While high-powered, high-price consoles like the PlayStation 3 languish on shelves, Rearden Studios thinks it has a new way to put cutting-edge graphics in the living room of gamers without the expense and hassle: just strip out all the system’s guts. The pocket-sized OnLive Games on Demand device, announced at this year’s Game Developers Conference, has no powerful graphics processor, massive hard drive, or even game discs – everything you need to play comes on demand over a broadband Internet connection.
While a traditional console needs heavy loads of processor power to render all the on-screen action in a game in real-time as you play, the OnLive box will simply send all the player inputs out to its far-away servers, generate all the graphics on the fly, and send them back across the Internet in an extremely compressed form. And according to the company, the entire process will happen in milliseconds, feeling exactly to the player as if it were all being done by the more typical humming box under the TV.
In short, it’s cloud computing for gamers. And rather than running out to the local box store whenever a new game comes out, you’ll be able to fire it up the second it launches. Hypothetically, gamers won’t even need to update their boxes when graphics technology gets better and better – all the upgrades will be on the company’s end. Rearden also claims that the PC-based version of its service will allow even old PCs to play the latest games, since they only need enough power to uncompress the frames OnLive sends across a broadband connection.
The system has been in quiet development for seven years, and Rearden has partnered with many major game companies including EA, Ubisoft, THQ and Epic, to deliver their games across the platform. That means titles like Burnout Paradise, Crysis Warhead, Unreal Tournament 3, Prince of Persia and BioShock will all be available when the service launches this winter. The all-important price, though, has not yet been announced. More information, and a sign up for the beta test, can be found at OnLive’s Web site.
Remember when transparent gadgets were the coolest things you could own? Sony is bringing that late '90s aesthetic back with its new PS5 Prism Collection. The gorgeous lineup gives your DualSense controller and PS5 console a glossy, see-through makeover in three eye-catching colors.
https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/2115459064981512662?s=19
For years, Call of Duty’s campaign mode has used big, scripted set pieces to tell the overarching story amid all the adrenaline-pumping action. The 2023 Modern Warfare 3 tried to shake up the established formula by introducing a handful of short open combat missions, and I genuinely liked the idea, but the game's overall negative reception seeped into how those missions were received.
I feared the next iteration might abandon the idea because of the backlash, but I am glad it didn't. MW4’s “Stranded” mission uses the same approach, but instead of fragmenting it across the campaign, it puts it all in a single large-scale open-world mission.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.