United Gamer Online (UGO)

by Mike Smith
Motion controllers? Child's play. High-powered consoles? Waste of money. If bold startup OnLive has anything to do with it, the future of gaming is up in the clouds.
Not literally, of course. OnLive promises to relieve your computer of the onerous task of actually running one of its selection of triple-A games -- instead, it runs on one of OnLive's massive servers, away in the "cloud" of the Internet. Your inputs are sent to the server; it sends back a high-definition streaming video feed of your gameplay, relieving the need for any fancy gaming hardware. All you need is a machine that can display a high-def streaming video, which these days is pretty much anything.

Sounds like pie in the sky, and since its announcement last year, OnLive has been treated with considerable skepticism by the gaming community. Many commentators dismissed it as a technological impossibility, a pipe-dream that'd never see daylight.

But it turned out to be neither. Last week the service launched, and OnLive is now in the hands of subscribers dotting the lower 48 states.

Its launch line-up includes about 20 games, around half of which are what you might call "top-tier" full-price releases: Assassin's Creed II, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, and Splinter Cell: Conviction. More are coming. OnLive has agreements in place with every major publisher except Activision-Blizzard, so it's going to be competitive, in terms of new releases, with download services like Steam.

But buying games on OnLive is way slicker. There's no downloading: you just hit the "purchase" button, enter your password for confirmation, and after a brief loading pause, you're in the game. It's a buying experience that's head and shoulders above everything else out there. OnLive is also ahead of the game in its social features -- you can record and share short clips of your game, for example, and check up on the activities of your friends in a way that'll be familiar to Xbox Live subscribers.

Chief among the predictions of OnLive's critics is that its games will be ruined by the unavoidable time delay between you making a move, the server processing it, and your screen displaying the results. And yes, there's a slight, but entirely perceptible, lag between you making a move and seeing it reflected on the screen.

If you're a hardcore shooter player, this will be enough to put you off completely. If you're not so tuned-in, you may not even notice. We found it significantly less bothersome when using an Xbox 360 controller than with a mouse. Set it next to a dedicated gaming PC and there's no comparison, even with identical graphics. Which, thanks to OnLive's somewhat washed-out, low-detail look, they're unfortunately not.

ut then again, OnLive will run adequately on machines that modern games wouldn't even touch. And to some extent your experience will vary based on your connection type, your distance from OnLive's server warehouses, the number of other people using your Internet connection, and probably the phase of the moon or something. But as long as you meet its modest minimum hardware requirements, it'll work pretty much the same as on a whizz-bang supercomputer.

Unless, that is, you have a wireless network. OnLive flat-out refuses to run unless you have a wired ethernet hookup, so if you're dreaming of slouching on the couch playing games on your laptop, resign yourself to running an extra cord. Depending on your home setup, that could be a dealkiller.

And speaking of dealkillers, let's talk price. Thanks to a deal with AT&T, the OnLive service is free for the first year for the first batch of subscribers, but make no mistake: this ain't going to last. Once you run through that year, count on paying $4.95 per month for access, provided nothing changes. You'll also have to pay for the games.

If you're scratching your head at the prospect of paying both a subscription fee for the service and full sticker price for the games, you're not the only one. Stop paying the sub fee, and your games -- the games you've paid for and own -- are no longer accessible. That's a pretty bitter pill to swallow.

Fortunately, that's not the only option. OnLive also offers rentals for certain games, with prices in the $5-10 area for 3-5 day loan periods. That's a much better deal. PC game rentals are a rare sight, and if you're anticipating a heavy weekend's gaming, it's a great option for non-console gamers.

There's one other OnLive feature that's unavailable anywhere else: it runs on the Mac, meaning that nearly all its games can be enjoyed by oft-neglected Mac gamers. If you're one of the millions who made the switch to Apple and you miss the world of PC games, OnLive's going to be of particular interest.

Future plans for the service are impressive, too. It's been demoed running on the iPhone and iPad, and later this year it'll be getting a dirt-cheap "Microconsole" -- a set-top box that can stream games straight to your TV. Exclusive games are in the works, the company's founder told us, and with a whole server farm at their disposal they could be able to perform at levels home PCs just can't match.

But is it really a feasible way to play games? OnLive is packed with more caveats than a cellphone contract: it depends on your connection, it's pricey, its future is uncertain, the graphics aren't as good, and there's that perceptible control lag. As a technology demo, it's spectacular; as a product, it's unproven. If you're curious -- or you're keen to play the latest PC games and don't want to buy an expensive new computer -- take it for a test drive. But it's not going to change the world just yet.