Last week, I was fortunate enough to be accepted into OnLive’s promotional one free year of service courtesy of AT&T. While the service will remain free for a year, renewing at $4.95 a month thereafter, game purchases and rentals are still going to cost me. For those unaware of OnLive and what it does, allow me to explain.

OnLive is a cloud-based gaming service that seeks to bring gaming to almost any machine connected to the internet. For the past year or so, OnLive founder Steve Perlman has been making the rounds, giving demos of the service, showing games running on hardware ranging from PCs to Macs and even iPhones. The way OnLive works is, essentially, the games are running on hardware off at a server somewhere. Users sign in to OnLive on their home computer and, when they choose to “run” the game, they’re actually running it off the server’s computer. Their inputs are sent to the server, the action is done in the game, and the result is pushed back to the user, all in a fraction of a second. If all goes according to plan, the customer is unaware of the exchange and the game appears to be playing on their computer. In reality, their home computer isn’t doing anything beyond tapping into a video feed. This allows computers such as my 2007 Macbook to play games like Borderlands, Tom Clancy’s: Splinter Cell Conviction, and Just Cause 2.
The biggest stumbling block for OnLive, leading up to launch, has been the doubt cast over the service. Many have wondered if it would actually be able to deliver on the promise of cloud-based gaming. Without sounding too much like a commercial for OnLive, I have to say that in my time, thus far with the service, it’s worked better than expected.

Let’s get a few things out of the way. Will OnLive replace traditional PC gaming for hardcore PC gamers? No. If you have the hardware that can handle these games, there are few reasons to spend the monthly subscription fee just to gain access to games you can already run. Is OnLive for people who love having a physical copy of the game? If you absolutely must have the game’s box on your shelf, lined up with all the others, then move along. This is purely cloud-based and anyone leery of owning a game for as long as they subscribe to the service need not apply. For someone like me, an avid gamer, who has often lamented my Mac’s gaming Achilles heel, the service is a no-brainer. My first reaction after installing the application was “Oh my God, it works!”

After a year of naysayers, decrying OnLive to be too far ahead of its time, I was pleasantly surprised to see Borderlands, running on my old Macbook. The specs of my Macbook run down like this:

While it’s more than adequate for running my day-to-day chores, my Macbook has always been a writing laptop first and a gaming laptop a far distant second. Valve’s recent embrace of the Mac lead to some heartbreak as, time and time again, I found my Mac unable to run games like Portal. With OnLive it looks like things are finally about to change. Anyone who knows about computer hardware will see that integrated-graphics processor as a real stumbling block when it comes to gaming. Without something a little beefier, this Macbook isn’t going to get very far.  That’s why it was such a treat to see games like Dirt 2 running and my computer’s fans hadn’t even come on.

Like any relationship, things aren’t always perfect. Currently, OnLive requires a hard-wired connection to the internet which means no wi-fi. At first, I thought I could just log-in, see what games were on offer, and deal with any lag caused by my wireless. That’s a no-go. OnLive won’t even start until you’re tethered directly to your router. As someone who lives wirelessly 99.9% of the time, I know I’ll be less inclined to relocate my whole computer set-up just to play. But I realize I could easily be in a very small minority when it comes to this. For most people, this will be a non-issue. But it’s worth noting in case some users are truly unable to access a hard-wired connection. OnLive asserts its “technology does indeed work well with good quality Wi-Fi connections” but doesn’t plan on releasing that functionality “once OnLive is better established”.

Since it was first announced, people have worried that latency would be an issue. Latency, or lag, is a constancy concern for any online gaming experience. Latency occurs when there is a spans of time between the player’s input such as firing a weapon and the results occurring in the game. In an online match, for example, lag could be the difference between life or death. OnLive has built servers around the country to cut down on the distance between your machine and its servers. The shorter the distance and the stronger your internet connection, the better it gets. In fact, unlike most discussions of PC gaming, OnLive is less about your computer’s hardware strength than it is the strength of your connection to the internet. In my time, I have yet to experience any extreme latency issues. My inputs have been mirrored in the game world faithfully. While playing Borderlands, for example, I have tested the time it’s taken for my to left-click to fire my weapon and the time my gun actually fired bullets. The time was nearly indistinguishable. I say nearly because while OnLive’s servers are doing an incredible job of translating and moving all this data, it’s merely a nanosecond behind what you would expect if playing the game directly from the disc. However, for me it quickly fell into the realm beyond “good enough” and I easily adjusted and forgot all about how the game was getting to me and just played.

The selection in the Marketplace is somewhat limited at the moment but OnLive promises more is on the way. I was annoyed to see Mass Effect 2 is only available to OnLive users connecting through a PC. I’m unsure who was behind this but the beauty of OnLive is that it is hardware agnostic yet even in the remote reaches of the cloud, the school-yard fight between Apple and Microsoft persists. It’s a shame. I’m also hoping the pricing sees some more restructuring. Players can purchase a three-day or five-day rental of some titles for $3.99 or $8.99 respectively. But not all games are available for rental. I wish there was more consistency in the pricing and availability. Full price purchases are often at the standard MSRP of $59.99. Hopefully, OnLive takes a cue from Valve and embraces the wonders of Steam Sales. The advantage of online gaming over brick and mortar retail will always be its ability to drop prices as it does not need to deal with overheads, shelf space, etc.

Other features such as the Arena which allows users to drop in and spectate on other player’s games are a fun distraction and seem more like a crowd-pleaser to show off an “ooh and ahh” factor of the service. OnLive is going to continue rolling out across the United States. The service is, at the moment, only offered in America but Perlman has expressed an interest to expand to other countries. Expect more impressions as my time with OnLive continues.