Thread resurrection a-la-D.
Has anyone tried this? There's a free trial going on right now, and I mean free. No credit card info, just email, username and password. But only in the contiguous United States. You get a client to download. Run it. (I had to track down wlanapi.dll to make it work, or install the SP3 to WinXP. I chose the easier first solution.) It works, but horribly on this laptop. Some people are claiming that it's usable even on netbooks. The biggest problem seems to be that the mouse drivers in this piece of shit Vaio do not get the uber-priority that they should. I'm used to mouse input never getting bogged down, and here it always gets bogged down when a lot of I/O is going on. How the whole thing works seems to be exactly what we surmised. Your input is sent to the server, and the server returns a frame as some sort of high-quality compressed video. Res is at least 1024 across on this system. It does degenerate into squares (macroblocks) when data streaming gets hitchy. And hitch it does. It got so bad for a while that it dropped out of the game I was trying, threatening to disconnect. But it came back, and I kept trying to play through the mess.
The trial was for Darksiders. 30 minutes in the game, apparently the full one. I really want to play it on a workable platform now. That looks awesome. So yeah, it seems like you can try out all those games for a limited time. It's worth a look-see, if you can do it for no money. I'll try it on my PC when I go back to my mother's, see if it does any better. Latency clearly is going to be present regardless. But you can't beat free entertainment, even if laggy.
