Last month Onlive began rolling out it’s streaming game service to those who have signed up early. OnLive provides subscribers with the ability to purchase digital subscriptions to various popular games like Splinter Cell Conviction, Bataman Arkham Asylum and Dirt 2. Then instead of downloading the game and running it via your machine, the video and audio of the game is streamed to you from the powerful Onlive servers. No longer do gamers need to worry about upgrading to the latest hardware to play the latest games, Onlive’s servers handle all the heavy lifting. To make the service even more appealing to casual gamers there will be a standalone box that you can hook-up to your HD Tv and internet connection, and enjoy their gaming without a PC.
I’ve been playing with OnLive for a couple weeks now and I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Games run smoothly on either my laptop or desktop, and controls are fairly solid with only minimal noticeable controller lag. Some games like Dirt 2 felt a bit loose in the control department then a game like Arkham Asylum or MLB 2k10. And one thing I found was that using a USB controller is much more fun then a keyboard and mouse, as many of the games are console ports.
Graphically the games stream fairly well. Even when hooking my Macbook Pro up to my HD TV the games looked fairly good. They in no way look as clean as they would if the game was running on my machine or console. Looking close you will notice a fair amount of compression and the graphics overall look a bit washed out. Unfortunately their aren’t any types of graphics options as the service is merely streaming video and audio to gamers. It is safe to assume that over time as the service evolves and compression technology changes we will see improvements.
Right now there is a decent selection of games and the OnLive library will eventually grow over time. Pricing is a bit odd, and it varies greatly from game to game. Some games have various day long passes, and others you can buy fully(as long as you maintain your OnLive subscription). Though one thing all the games in the library have in common is a 30 minute demo mode, allowing you to play the game for 30 minutes before deciding to purchase. I think the various day length pass model is quite good and will be welcomed. I have so many games that I really only play for a few weeks or days then rarely pick-up again. I’d be much more compelled to purchase a 2 week pass to a game I might not have otherwise purchased.
OnLive is still very young and while it’s been in development for years, now that it’s in the wild I see the system evolving over time. While the requirement of a hard wire(and high speed, 5+ mbps) internet connection might deter some, we can hope over time that the technology improves and begins to allow the service to run via wifi. The service needs to jump a lot of hurdles to work, and while controls might not be as tight as a full fledge console and the graphics might be compressed a bit, for those on a budget who want to play the latest games, OnLive is a great option. You can still sign-up as a founding member which gives you a year free(plus game purchase prices), which makes it a good time to try out the service and a few of the game demos.
