So I signed up for the first free year of OnLive because I was curious if it would work without lag and other delay based issues. I always intended to play through Trine after trying the demo a while back and when I got a free game for signing up with OnLive I decided to finally do just that. Trine has been out long enough now that I think most people are at least familiar with it. You play as three characters are magically merged together that you can switch between at will.  There is a wizard, thief and knight.  The wizard can create boxes, floating triangles and flat panels. The thief has a bow and the ability to use a grappling hook. The knight has a sword & shield as well as a massive war hammer and the ability to pick up and throw items. The game itself is a platformer where you have to use the three characters abilities to traverse the levels and puzzles. The game is a lot of fun and while a few of the jumping based puzzles were a bit frustrating (for me) at times there are plenty of checkpoints that you don’t have to redo major portions of levels very often. If you have not played Trine I would recommend checking it out. It is really fun even and nicely made.

One of the main reason I chose to play Trine via OnLive is because it supports using the Xbox 360 controller.  Actually, I believe that every game on OnLive supports using the controller.  I play a lot more console games so I’m far more comfortable gaming with a controller than with mouse and keyboard. I probably could have made it through without the controller because I played the demo that way, but once I started using the controller there was no going back.  Trine 2 has been announced already and if it is not on Xbox Live Arcade I’ll probably not play it until I get confirmation that the PC version supports a controller.

The OnLive interface it pretty nicely made.  The main screen that loads has quick links to the main categories. It is quick and responsive to navigate once it starts up but the actual start-up takes a few seconds. For the most part I did not notice any input lag in playing Trine.  I need to play the demo for something like BFBC2 to see if there is input lag there but for the single player games I’ve tried there has been no issue.  However, there have been multiple times where the graphics get all blocky because of a “network issue”.  90% of the time the graphics look great but occasionally, and seemingly randomly, a little network warning would appear in the lower right corner and the graphics would get all choppy.  Sometimes even without the warning the game would suddenly pause for a second and then restart with my character moved a few steps to the side. Those were mostly minor annoyances, but twice I could not even get the game to start because of network issues. Every time I immediately did a network test and it was always fine so I’m assuming the network issues and errors were on there end. Hopefully those types of things will get sorted out in the coming months.

OnLive’s list of games is not very big yet but the titles they do have are pretty big ones.  I assume they have more games lined up that they will be adding.  The main issue is not really the small game list as much as the pricing.  With Steam regularly having 50 to 75% off sales it is hard to see how OnLive can compete without having similar sales.

One feature I find interesting in OnLive is their Arena. Basically anyone playing a game via OnLive you can go into the Arena and see their game live as the play it.  You can spectate and watch them play and give them a thumbs up/down.  More than once people joined my Trine game to watch for a while.  Frankly, I don’t see why people would watch someone they don’t know play a game other than to see if the game looks fun or interesting. However, for people interested in that the Arena did work smoothly when I tried it.

So, while OnLive has been out only a short time I can see it doing pretty well if they can continue to improve their infrastructure, put games on sale and add to their catalog. I don’t see it replacing Steam or consoles for me but it is a nice additional way to game since I like using a controller.