http://www.joystiq.com/2009/12/29/onlive-technology-demonstrated-at-columbia-university/
(Fast forward to 12 minutes in or so.)

I remember hearing about this about 18 months ago.

To sum it up for those who haven't heard of it:
Cloud Gaming/Computing basically allows you play all the latest and greatest games without ever needing to upgrade any part of your pc/mac.

The only REAL important factor is your net speed.
1 meg download required for Standard Definition gaming, 5 meg download for HD gaming.


So you can play high-end games like Crysis with all the details, shadows, HDR and all that jazz switched up to full/max on your run of the mill average machine.

Well, that's the idea.

Weather we see this "OnLive" service in the UK is another matter but I think it looks quite promising.

I used to host LAN parties at my house and always wished there was some way of using the extra processing power on the network to boost some of the other machines' power. There was always someone there with a machine a couple of generations older than the rest that we'd have to donate spare RAM to before it would even load up some of the games! Would've been nice to just set up a wee cloud for those poor sods to use their terminal machines on.

It's an interesting idea, though I have doubts for anyone serious about gaming. I already get annoyed with wireless mice sometimes for having a delay, can't imagine playing a game essentially remotely like that.