Obviously—since the slide was not in the final presentation—Dan Teasdale didn't say a word about it, so we don't know. My hope that the instruments are—if not made with bricks—at least compatible with bricks. Imagine it: If their surfaces are covered with Lego-compatible studs, that would mean that any Lego and Rock Band fan would be able to customize them in any way they want using regular bricks. [Kotaku]

I think there are two main concerns running through the heads of anyone that's heard of this thing: a) Latency between your control inputs and the action on the screen and b) picture quality. While this system is still in pre-beta, and both of these aspects are inferior compared to a home console or PC experience, I still think OnLive will serve well the gamer who doesn't want to kick down the cash for the latest hardware.

I played Bioshock using the PC setup, which involved an average looking Dell laptop, and a Logitech control pad. The game was running 50 miles away on a server in Santa Clara, and load times are pretty much the same as running the game on your PC.

Once I got started with gameplay, I noticed the slightest bit of lag between controller and screen. Just enough to not feel natural, but hardly enough to really detract from gameplay. Some environments (especially indoor) were more responsive than others to the point that you barely noticed any latency. Definitely not for the competitive gamer, but for the guy who just wants to play for a few hours on the weekend, it's fine.

As far as picture quality goes, there is noticeable compression and artifacting that takes place. When fire and water effects were dominating the screen in Bioshock, you pretty much saw squares everywhere. OnLive doesn't mince words about it, saying it comes with the territory, but they do expect the quality to get better over time as they hammer out the kinks. Some of the indoor textures and environments looked pretty close to running on your own console, with minor dropoffs in sharpness and clarity. The batch of screenshots below doesn't tell the entire story, but it gives a basic idea of what to expect.

I also noticed some choppiness in the framerate, but whether or not it was caused by the streaming, or the server, is unknown. As for the palm-sized, set top version of OnLive, I didn't get to actually take it for a spin, but from watching, I'd say performance was about the same compared to using a PC.

OnLive says that when they roll the service out, they plan to have data centers near every major American metropolis, which is somewhat vague, but ensures that you won't be all running off a server on the west coast. Whether or not they'll be able to support a national rollout is unknown, since it's still early in development. But OnLive seems like a gaming solution worthy of our attention. [OnLive]

Plenty is discussed here, and it's worth watching all the way through if you were at all intrigued by yesterday's announcement. The genuine boner moment is at around 15:00, when a lowly Dell Studio 15 plays Crysis without even flinching. The presenters discussed latency and did their best to demonstrate that OnLive does provide the same experience as a proper gaming machine, but until the service rolls out it'll be impossible to tell if this is true. If the games feel even slightly laggy it'll be a huge blow—OnLive will live or die by a few milliseconds. [Gamespot]

The liveblog will be all in one post this time around (none of that confusing multi-post business), so warm up your refresh buttons and stay tuned. –Adam Frucci

Well, the PlayStation Home is a little virtual home in which the avatar you make (your Pii?) will live. When you complete a game, it'll award you with a little trophy or toy to place in your home that your avatar can interact with. Not only that, they're planning to make your avatar social—like MySpace—and have it interact with other people's avatars.

All of this is rumored still, but Sony seems to be doing something big next week at GDC. We're willing to be that this is it. – Jason Chen

Rumor: Sony To Unveil PlayStation Home [Kotaku]

N-Gage to debut at GDC - Nokia rules out optimised device [Mobile-Entertainment]
Also: Rumor: N-Gage: The Second Coming? [Kotaku]

Apparently, the dev-kit was supposed to be Linux-only and was also supposed to come with a pet dolphin and make you see beautiful sunrises. However, this frightening development truly changes the entire game. After all, when was the last time Sony used a proprietary, closed-source software or hardware platform?

PS3 Running XP? Ponders Major Nelson [Kotaku]