sims posts

After a couple of years of teases and months of closed beta testing, the Gaikai streaming PC game service is now officially live. The CEO of Gaikai, Dave Perry, announced that the service was open to anyone to try out on his official web site late on Friday.

The streaming service is concentrating only on limited game demos, at least for now (unlike the OnLive service which has full games to play). The official Gaikai web site is offering a streaming demo of Mass Effect 2 (access to the demo pops up on the right hand side of the site after a few seconds). Gaikai is also being used to demo other EA games such as Spore and The Sims 3 which didn't have traditional PC demos released for them. Most interesting is that Gaikai is the only place to play a PC demo of the recent sci-fi horror game Dead Space 2 (after you fill out a survey). We've played it and on our connection it's pretty smooth. There's also a way to try out the quasi-MMO game Second Life via a Gaikai connection.

On his web site Perry states that at GDC next week he will be demoing a Gaikai-powered game running inside a Facebook page. He also states that " ... we will show some really high-end, high-performance games running at 60hz with no work needing to be done by the publishers / developers."

You can add Sims and Spore creator Will Wright to the growing number of game industry professionals who are critical of the current "invite only" version of E3. In fact Wright states in a chat for Gamesindustry.biz, "the real E3 died a couple of years ago" and adds, "It almost feels like a zombie at this point; it's the walking dead."

While E3 may not be trying to eat any brains yet, Wright does feel that, "Right now we're in this kind of dicey, do we have an event, what event is it, which one do we go to?" type of situation. He knows that the old E3 was getting too expensive but the invite only event doesn't seems to be any better. Wright feels E3 is currently "struggling for an identity".The event's organizers, the Entertainment Software Association, have announced that a 2009 event is coming but no dates, locations or format have been announced.