup – but nothing unexpected for a pre-beta release!) – both of which were extremely refreshing after the clunky clutter-fest that Facebook has been for some considerable time now.  Taking one of Facebook’s weaker functions – the ability to compartmentalise your connections and sharing – and making it the core of social interaction on Google+ seems like a great idea. 

So far, so retreading-the-ground-of-the-endless-Google+-discussions-already-plastered-all-over- the-web.  Much has been made of Circles and Hangouts – the latter being the impressively powerful video chat, supporting up to ten people with YouTube sharing. Hangouts, though, seem to be the least robust part of Google+, suffering from fairly frequent crashes, along with rampant performance and bandwidth issues.  But there seems to be less attention given to the two other big features of Google+ which were touted to me when I first started the Field Trial.

First, there’s Huddles – a multi-user internet text chat.  I was quite excited by this when I first read the description, but I’ve had to wait until now to try it out – it’s exclusively on the mobile apps, and the iOS native app has only just launched today.  So far, it hasn’t disappointed – though I’m yet to test it off a Wi-Fi network, which is where awesome things like this tend to fall down.  It seems that it would be particularly useful in light of the fact that iOS (text) messages doesn’t support multi-person threads – if you send one out to multiple people, replies go into the message thread for that person.  Understandable, given how hard it would be to implement it otherwise, but it does feel clunky. 

Secondly, Sparks.  Here’s Google’s video introduction to it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DoAl4JXhQo  - complete with obligatory obscure pastimes (yodeling? really?*).

This doesn’t seem to have been given much thought in the coverage I’ve seen, and I can see why.  It’s hardly given any weight within Google+ itself, and seems to have been largely forgotten about – I have only felt the need to check it a handful of times so far, and it’s never provided any interesting links.  Perhaps the problem is that there currently isn’t enough data to make good suggestions.

Maybe it will be fleshed out by the links other people on Google+ are sharing, or by the ability to +1 pages on the web in general – something else I’m not sure how much people are using – is anyone +1’ing links in Google, or on articles with the usual array of social media buttons?  This is perhaps the weakest, or at any rate, least explored, feature of Google+ - though there is plenty of time to improve this!

As has been said elsewhere, the real trial of Google+ will be whether or not it can reach the ‘critical mass’ required for a social network to survive(which is where Google Buzz failed).  With user uptake over the last few weeks in the millions (still pre-beta), it looks like it’s well on the way.

I plan to talk some more about Google+ in other posts, trying to discuss this new position it seems to occupy on the social media ‘spectrum’, which seems to have people somewhat unsure what to do with it, and what feels like is missing from it.

*Apologies to all yodelers out there - not for my comment, but because you probably need them.




Just as a last word - please give me feedback - on the style, on the content, on the pathetic pun in the title, on the blog itself - it'd be very much appreciated!