OnLive Review

OnLive is a cloud-based gaming system that has been live in America for some time, and only just recently joined the European market, especially the UK and Belgium. Because of that they had a massively marketed booth in Eurogamer Expo and I had the chance to have a chat with one of their CEO's.

Cloud-gaming is much like streaming your games. The games are running on hardware somewhere else, and you simply play the game "on the cloud". It's actually a quite natural step in today's digital world. Where we used to have everything located on our personal computer, much of our info nowadays is already on the cloud. Think of Twitter for example, and Apple's latest belated iCloud.
Streaming games might seem odd but it has a few inherently powerful benefits. The most important one is that since the games are running on different hardware, you can actually run near any game whatever specs your computer has. "If you can run Youtube videos, you will be able to run our games" I was told during the private interview.
OnLive is also a cross platform console, so it can be played on your TV (although it will need a USB port), your PC, laptop, Mac, but even your iPad. During the developer session in Eurogamer Expo we saw an example of From Dust, running on an iPad almost as if the game was made just for that application. Smooth and fluently.

Of course the downside of the games running on the server's hardware, is naturally that the quality of your game becomes inherently tied to your broadband infrastructure. If your network cannot cope you'll be inevitably witnessing huge latency. For that reason OnLive will work on a PC, but if you have decent hardware then I strongly suggest you stick to a traditional way of playing.
If you're a hardcore gamer or you're into e-sports, then it will matter even more, since you will never be able to beat the response-time you would have normally, than with OnLive.

It's still an amazing console, so small and lightweight you could easily take it with you when you travel, and as it's cross-platform it makes it an even more practical device.

Cloudgaming is definitely the future of gaming, but the jury is still out on its verdict on OnLive. But since OnLive is heavily marketing its release in the UK with promotions and great deals, I heartily recommend any gamer be it hardcore or casual, to pick this up. Perhaps even more so if you are the latter, since it is so accessable.