OnLive giving 30% discount on all games and rentals for the Fourth

@Grubasaurus Rex
My Xbox does deals all of the time= My Xbox deals cocaine on the streets every Thursday near Jackson Elementary.

It also lets me buy full games without having to get off the couch=I'm to lazy to find a Bestbuy or Gamestop that sells the game for half the price.

Heres the kicker... It puts them on my hard drive, so if I'm not connected to the internet I can still play them = I can't think of a better way to fill up my 20gb HD, so I'll buy Lego Star Wars again.

Honestly Rex, if you think PC's are inferior to Xboxs' ability to play games without an internet connection you are seriously mistaken... except Ubisoft.

@Special Agent Steve I never once stated that PC's are inferior. They are obviously better then any gaming console, but this service is a joke.

I got into the beta by saying I had a 8mb connection, because I forgot I switched when I moved.

I can't run it on dsl. :(

@Special Agent Steve: Where would we be without you, champion of PC gaming? You are my light and my way.

@Grubasaurus Rex
I agree OnLive is a complete joke, but consoles are not inferior :P

Now lets go in circles!!!

But seriously. Consoles are awesome. PC is good too, but awww those console games

@Grubasaurus Rex Steam has better deal.

@Kyammi Oh I agree. I have a 360 and I love it to death. I can't play a game with a mouse or a keyboard, and gaming PC's are expensive. It's all about quality. The more money you put into a PC, the better the game is going to look and play. Consoles are great for people who don't want to drop a lot of money on a PC, but like the fact that every game made for it will work.

@Grubasaurus Rex you are not the audience looking for this...

@STiger
Well, imagine playing Crysis through a tethered phone on a netbook in some cab in New York City. That would be sick. I prefer Steam, of course, but OnLive is a pretty solid service.

@Special Agent Steve

Good luck getting the required 5Mbps connection on your 3G. I'd be surprised if Sprint's 4G could even sustain that. Besides, the lag on any wireless technology can be pretty rough.

@Special Agent Steve
I have OnLive - I was one of the people that signed up as interested 2+ years ago, so I got a free year and a free game.

Your cab idea is what I thought of when I was originally interested, however the reality is much worse.

They don't even allow you to connect via WIFI on your laptop!! If you try and launch the client on WIFI, the client detects you are using a WIFI adapter, and cuts you off. Needless to say I haven't played it much, since I use WIFI (N, mind you) for everything. Cables are a pain in the ass.

@Special Agent Steve Dude, OnLive is terrible. It's like you know nothing about how it works.

@ebob9 The onlive service does work on Wifi you just have to Bridge the connection, works great on my acer netbook, and my 'gaming' computer upstiars on 802.11G, works great on my wired P4 3.0ghz Htpc box

does NOT work on my work computer which is a dell w/ onboard gfx.. :(

Hope This helps,
sean

@The Tim
I've used it in "real life", it's... OK. The navigation's a little funky and getting a game to start can be tricky. Otherwise it works as advertised, as long as you have a good connection you can play whatever you want on any capable computer.

@The Tim
I've tried onlive and read many accounts of experiences and from what I can gather the only way to know if you will like it is to try it yourself.
There are many varying opinions on lag and quality, while some people say they don't notice the lag or quality difference at all, there are others that cannot stand it.
I think it is just a very subjective thing. For instance, I am bothered by poorly compressed mp3 music while other people do not seem to notice. Not everyone's ears and eyes are created equal. While it is a proven fact that Onlive's streaming videos are compressed, it will depend on how you perceive them whether or not it is unacceptable.
Input lag is also variable among opinions. One thing this has to do with is how far away from their servers you are. The further away, the more your lag.

While both lag and quality bothered me to the point I wouldn't buy games on the service, the one thing I found really great was the ability to instantly play game demos.
I played every demo they had in a few hours sitting because I didn't have to download/install/uninstall anything. Just click and play instant. In turn this led me to trying out games I haven't before and buying them on Steam.
So for me it offers a great demo service but not much else. You'll have to try for yourself to really tell though.

I highly doubt they're sending you sixty individual frames per second at any given time. If that were the case (or even possible through their service), people wouldn't be having such problems with racing games and twitchy FPS's.

I'm curious how you came to the 60fps number. Does their service tell you it's sending at 60fps, or do you mean that the game runs on their servers at 60fps (before it ever sends data to you)?

@BananaBoat

It's likely rendered in 60 fps, but as for what the video is, who knows. I seriously doubt it's 60 fps in HD, though.

This whole OnLive thing is a fantastic way to suck up your money. I'd be very surprised if it survived more than a few years. Even if it did, I think most core gamers won't be happy with the lag or video quality that they're paying so much money for.

@BananaBoat
I know what 60fps looks like. I don't need a frame counter to know I'm seeing 60fps. Some do. Perhaps you do. I know that I do not have a problem knowing I'm watching 60+fps. I know that Batman on OnLive versus Batman on my Xbox 360 (which I've played side-by-side for fun) look quite different, as the 360 version shutters at a solid 30 like a flickering move and the OnLive version slides along like a live video broadcast.

I wish you could see it because it's rather unbelievable.

@postpwn -

I'm not judging your eyes; I'm just saying that 60fps high-def video (assuming that you are playing in HD) requires a very large amount of bandwidth. I'm doubtful that OnLive is capable of or willing to send each individual subscriber a 60fps high def stream. If you are playing in a lower definition though, that would make sense.

I played AA on the 360 as well, and I didn't encounter any of the problems you had. Action/adventure/stealth games require fewer frames per second than racing games or intense first person shooters. Most will notice drooping frame rates in either of those genres long before they do in a title like AA.

I don't have OnLive on hand, so I can't test it. The general consensus among journalists right now seems to be that the service isn't quite what it was cracked up to be though. Given the bad press, and the generally negative reaction of gamers, it is difficult to see how OnLive will survive as a company once their initial round of investments dry up (although the e-mail I received asking if I wanted to be in the beta was sponsored by AT&T....)

@BananaBoat

You're just judging their service and potentials, yes, instead of their eyes; there is no point arguing any of this if you don't have the data. Although, I have no idea how many frames they send you anyway. As far as I know, the quality dips as your connection does, but before I ever notice any video hiccup, I see blurry first. And actually, I've never experienced a video hiccup, but Borderlands did NOT feel like 60FPS when I played it. More around 30 or so.

But I'd agree with journalists that it isn't the end-all, be-all service yet, but I wouldn't fault the technology as much as the risky business model and lack of a strong library.

Depending on how much compression is used, I doubt there are very many people in the US that could stream 720p at 60 frames a second (definitely not 1080p). 30 is a reasonable target, and I'd be surprised if that wasn't their goal for most if not all of their games.

Your experiences line up with everything I'm hearing though. Blurry, muddy, and laggy, with a side of nausea (reported by people that have never been nauseous from gaming in their lives).

I still say this services only chance at survival is being picked up by an AT&T, Comcast, or Verizon, and positioned at every major node. If I could tack twenty dollars onto my cable/internet bill every month for all access PC gaming, I'd definitely be tempted. The key word there is all access though, and the "pay us a subscription, then pay us for rentals, and you lose all your games if you unsubscribe" model seems like it was destined for failure in the first place.

@postpwn

Yea it can be 60fps, and it's able to do that in 'HD' because of the incredible layers of compression (that make the image quality horrible).

It looks like a JPEG saved in MS Paint 50 times.

If that's good enough for you, enjoy. Probably should get your eyes checked though.

@BananaBoat

Don't assume you know what my experiences are. I said that when connection problems occur, that's what all happens. The majority of the time I've had clear picture and relatively small input lag in my overall experience, and bugs have never occurred. Also I don't understand the nausea, so I find that odd.

I want to see how Gaikai turns out though. They will be the competition OnLive needs, and they'll either help keep the two in a competition to stay on their toes, or one will die off and the other will succeed, or consumers will realize cloud computing isn't for everyone and it will become niche or just die off until better networking technology exists.

@BananaBoat
Just ran OnLive with ATI Tray Tools open (using the frame counter) and it's a solid 60 frames (goes from 57-61). It's amazing.

@EatMoreBread Definitely 60 without a doubt as my ATI Tray Tools frame counter has just showed me.

@Kyammi Well, my video quality is definitely not compressed in that manner; my picture does not look like a crappy jpeg. Games look like they're running off my hard drive. This could be because I'm within 250 miles of the Los Angeles server and I have a 10 megabit connection.

It really sucks to hear that people are getting terrible compression because I see BARELY any whatsoever. I'd equate it to what an HD video over Netflix Streaming looks like (in that I'll see the occasional few blocks of compression, if that).

@EatMoreBread
If I choose to pay the monthly fee to OnLive, in two years I will have paid a total of $60 in monthly fees. I can't build a gaming PC for $60.

@pstpwn

He said in the long run. 2 years isn't that long of a run. Building a good gaming PC will last you at least 4-5 years. In that time you would have paid $420 to $600 for OnLive. You can certainly build a good gaming PC for that price and you will actually get to keep the games.

@Grey

No. To build good gaming computer that will last 4 - 5 years you cannot spend less than $1000.

I've built four machines in the last few days ranging from $818 - $1477, and there's absolutely no way the $800 machines I assembled will last that long.

OnLive, much to my disbelief, is proving to be a fair investment if you live within the service range.

@Grey

This PC argument needs to stop, because it is purely a subjective discussion.

Some people are content running games in 800x600 or anything less than even 1240x1024. Those people will not need super upgrades for gaming because they will not have the CPU and GPU load from the lower resolutions and no AA and will probably not care about max settings (turn of shadows people). Some people don't even mind 20-30FPS and don't need 60FPS at least to play, so they can turn the settings up. Some may not even care about the new DirectX 11, so they can go with an HD 4890 which is a great price for it's performance outside of DX11.

Then you have the enthusiasts or higher end gamers, who will need much more powerful and modern hardware so they can get the most out of their games. They may not try to hit 1920x1080, but they still want max settings running relatively smoothly without any drops. And if their card doesn't do that anymore, they're going to the next one.

So, if you are content with less graphical fidelity, yeah, PC's are cheaper. But if you can't stand anything less than 1080p and need your parallax maps, SSAO, and dynamic soft shadows, you will need expensive hardware, particularly CPU/GPU.

@Khaiz

graphics quality have been stagnant for at least 5 years (or since XBOX 360 came out). I don't think PC's will be pushing graphics for a long time since consoles dominate the market. Meaning most games are console ports, so they have to be able to run off of that old hardware. I see another 5 years of this exact graphic setting. At least until then next consoles come out then the graphics improve.

Sorry if that didn't make any sense, I just woke up.

@dooms33ker Yeah, that sounds just about right. I'm hovering mostly at exactly 60 and dipping every now and then to 40ish (this is according to the ATI Tray Tools frame counter).