OnLive: Viva La Revolucion!

Crysis. Empire- Total War. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky. When you hear these names, you might think of three games with absolutely beautiful graphics, but what you’re probably thinking of are the system requirements. Games like Crysis push the PC to the edge daily, with every “Ultra Hi-Rez Texture” and “Enhanced Smoke” mod released. Even the games themselves, when vanilla on release, had PC gamers scrambling to upgrade their rigs to be able to run these system hogs.

What if I told you, that you would never have to make that sort of upgrade again?
What if I told you…that you could buy a cheap, standard HP desktop from Best Buy for around $400, and still be able to play games like Crysis: Warhead on the absolute highest settings at 60 frames per second?

You’d probably slap me and suggest I go to a mental institute. Hopefully somewhere before admitting me into the institute (and maybe even the slapping part, if you’re nice), you would let me explain myself.

OnLive.

OnLive is many things. It’s a console. It’s STEAM. It’s Xfire. It’s Xbox LIVE. It’s GameTap. It’s a mixing pot of all of that, and more.
Recently announced, gamers and press outlets learned that OnLive is very real, and only months away from a private BETA.
What is it? At its core, its a digital distribution program you subscribe to. “Why on earth should I have to pay a subscription fee to a DD Service?” you might ask…
Well here’s why:
While it provides services as basic as online purchasing, ingame chat, video recording, screen-cap abilities, friends lists, file sharing, LIVE broadcasts of your gameplay, and more, it’s got several features that no other Digital Distbribution program has. All of it is achieved via the internet.

1. When you buy games, you never download them, you never install them. You purchase the game, and you play. This has pros and cons. It’s great for companies because it effectively stops piracy once and for all. If the gamer never touches the files of the game they’re playing, there is no way they can make a copy of it and throw it up as a torrent. On the flipside, this means you’ll never “own” your games, you’ll just be paying OnLive rights to play a game, so if you’re banned from OnLive, cancel your subscription to OnLive, or even so much as lose your internet connection for a day, you will be unable to play the game you purchased.

2. You will never again have to upgrade your PC to meet system requirements. PC’s on their side of the internet will do all the CPU and GPU calculations for you! Again, more pros and cons. On the upside, you can get a dirt cheap PC and stream your gameplay on highest settings with absolutely no graphical lagging….On the downside, this means you need VERY good latency. The slightest slow-down in your internet connection, or in the event someone else starts using a fair share of your bandwidth, your game will start lagging. Not lagging with every explosion, but connection lag as if you were playing an online match. This can produce results like slow reaction times (pressing space to jump, and not jumping until 4 or 5 seconds later) and even rubber-banding (walking forward a few steps then warping back to where you originally stood).

3. If you want, OnLive offers two accessories. A wireless controller/gamepad with all the buttons you need, plus “play, pause, next, back” and “record” buttons, and wireless reaction times they claim are in the “micro-seconds”. And also a small box that looks almost like a router or hub, which can be used as a console. Hook it up to your TV screen, pull out the wireless controller, and you can play any PC game in their library on highest settings on their little mini-console. “[There are] few strings attached.”

OnLive is clearly trying to innovate here, and while a lot of things sound very appealing (like no download time or install time, and not having to process the game on your own PC), there are also a number of turn-offs that can’t be ignored (like the risk of serious latency issues, and the fact that you won’t “own” your games).

You can check out OnLive’s Official Website, and if you’re over the age of 18 you can even sign up for the BETA.

The general public still has much to learn about OnLive, and you can bet that more will begin to unravel soon enough, with GDC going on.

OnLive has already signed with a handful of major teams like EA, UbiSoft, THQ, and other companies of that caliber.