Beamed Into Your Home By The Onlive Overlords!

 Beamed into Your Home By The Onlive Overlords!

It's Out There, But Does it Matter?

Granted, the cloud-based game streaming service Onlive never really set the gaming world on fire when it was announced almost a year ago, but I expected a little more press and interest when the possibly revolutionary system finally launched. For those not familiar with Onlive, imagine Steam mixed with Youtube. The service allows you to download and play games a variety of triple- A titles through the power of cloud computing. When you make a controller input, the signal is sent to some distant Onlive HQ via the power of the internet (a series of tubes, remember). Onlive then streams the game's visuals back to your computer. The game itself runs, not on your system, but on the powerful computers supplied by Onlive, and this means that even a standard non-gaming laptop like mine can run resource intensive games without breaking a sweat.

From what I've seen, though, Onlive has been met by little more than sniff from those all-important gaming journalistic cabals with three letter acronyms or names ending in “spot.” I suppose that we've all been complicit in this collective neglect, though, and I'm among the offenders. I downloaded the Onlive client over a month ago, but never bothered to open it or look at it until just this afternoon. The shortcut icon blended into my desktop, and it was only by coincidence that I remembered it was even there. Before I'm too hard on myself, though, I should say that it wasn't for lack of trying that I've left Onlive alone. Honestly, it's just a little hard to deal with: I can't connect to the service from my home internet. Despite being fast enough for nearly every other online activity, my connection was found wanting by Onlinve and rejected. The only place where I can get the thing to work is at my school, and that clearly makes bringing a gamepad and finding the extra time a little harder.

When everything is going well, however, Onlive is a joy to work with. Not only can you purchase some of the latest games for prices that compare well to Steam, you can also play a 30 minute demo of any game before you decide to purchase. Onlive also allows you to post short videos of you playing a game to their “Brag Clip” section where other players can view your “leet skills” and whatnot. In compliment to this feature, there is an “Arena” section where you can spectate other players live. All around, I like the atmosphere of the application: it feels sleek and streamlined, perhaps even more so than the somewhat awkward Steam.

What Steam does have, though, is selection. While Steam is the established digital distribution service for PC games, Onlive is just a startup, and they're going to have to put in a lot of work if they plan to mount a successful challenge to Valve's brainchild. In the seven months since its release, Onlive has added just over 60 games to its library, while, in the same amount of time, Steam has added over 100 games to its already sizable library. What Onlive has that Steam doesn't is a ten-dollar-per-month deal that gives you access to a group of some of the most recent games added to the service. Right now, though, the “PlayPack” includes such gems as F.E.A.R. 2, Prince of Persia, and Unreal Tournament 3, but those aren't exactly the most recent titles. Most of the other options in the Playpack are games you've probably never heard of, so the value of the deal will really depend on how willing you are to play games just because they're there.

Admittedly, the usefulness of this platform is somewhat limited by the necessity to be connected to the web at all times. If you're got problems with multiplayer lagging, now you'll be getting the exact same problems in all portions of the game. I probably won't be using Onlive just because of the inconvenience, but if you don't mind the drawbacks, Onlive could very well be a glimpse of gaming future.

--Tom