[Xperia Play General] flat_steve:
When OnLive, the popular cloud gaming service, released a version of their client for Android phones and tablets last year, they offered a potential vision of the future, one where any mobile internet-connected device – no matter how gutless - gave you full access to top-tier games that looked just like current-gen PC and console games. Notice I said ‘potential’, for while the technology behind it is stupendous and its implementation is mind bogglingly effective, for all that it is hampered by one big downside: smartphones lack anything in the way of actual real buttons, d-pads and the like, so getting a complex FPS or racing game to work on something with just a touch screen is, as they say, nontrivial.

The insurmountable problem here is that touch-screen mobiles and tablets are not good platforms for traditional PC and console ports. “But what about Angry Birds, or Fruit Ninja, or any number of games that have earned Millions on mobile?” Well, yes, if you create a game from the ground up that takes advantage of what controls are there (gyroscope, basic touch gestures and so on) then it’s quite possible to craft an effective (albeit lightweight) game that’ll go on to sell like hot cakes. But just try playing R-Type with virtual controls: you can do it, but it’s no fun. It lacks any tactility and sooner or later you’re going to get wiped out once your finger reaches for a control but misses because your muscle memory just isn’t that good. Ok, there’s an OnLive gamepad in the wings which you’ll be able to tether to your device and while that will solve that problem, really, who is going to carry a gamepad around with them?

However right at the end of the year, OnLive then did something that inadvertently – almost accidentally – gave rise to one of, if not THE most significant gaming event of the year: one that went totally under everyone’s radar. You see, they very quietly pushed out a version of their Android client that had been tweaked to take advantage of the slide-out gamepad on the Sony Ericcson Xperia Play phone. Wait, what? That’s the most significant gaming event of the year? Bigger than the Wii U reveal? More important than the 3DS? Well, I think so. Read on.

Now I am aware that the Xperia Play has had a bit of a torrid time in its short life. It’s something of an oddity in the realm of smartphones: somewhere between a phone and a handheld console, it’s struggled to find purchase with gadget lovers and gamers alike, for a variety of reasons. From an insane price point at its release in May 2011, to criticisms on its sheer bulk, button placement (I’m looking at you, power button), down to the middling hardware specifications that were already outdated on release day.

If we were being particularly mean we could even try to draw parallels to Nokia’s implementation of a similar game-as-phone concept a decade or so back, the hideous N-Gage, a concept so poorly received and so badly implemented that they probably had to bury five million of the things next to the pile of Atari ET Cartridges buried in a Texan landfill. But the combination of the Xperia Play and OnLive – though both individually flawed in certain ways – together produce something utterly mesmerising, somehow more than the sum of its parts. Quite simply, it’s a revelation.

For, you see, all of these pros and cons paled into insignificance the moment OnLive ported their client to the Xperia Play. Suddenly there was a single solitary handheld mobile device, unique and distinct from anything else on the market, that could play current-gen console-standard games, and more to the point could deliver them without silly pretend on-screen controls, or wiimote hacks, or external controllers, or compromises. You just slide that slick gamepad out, launch OnLive, fire up your copy of Batman: Arkham City or Saints Row: The Third and enjoy high-fidelity PC-quality gaming.

For you see, this killer combination of OnLive, the Xperia Play and a capable internet connection delivers something you can’t get anywhere else: proper, full-fat, platform-agnostic gaming in one unit that will fit in your pocket. Nobody else does it. It’s a game-changer. It’s so ahead of its time that I suspect that no amount of waxing lyrical will alter the fact that this devastatingly effective combination will be totally overlooked by all and sundry. (That is, presumably, until Apple ‘invents’ the concept of integrated mobile cloud gaming in five years’ time – iPlay anyone? – everyone slaps their forehead, wonders why no-one else thought of the concept and we buy them in their millions.)

The Xperia Play needed OnLive, and OnLive needed the Xperia Play, though neither would have admitted it. The Xperia Play has finally found its raison d’être, a unique reason or "killer app" to buy it over any other phone, or portable games console for that matter. And in OnLive’s case, it gives it a reason for existing: what’s the point of playing games through OnLive on a computer that probably could have played those games natively anyway? It only begins to make sense in environments away from the raw processing power of your Desktop Computer, and never more so than on the Xperia Play.

While there are certainly plenty of devices that will run OnLive, none do it with the ease, perfection and panache of this quirky little device. It also future proofs it: If Sony stopped selling it tomorrow, even if everyone stopped writing games that support it, as long as OnLive keep going you’ll get a constant stream of bona fide, triple-A games coming your way. And for Xperia Play owners, it even puts an end to the mobile arms race – it simply doesn’t matter that newer phones with faster dual and quad core processors come out every other five minutes. As the games are rendered on OnLive’s servers rather than on the device, it means that you can ignore all of that nonsense as it simply isn’t important any more. Now that’s a game changer.