I just received my invitation to join the OnLive founding program. This means one year free of the service, which includes many thirty minute demos. Beyond this, I can pay either $3 or $5 for a few days of playing the game, or standard price to buy the game. More on this in a minute.

For my first game I played Batman: Arkham Asylum. The controls were a milisecond behind the usual game, and the video was restrained to 720p, but THE SYSTEM WORKED. I got to demo Batman for free for thirty minutes. Oh wait. You can do that here indefinitely. Hmmmm.

For now, the games that they have include Assassins Creed II, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Borderlands, Dirt 2, Dragon Age: Origin, Just Cause 2, Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4, Mass Effect 2, NBA 2K10, Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell: Conviction. Future games include Alpha Protocol, FEAR 3, Dawn of Warr II: Chaos Rising, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Kane & Lynch 2, Homefront, Two Worlds 2, Driver, Dark Void, Red Faction: Armageddon, Metro 2033, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Darksiders. Souns like a good future line-up. Out of all of these, I know I'd like to try FEAR 3, Homefront, Metro 2033, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. To think that I could play each of these games for about $20 instead of $200 is pretty sweet.

Well, for the games that DON'T have demos, being a founder of OnLive works well. Being able to rent PC games for a few bucks--like most console owners have always been able to do thanks to Blockbuster or GameFly--is pretty damn sweet. For that one reason alone, it's about damn time.

What really sucks about OnLive is their business model. Not only do you have to pay for the games you rent or buy, but you must also pay for a subscription on top of that. The first year's subscription is free, after all, so that's not a big deal... for now. But the huge problem is the method by which you purchase games through OnLive. Once your subscription is up, you can't play the game that you purchased anymore. I'm not talking about the games you rent for a few games; I'm talking about the games that you pay $50 to "buy." So you can never really buy a game and own it outside of OnLive. Or another way of saying it is that to buy a game from OnLive, you must pay $50 plus the subscription price * every month you want to play your game. Yikes.