Introduction - What is it?

Onlive is a newly launched streaming video game service. Users play games on the OnLive servers rather than their local machine, with the game's video and the user's input commands being streamed back and forth over the net.

How do you sign up?

Users who sign up on the OnLive website will receive an email inviting them to participate in the service. The service is being rolled out in waves, so the email may not come immediately. Mine took about a week. Once you get the email, you get a standard registration webpage. Name, email, date of birth, etc. The only thing of note is that the service does require a credit card. If you get in on the free one year offer they have going on, your card doesn't get charged, it's just used for validation and such. All in all, a painless process.

How do you connect to the service?

The process couldn't be easier, and is exactly as they said it would be. You download a very small plugin, and then you can launch the service from your browser, or your desktop. Type in your email and password, and a nicely minimalistic launcher verifies your info in just a few seconds. You then get a brief login animation (skippable) and you're taken to the home screen. Desktop to service takes about 5-8 seconds.

What can you do from the home screen?

I won't try to describe every last detail, because I know you can all watch this on youtube. Still, I'll hit the high points. You can go to a marketplace (the games), an arena (where you can watch other players play games and add them as friends if you like), a place to check your friends list, a place to watch brag clips, and so on. Personally, I didn't care for the look of the home screen, but I will say this: it's very functional. Everything important is just a click or two away, the animations are smooth, and it works very well.

...The games, already?

Right! Sorry. There's a decent selection of games currently available. I believe there are 8 blockbuster titles (you can look them up if you want) and probably about the same number of smaller, Indie games. World of Goo, and the like. It's not huge, but it doesn't seem skimpy by any means.

Pricing

The pricing info has been available on the web for a while now, but I'll repeat it here for those who don't know. In short, you pay a monthly fee (which as I mentioned is waived for a year if you get in on the action within the first month), and then pay for "Game Passes" which allow you to play. Most games had options for 3-5 day rentals (ranging from 3.99 to 8.99 depending on how many days and which game) as well as "permanent" (guaranteed for 3 years, at least) game passes. I'm sure you can look at the price list, but a permanent pass for Borderlands was 29.99, and FEAR 2 was 39.99. A bit cheaper than retail. Oh, one last bit, you can try any game for 30 minutes, free of charge, hassle, nag screens, etc.

But does it WORK?

Good news, folks: yes. It works. I've only played one game (FEAR 2), but I had a good time doing it. Here are my takes on the three main performance components.

- Latency

I expected the latency to be a huge issue, but it's really not. If you look for it you can find it, but I found it to be generally unnoticeable. I don't mean "this is annoying but I can live with it," I mean "this doesn't seem laggy unless I actually try to cause it." I fired grappling hooks, made headshots, jumped all over the place, etc, and had no problems.

- Streaming

This is the area that would need slight improvement for me to really love the service. There was an occasional artifact once in a while, but hardly worth mentioning. More importantly, the game had a just slightly jerky quality to it. It wasn't constant, and it wasn't bad, but it was just enough to be slightly annoying.

HOWEVER:

• I was playing this game on a 6mbps connection (slightly over the 5mbps lower limit for streaming 1280 content)
• I was connecting to a router repurposed as a wireless repeater bridge, accessing a gateway router two floors away. The game service specifically doesn't support wireless for the time being, I was just being all sneaky 'cause I didn't want to carry my computer downstairs.
• Once or twice during the game, I got a small network warning box pop up in the bottom right.

Meaning what? Meaning the slight streaming problems I had could well have been caused by my problems, not theirs. I'll definitely have to connect by wire straight to my router at some point to test further. I'd like to repeat, though, that even with these issues, I still had fun playing the game, and didn't want to stop when the demo kicked me out.

- Video Quality

Games look good. You won't mistake them for the perfection of your home 5870 crossfire setup, but they definitely look high quality.

Final word

OnLive really impressed me. It's not perfect, but it's a solid, functional, genuinely fun service. Even in its early form, I would already recommend it for all of your non-core gaming needs. Maybe you're visiting relatives on vacation, or you want to play something new but the rental stores aren't open. . .things like that. It won't yet replace your desktop for your regular gaming sessions, but it's a fantastic (and fascinating) technical demo of the way gaming will be done in the future. I do wish they'd change their pricing structure, since the service is currently better suited to on again off again style gaming than it is constant play (which you'd want to do to justify a monthly fee), but that'll work itself out eventually.

Anyway, it works, it plays, it's fun, and it can only improve as time improves code and infrastructure. Again I say that I was impressed, and would strongly suggest you all check it out if you get the chance.

Oh, and feel free to ask me any specific questions you might have. I know I didn't get into much detail above, but it's late.