2014-03-14 »
I was feeling stressed, so I thought I would play some video games. I do this sometimes, but haven't for a few months.
Loaded up Onlive for the first time in several months. OH GOD WHAT HAVE THEY DONE. They have clearly rewritten the client entirely from scratch. Last time I checked, it was slightly confusing, but very awesome (particularly the "Arena" which would swoosh around an endless-seeming grid of scalled down live realtime video of people playing games). Now it's been redone, and it is bug-ridden, laggy, and not awesome at all. In my cynical moments I imagine that they replaced their crazy native OpenGL thingy with a web browser based UI. (Which is maybe true, but of course the main thing that happened is they went bankrupt and lost all their best people. The replacement dev team, like all replacement dev teams, decided the original code was crap and must be replaced.)
So, that was a failure.
Instead, plugged in my old Wii and put in Super Mario Galaxy. I forgot how amazing the Wii is. As I understand it, it uses the same CPU as the Gamecube (from late 2001). That's 12.5 years ago now. And yes, the video is SD not HD, but it still looks way more gorgeous, and the animation is way smoother and more responsive, than any TV settop box in existence today, including ours and Apple TV. Also, I can read the fonts from across the room, which is nice. HD UI rendering on a TV is overrated if you ask me.
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