Last week I got an invitation to OnLive cloud based gaming service. Today I finally had time to check it out.
OnLive is giving “founding members” a free 12-month subscription to the service, so I decided to give it a go.
I’ve been quite skeptical of the service prior to its launch thinking it can’t possibly work with the lag introduced by having to connect to their servers over the Internet.
I was wrong.
My initial impressions of the service are very positive. The user interface is easy to use and it’s quick. Spectating other users’ games is really cool. All the games can be played for free for 30 minutes. The service has friends lists, achievements and brag clips (I assume video captures of your “greatest moments”.
The only negative thing I could say about the service is that my old gaming laptop is showing its age. It froze for a few seconds at a time multiple times. It felt like the CPU was getting overstressed. That’s not really the service’s fault, however.
I did not test a multiplayer game yet, but the single-player game demos I played worked flawlessly.
This thing is gonna be big.
-TPP
