Ultimate OnLive review

As a PC gamer, what would you do if you could get a PC that you never needed to upgrade?  You never ran out of hard disk space for games?  Your video card was always good enough to give you the resolution that you wanted with the highest settings?  What if you could buy a game without ever leaving your house and it was instantly available to play without any waiting for it to download?  Impossible?  Not exactly!

In comes OnLive, the “cloud gaming” service.  With OnLive, all you need to play top tier titles is a small client installed to your PC, a subscription to the service and a high speed broadband internet connection.

How does it all work?  Well, basically it works like this.  You have your PC in your home with the OnLive client installed on it.  When you connect to the OnLive service, you are accessing a high end gaming computer in their gaming center.  All of the heavy lifting (CPU and video processing) is done on that PC and the results (the game) are streamed to you in real time.  So as the new games come out that require higher computer specs…all the upgrades are done at OnLive…with the only cost to you being the active subscription (about $5/month regular price…they are having some signup deals now...which are cheaper).  I tested the service on my home gaming computer and an older laptop (which didn't had a weak Intel video card), but PCs were able to run the service without a hitch.  The client loaded on a PC really only uses about 55MB of RAM while in use.  The installed client takes up less than 5MB of disk space.

Does it all work?  Yes, everything works as they advertise.  However, it’s not 100% perfect yet.  Since this service runs completely over the internet, EVERYTHING you do revolves around the quality of your internet connection.  OnLive actually requires you to have at least a 5MB broadband connection and it certainly does use it.

Here is a speed test of my idle internet connection:

Here is a picture of my internet speed after I start OnLive and get into a game:

So it really does use the 5MB connection.  In the future, they plan on offering a standard definition resolution that won’t require a 5MB internet connection.  While I’m on the topic of resolution, currently the service only runs in 720p and if your monitor is running at a higher resolution and you full screen the OnLive client, you’ll see some graphic quality degradation as it stretches the picture to fill the higher resolution.  It’s not terrible, just something to be aware of.  You can always lower the resolution of your PC before you launch the client and then it minimizes the effect.  Another future offering of OnLive that is planned for 2011 is upgrading the resolution to 1080p.

Getting back to the internet portion of this review, something I need to bring up is the amount of bandwidth the service uses.  OnLive uses A LOT of bandwidth.  Here are some bandwidth results for you to see.

Here is my internet connection usage after 30 minutes of being idle:

Here is my internet connection usage after 30 minutes of playing on OnLive:

Remember, this is just after playing for 30 minutes.  If you just purchased a brand new game, how long would you play it for?  A couple hours a night?  What if it’s an RPG?  People are racking up like 80+ hours on Dragon Age.  This could be a serious problem for users that have a monthly bandwidth cap, like I have with Comcast.  My limit is 250GB/month.  Simple math says that I can only run OnLive for 99.20 hours before I’ll hit my bandwidth cap for the month.   That breaks down to about 3.30 hours/day if you play every day in a 30 day month.

And this isn’t even running 1080p…just imagine how much bandwidth would be used to get the best picture quality!

Now let’s get down to the games and the actual game play experience with OnLive!  My experience playing games on the service has been mostly positive.  I tested Batman: Arkham Asylum, Just Cause 2, Unreal Tournament 3, Borderlands, MLB 2K10, NBA 2K10 and a handful of other games.  Right now, there aren’t a ton of games, however, some of the main blockbuster titles are on the service and as of this writing, OnLive has only been around for a month.

One quick side point about games, whenever you buy them, you don’t own them.  I know people go crazy about this, so I’ll put it out there now.   When you buy a game, you can play it as long as the game is available through OnLive AND you have an active subscription to the service.  Most games seem to be licensed through 2013, but if something happens where they aren’t allowed to be played after that date, you’ll lose access to the game.  Typically, I don’t play many games after 3 years, so it’s not a deal breaker for me.

Based on my experience with the service, if you are a competitive (or someone who enjoys playing online against other people) First Person Shooter gamer, the latency could be a problem for you.  I tested it with Unreal Tournament 3, and I just felt the latency…it wasn’t terrible, but it was somewhat annoying.  In the interest of being 100% open about my internet connection and because everything revolves around internet connection, here are my ping tests for my Comcast connection.

Other games that didn’t need such precision aiming were fine.  Borderlands, another shooter, played perfectly.  Sports games such as NBA 2K10 and MLB 2K10 also played without any latency.

In addition to actually buying and playing games, you also have the choice of playing a demo of the game, watching trailers, watching someone else play a game, playing with other people in multiplayer modes.  So there is a lot of flexibility with OnLive.  I even watched a trailer of the upcoming Harry Potter movie, just to see how the video quality was.  Looked good.

So is the service worth it?  It’s really a case by case basis.  First off, do you meet the requirements?  You’ll need to make sure your internet connection is fast enough and, depending on how much you plan on gaming, how much bandwidth do you have?  If you play games 8 hours a night and hit your bandwidth cap halfway through the month…you probably are going to be incurring charges from your internet provider or just lose internet.

OnLive requires the internet…there is NO offline playing.  As of right now, you also can’t play over a wireless connection; you need to be connected to your internet via an Ethernet cable.  Probably not a deal breaker here.  However, in the future they will be allowing wireless access.

Let’s also break down the cost:

The cost of OnLive gaming service for 4 years is $5 X 12 Months X 4 years  = $240 for four years of service (plus the cost of games).  While the average cost of gaming PC is around $500-1000.  I would even venture to say that this is on the low range.   So if you are looking to play some of the new top tier titles, but really don’t feel like forking out that much money for a new PC, this could really work perfectly for you.

Something else to consider, OnLive will, at some point, have a MicroConsole TV Adapter, which will allow you to play all these games on your TV…without a computer!  That’s right…no computer.  Hell…if your PC monitor has an HDMI connector, you don’t even need a TV…just hook it up straight to your monitor.  The MicroConsole TV Adapter also allows up to 4 controllers to be connected wirelessly.

Like I said earlier in the review, you really don’t need a high powered PC to take advantage of the service.  So if you were thinking of upgrading to a newer PC, you could just sign up for OnLive and use your current PC.

OnLive is still in its infancy stages, but growing and definitely showing promise.  On Demand “cloud based” gaming is definitely part of the gaming future, it’s just a matter of how fast it gets adopted.

For more information about OnLive, check out www.onlive.com.