The OnLive Experience
The experience is better than I expected. The company tunes your connection to limit lag, and I haven’t noticed any significant game degradation. It is dependent on your network connection though, and if you have issues you’ll likely lose your connection. You won’t be playing this on a plane anytime soon, for instance.
I played a wide variety of games. They have around 20 and up at the moment, ranging from A-list titles like Batman: Arkham Asylum to independents that I hadn’t heard of. It turns out it is a great way to demo games as well, because you don’t have to download and install them, just play the demo on the service.
Installing the client takes around 2 to 3 minutes, depending on how fast your computer is. Loading the actual game takes around 15 to 20 seconds on average, so you are gaming fast. You are playing the game remotely, and they are streaming a compressed high-definition image back to you real time, so there is some slight degradation in image quality when taken against a high end gaming machine. For instance, on my nine-screen Eyefinity rig, it would only expand to about 80 percent of the overall screen area. But these are six 22-inch screens, and a massive display that I rarely can see all of anyway, so that wasn’t a problem.
If a virus scan or other process starts up on your PC, the game continues without a hiccup, and it was interesting to note that I could play in Windowed mode and not have any visible impact on anything else that was running.
You buy a game much like you would buy a movie from a streaming service. As with those services, you actually are buying the right to play the game, and you don’t get anything you can sell or physically hold. For me, the tradeoff of being able to play on any PC that had a wired connection anyplace was worth it
