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Gaming On Demand
hetfield writes: "Cruising around today, I found this. Run by Electronics Boutique, EB1 allows you to rent PC/Windows games on demand. Five bucks gets you 72 hours with a few fairly new titles, which are streamed to your hard drive using a client called IntoPlayer. If you decide to buy the boxed game later, you can copy the save files over and continue right where you left off, according to the FAQ. These are FULL games, not demos. Modem users need not apply for the service, however."
Tried it out ($5...big deal I'll always pay more for convenience). The verdict: Not 100% perfect at my bandwidth (540kb adsl) but very /very/ cool.
Purchase Details:
You start at EB's Flash driven site, and when you rent you get a HUGE license agreement. After you agree you bounce to a site the has the game ("Serious Sam", a fp-shooter in my case) and a link to download the "IntoPlayer" (Funky power button logo combined with the letter "I"). I downloaded the player from "www.intonetworks.com" (feels like the RealPlayer without all the "Big Brother is watching" corporate schtick,) and it bounced me back to the game page. The button that had said to get the player now displayed a rental offer for $4.99 for 72 hours. There wasa link for me to check "System requirement" which ran some test that told me that I had directX 7 installed and that everything was cool. I clicked the offer and paid my money (Visa, and I had to create an account, so I assume this will facilitate future purchases.) After some processing it sent me to a page that had a play button, there was also a link to "My Titles" and various account managment links. It looks like you can maintain a library of software online.
Play Details:
When you click the play button, the IntoPlayer comes up and a bunch of message zipped past in a little dialog, then a progress bar and timer told me that my title would be ready in 20 minutes. It was bringing down about 90 meg of the game (so says the progress bar) and the game would start when the transfer finished. There was a check box you could select to make the game ask you before starting up. 25 minutes later (close enough estimate for me) the game started up. Everything seemed normal. I did notice on subsequent runs of the game that the loading time was almost nil...caching?
I couldn't tell any difference between playing a game locally and playing it this way except for load times. The games was level based, and at each new level there was about 2 minutes of load time. I suppose this would change if I had more bandwidth. The actual in game play was superb! I finished the game (on the easy setting) this morning and have about 36 hours left on my rental. Pretty sweet for $5! Load times are a small price to pay for not shelling out $60 for a game you'll finish in a weekend.
This has awesome potential. It's convenient and simple. I like not having to screw with installations.
Other notes: There's some sort of caching going on. I Saved multiple times, and when I went back to an old save there was almost no access on my dsl modem. I think it saves the data locally.
Very, very cool. This thing can only get better as bandwidth improves and the companies involved get more saavy about this space.
-UT