I won't lie — I wasn't in San Francisco for the Game Developer's Conference this week. Someone had to stay in Portland and drink heavily while crying, and as a result I missed ... absolutely nothing. Aside from a few panels that are only interesting to gaming journalists, designers and the industry's creepiest fans, for most of the conference the content was depressingly dull.

And then *cue Matt Davis-style bold text* there was Batman.

Yesterday, or maybe today — one of those, anyway — developer Rocksteady Games debuted the first gameplay footage from Batman: Arkham Asylum. Considering Batman's past gaming appearances, which range from "insanely difficult, but pleasingly gimmicky" to "did Spider-Man just turn into Batman?", everything here looks pretty damn awesome.

Even without playing the game, I feel safe saying this is the best thing Batman has been involved in since the Olsen twins killed The Joker (too soon?).

Thing #2 that happened:

Modern Warfare 2 (we're still not sure if Activision officially dropped the Call of Duty prefix) also got the video treatment.

What? Did you expect a video that would actually tell you anything about the game?

Finally, we come to Thing #3: OnLive.

While you're reading an explanation from someone who actually got to play with it, I'll be busy sublimating my bitter jealousy with a delicious pita.

"What OnLive does is seamless and completely transparent, and it does not have any requirements for the local system."

OnLive's service, which is planned to combine a relatively low monthly subscription fee with other per-game business models not yet fully determined, requires only a one-megabyte download to a computer, or a small plastic dongle (called a "micro-console") to connect to a TV; no GPU is required.

Once subscribed, users will be able to run any of the service's games, regardless of system requirements — Gamasutra was able to try the system out with graphical powerhouses like Crytek's Crysis and Codemasters' GRID.

A number of major publishers including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., Take-Two, Eidos, and Atari have already signed on. And the company has announced a partnership with Epic Games that will see the Unreal Engine 3 easily adapt to OnLive's APIs.

"Not only have we solved the problem of compressing the video games, we've solved the latency problem," Perlman said to Gamasutra. "We knew, in order to make this thing work, we'd have to figure out a way to get video to run compressed over consumer connections with effectively no latency. Our video compression technology has one millisecond in latency — basically no latency at all. All the latency is just for the transport, and we've also addressed that."

While it is of course impossible to completely eliminate the possibility of latency over a network, OnLive has actually gone to such lengths as to work directly with cable and internet providers to identify and repair inefficiencies in their systems that resulted in dropped packets or other flaws.

Eventually, the company hopes to provide even faster service by streaming directly through cable to users' homes, much like paid television currently is.

In short, no matter how shitty your computer is, as long as you have reasonably fast broadband, you'll be able to play the latest, greatest computer games in all of their graphical splendor.

When OnLive was revealed you could almost taste the doubt forming on the tongues and ears (That's where it forms! Really!) of gaming writers everywhere, but from my conversations with all the folk who had a chance to see the thing in person, it actually seems to work pretty well.

Who knows if it will function properly in the real world once it's released this Winter, but it's a nice dream for the moment.