So I’m not a pro, but I am proficient enough to enjoy the game–and I prefer Quake III Arena-style games because the physics make it tremendously enjoyable, and there is zero committment: you hop in, play for (a usually very intense) 20 minutes or so, and you’re out. I also ran a games site back in the early 2000s (complete with online game servers, custom mods, etc.), and racked up a fair share of top slots whenever I played for keeps.
In fact, I still have ioquake3 installed on my home machines (I even have an SD card with a preconfigured image for the Raspberry Pi), and given enough free time (which is quite seldom these days) I will play a couple of hours every few months as a sort of extremely invigorating stress relief. In fact, statistically, these days I don’t play at all, but a I spent a lot of time playing QuakeWorld through modem and ISDN dial-up connections, and enough Quake III Arena over cable and DSL to literally play some levels by ear (you can anticipate other players’ moves by listening for item respawns and pickups). Obviously, latency is a major topic here, and has a profound influence on both parts of the equation (there are also a lot of other challenges like bandwidth, capacity, etc., but I’ll get into those later). NVIDIA’s service is in beta, and relies on two things: data center deployments in several US and EU locations, and a finely tuned streaming protocol (with clients for PC, Mac and their own hardware). What got me interested in GeForce NOW in the first place is that it promised hassle-free access to a few select games I cannot play on my Mac at all, like Quake Champions, which I only managed to install (but hardly play) in a Parallels VM a year back.
There have been many attempts at launching game streaming services in the past–some by labels, some by third-parties, and even some by carriers 1. That e-mail almost single-handedly prevented me from finishing last week’s post, but provided so much fun that I just had to write something about their service from the perspective of a (nearly) retired FPS gamer.
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