smart computer use?

According to Steve Perlman, founder of OnLive, gaming is about to change.

A new online video game distribution network hopes to revolutionise the way people play games and re-write the economics of the industry.

OnLive, to be launched at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, aims to let players stream on-demand games at the highest quality level.

Basically, there is no high-end hardware, software or upgrades required. The system works by simply streaming the experience from another computer system to your home. The other computer system (that is not in your presence, but streaming the game) is doing all the hard work and providing the horsepower.

Good stuff.

But here’s a quote that I don’t agree with:

The service could signal the end for Playstation, Xbox, and the Wii.

I doubt it.

Even if you could fully stream the games to your cheap end-user gaming system, what’s powering them in the background? It’s probably going to be a Playstation or something.

What this does is provides a different way to deliver gaming to users that don’t want a huge hardware/software overhead, which can be costly. There will still be plenty of demand for a box that sits in your living room. There will still be demand for generations of gaming consoles.

I stumbled across an interesting read at the Early Ed Watch blog today that got me reminiscing about all the educational computer games that I played back in the ’80s and early ’90s. I was a kid during that time, being born in 1979.

Computer gaming was reaching the classrooms, and I logged my fair share of Number Munchers hours. Imagine that. Learn and play video games at the same time. It was novel concept back in those days.

From Early Ed Watch I worked my way over to an article titled “The Top 10 Most Influential Educational Video Games from the 1980s“. What a good read.

From Educational Games Research:

People who grew up playing videogames are influenced by them, especially when designing games of their own. Those who played through the 1980s are reaching their professional prime, and the games they played in school are worth examining. Here we’ll take a look at what I consider to be the top ten most influential educational games from the 1980s.

I guess I fall into this category of people who grew up playing video games in the 1980s. I must read on. This is getting interesting…

After reading about and being reminded of the classics like Sim City, Number Munchers and Oregon Trail, I just want to play some of these games to see what my impressions of them are now as opposed to how I thought they were awesome when I was a kid.

This guy over here named Justin uncovered a couple links to both Number Munchers and Oregon Trail. I had to try to see if I could get them running.

First try was Number Munchers. Nuts. I can’t seem to get their emulator plugin to download into FireFox. The download fails.

Well, maybe I can get into the Maxis site where Sim City can be played online for free. Good times.

The Thinking Machine 4 will visually play chess against you. You will see all the bits of thought that the machine goes through.

Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

Read more and play the game here.

It’s fun to keep around old computer games and old console games. Conversely it’s tempting to sell them if are able to get something decent in return. Some game store offer credit for trade in, which can actually have good value compared to selling a game straight up. It’s too easy to get rid of games after you’ve had your fun.

Don’t sell all your unplayed games

I find that it is fun to keep the best of the best games that you buy, until your console system dies or until your PC doesn’t run the game any more, for whatever reasons.

If you don’t play that PS2 game anymore, but you had a good time with it, keep it. Keep it, that is, if you still keep your PS2 around. You might get far enough down the road of your video gaming career that you can pick up that game once again and have fun playing through it again.

You will already know how the game plays, and know how to work around the things that particularly challenged your gameplay when you first played it. But there will be a certain amount of unfamiliarity with the game that will make it fun to play again.

How many times have you wished you learned about a particularly fun feature of a game earlier in your experience with the game?

• “I didn’t realize I could do that move”
• “Wow, that weapon is much more kill-tastic when you realize you have that secondary shot”
• “Dang, I didn’t realize I could make that type of modification to my car”

You generally won’t experience the uncomfortable feeling of not having a grasp on the controls, or not knowing how a confusing part of the games mechanics work if you’ve played it before.

Replay-ability in a game is sometimes a long-term effect. The game doesn’t become enjoyable until about a year from the point you last played it.

It can happen.

And then the game becomes so old that it’s fun to play for nostalgic kicks

How do you regard Combat for Atari? You’d probably have a hard time sitting and playing it, and actually having a grand old time. But, you’d probably also have fun giving it a run just for kicks. It’d be fun to realize that at one point you had fun flying of one edge of the screen and then behind a pixelated cloud.

Just imagine thinking about Dead Rising in that regard, disgusted by it’s graphics.

It might happen.

Either way, it was fun to keep it around

You had fun with the game 5 years ago, maybe it’s still fun. Break it out and play it.

I recently played a round of Return Fire for PS1, that game is fun. I liked it just as much now as I did when it first came out. That must have been almost 10 years ago now.