Two weeks ago I sat down and chewed through Arkham Asylum on Steam; one week later I did the same with Arkham City and Harley Quinn’s Revenge. I enjoyed them so much, I even got all of the Riddler trophies in both games.
Now, those of you that have read this blog for a while know that I actually completed the same feat quite last year on the OnLive console. I found the streaming gameplay to be acceptable and, while I was initially annoyed by the pre-update connection drops in Arkham Asylum, I didn’t have much trouble completing the game on normal.
By playing it on Steam, I wanted to test out three things.
First, I wanted to see how the story held up for replay. Surprisingly, both games held up very well. I noticed that I moved through the stages more quickly the second time. I suppose this was because I knew my way wround the island and the city well enough that my moves could be more bold and decisive. In any case, I was pleasantly surprised to see things the second time around that I had not previously noticed. In Arkham City, I noticed certain ironic echos between Batman and Catwoman, and I also noticed certain villains that I would later face standing in the prison line at the beginning of the game. I wrote recently about my frustrating with games that try to explain everything, but Batman does the opposite; it lets you discover everything on your own.
The second thing I wanted to gauge was the difference in video quality. While the local video quality was definitely better, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t as dramatic of a difference as I expected. The OnLive graphics were satisfactory, and sometimes the degraded quality actually made the scenes look LESS CG and more realistic.
The third thing that I wanted to test was the response time of the game. In this area, the Steam version blew OnLive out of the water. When I played through the game on Normal on OnLive, I occasionally struggled with some of the stages because of the lag. I compensated for this by predicting ahead of time how I would need to make the battles flow, and was eventually able to get through them. On the Steam version, however, no such prediction was necessary. I played on Hard Mode, and had no trouble beating either game. In fact, I would say that I was fighting more effectively on Hard Mode on Steam than I was on Normal mode on OnLive. In these two games, that’s saying something.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed the experience of the games on both consoles, and I can’t really bash OnLive for the experience. I’ve just come to realize that the games I select through OnLive will tend to work better if lag is not an issue. Games like World of Goo or A Kingdom for Keflings work great.
Speaking of those games, I had the chance to play both of them on my Tablet recently through the OnLive android app. The experience was wonderful. If you get a chance, I strongly encourage you to try it out.