OnLive: It actually works!

Hey guys!

First of all, sorry for being late on the posts, been really busy lately. Had a business trip and was away for 6 days. But, now I am back and starting the daily posts again!

Alright, so something I tried last week was OnLive. Those who don't know, OnLive is a web service, where the games are streamed on remote machines by OnLive and you can play those almost lag-free. So all the computing and graphics is done at OnLive HQ. That means that your computer does not have to be powerful to play latest games, so a netbook is okay, and they even have a iPad app.

The biggest concern what I had with it was the lag. I heard that the nearest HQ to me would be in UK (I am in Finland), so I was bit worried of the lag. But surprisingly, the lag was not a issue! Sure, there is a slight input lag, but otherwise, I played it for several hours and got no serious lag.

There are couple of things I like about the service. One of them is that you can "demo" almost all of the games. What this means is that you can play 30 minutes of the game (the real deal!). In 30 minutes you get a pretty good view of the game in my opinion. Also what I like is the Arena. There, you can jump in on anybody playing a game on the service and almost instantly can start streaming. Awesome!

The resolution of all games is 720p, which is not that good honestly. Also the stream is a bit compressed, so you get some artifacts.

In the end, I would recommend this service to anybody not that serious to gaming. You can play some fun games here and there and you don't need the latest machine for that. But don't play competitively on this service, oh no.

Anybody got experience on this service?