First off, thanks to Maxx for that wicked play on the name in the headline! Super clever! As for the news, OnLive is still shaking off the packing peanuts from its recent debut and keeping things interesting with their first sale. Like Steam who has seen immense success with brief, high discount sales, OnLive is doing a ‘4th of July Sale Extravaganza’ and giving players a 30% discount on all of their current titles. Between July 3rd and the 5th, just enter the promo code 30OFFJULY4 and you get the discount on any game, as many times as you’d like and for any PlayPass purchase length (3-day, 5-day, or Full).
And just so you know, my free Founding Member invite gives me a year of access so expect me to report on OnLive as it grows and develops… at least until my membership expires. I’m not really playing much on it but I’m fascinated by the service!
The backbone of OnLive is pretty amazing stuff; streaming PC gaming that requires little more than a web browser and a controller. But ever since the service launched and Maxx and I got invited in it’s felt more and more bleak. Losing the right to serve up any games from EA (for now) has left OnLive with a tiny roster of titles and the payment structure in general is a little confusing. There’s not a lot of PR coming out of the company yet so I was pleased to see that their first new release, LEGO Harry Potter, came with some fanfare.
That fanfare would be a contest in which the first person to complete the game by having found all 200 Gold Bricks and completed a Voldemort bonus level will win an Apple iPad with the next five players who meet the stiff criteria winning an iPod Touch. I especially like the way in which you prove your progress. Since OnLive is a streaming service it’s always backing up the last several seconds of your game and you can simply hit a button combo to save that footage as a Brag Clip. It harkens back to the days when you’d take a photo of your TV to prove to Activision you really did get a top score on Astro Blast, but the rules nowadays are understandably more complex. Good on ya, OnLive! Here’s to progress!
Let’s just cut straight to the nitty gritty. Does OnLive work as promised? Yes. It actually does exactly what the company claimed. It runs on virtually any computer. It allows you to jump right in to any game without installing, patching, or configuring. It gives you a perfect image that’s comparable to an HDTV running at 720p. It runs without any lag or noticeable delay.
That is… as long as you have sufficient bandwidth.
Yes, OnLive works as advertised, with the one conceit that both your bandwidth is high, and the servers aren’t over burdened. If the connection isn’t perfect, the illusion isn’t quite perfect. At best, it’s like you’re playing a game on a high-end computer. At worst, it’s like playing an interactive YouTube video running at full screen with a dying controller. The graphics can look very pixelated, the controls can have a very noticeable delay, and the sound can even lag behind the video. Fortunately, this has mostly been the exception in my experience.
There are a handful of games currently available to choose from. There’s not much consistency in their prices or purchase methods. Some can be bought outright, some can be bought or rented, while some can only be rented but not purchased. Rentals give you the game for a few days, while purchases give you access to the game until at least the year 2013. And that’s one of the big issues with OnLive. Games you buy aren’t permanently yours. You’re either renting or leasing, essentially. The prices of these games are also an issue. You might expect that these non-permanent games would be cheaper than what they would be at retail. You should think again. The prices are exactly in line with what the same games go for at retail, or Steam for that matter.
Questionable value aside, OnLive works incredibly well on a technical level. It’s difficult not to totally geek out when it’s running. You can select any game on the service and just jump right in. Many of the games have 30 minute timed demos that you can initiate at any time. Besides playing the games, you can access the Arena. The Arena is a big, endless wall of videos. Each video is a game being played by someone else right at that very moment. You can make any of these videos go fullscreen and just watch other people’s games. Of course, other people can do the same to you, but you can easily disable them from doing so if it bothers you.
My OnLive account came with one free game. I chose Borderlands, because it seemed like it would last me quite a while, and because it was one of the few games that I didn’t already have on a console. Playing it with the mouse and keyboard, especially when the connection isn’t 100%, is less than ideal. The precision of a mouse combined with just a little bit of lag makes for an experience that could make you nauseous. Playing with a controller, on the other hand, it’s barely noticeable that you’re actually playing a game on a server hundreds of miles away. I’ve played Borderlands on OnLive for the last two nights straight, and both times I eventually forgot I wasn’t playing a game running on my own computer. That is impressive.
Does OnLive have a future? I can’t say. I’m not really sure the business model can support itself. They need a lot more games, and a much better pricing scheme (see: Netflix). On the other hand, the technology delivers and makes you realize that, hey guess what, we’re living in the future now! Hopefully OnLive will stick around, I’d like to see it take off.
The whole crew is back this week in tip-top form! Maxx kicks it off with his souring experience with OnLive (he bought Borderlands for PC), Katy and I fantasize about Agent sex in Crackdown 2, and Dana fills us in on Blizzard’s unsettling Real ID/Battle.NET mess. Oh, and we all flipped out over that Steam summer sale and detail a bunch of games we bought that we probably won’t ever finish! All that and all this too!
Listen to the show right here in this very page or, as always, head over to our Talkshoe page to rate and review the show, subscribe via RSS or iTunes, and check out all of our past episodes! Thanks for listening and letting us know what you think! Leave a comment here, e-mail us at podcast (at) gameluv (dot) com, hit us up on Twitter @GameLuv, or give us a ring at (646) 504-GAME. We hope you like it!
E3 sucked all the air out of the room and even though we don’t usually talk news on the show we’re still feeling its effects. Done with the Crackdown 2 demo and with Red Dead Redemption’s fantastic endgame still in spoiler territory there wasn’t a lot to talk about this week. Maxx is out sick, I’m still not feeling so great and the only thing new-new-new is LEGO Harry Potter. So we kept it short and sweet this week and even had a couple listener questions to answer! Would you like your queries addressed as well? E-mail us already (see below)! In the meantime, listen to this week’s episode!
Crackdown 2 demo: final thoughts
The Sims 2: Castaway on Wii
LEGO Harry Potter
My experience with OnLive
Red Dead Redemption: the spoiler-free stuff
Nier Gestalt demo
iPad: ZenBound 2, eBoy FixPix
Listen to the show right here in this very page or, as always, head over to our Talkshoe page to rate and review the show, subscribe via RSS or iTunes, and check out all of our past episodes! Thanks for listening and letting us know what you think (Psss! E-mail us at podcast (at) gameluv (dot) com or hit us up on Twitter @GameLuv). We hope you like it!
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