I've heard a lot about this whole Onlive mumbo jumbo and while sorta interested, haven't given it much thought. Reactions that i've heard about the service have seemed mostly middling. Some better, some worse. From what i've gathered, it seems like cool tech but its not setting the world on fire. That's nothing new to anybody I'm sure.

Recently, however, my interest in the service went from "casual" to "hey I should give this a look". What precipitated this change? 40K, that's what. It's no secret that I'm a fan of the 40K universe but seeing as how I own a Mac mini, i've been forced to sit on the sidelines when it comes to the Dawn of War games. I was able to find a fan ported version of Dark Crusade, which I gleefully downloaded (I bought the game back when I had a PC and would have again but they don't like us Mac users over there in Vancouver. I'm not at all a fan of piracy but in this case I don't feel too bad.) But for Dawn of War 2, I've been kinda screwed.

Until now.

Onlive recently added the game to its roster so I decided, "what the heck, lets give this a shot". Signing up was a pretty painless experience, email, username, password, that's it, that's all, you've got yourself a trial account. Quick install of the Onlive program and done. RUN PROGRAM! (or should I say, application)

What happened next, I can only attribute to tech wizardry. A window popped up as does with most programs, a promo video started running, and boom. Menu screen. Searched for game. Selected. Run game. Game starts. Holy crap I'm playing DoW2 and it took all of five minutes from inception of idea to execution.

Magic.

I was so impressed, after the 20 minute trial period I fed my credit card into the system and $20 bones later, I'm playing the full version of Dawn of War 2 complete with Chaos Rising expansion (no Retribution as of yet).

To be fair, it's not a perfect experience, video options are pretty limited but to be honest with my weak sauce comp, it probably looks better then it would have installed. When the game is running in windowed mode it's a bit fuzzy but in full screen it looks great. The cursor feels a tad floaty and the text is kinda tiny. I wish I could monkey with some of that stuff. Also there's the whole "I don't actually OWN this game" thing that's sorta strange. Should they one day remove the game from the system, or the entire thing folds, I'm out $20, but I'm not too worried right now and considering I'm legally playing a game that wasn't made for my system and probably would run like crap on it anyway, I'm pretty stoked.

I've only played for about 45 minutes so this is an initial impression but I'm real impressed right now. I expected some serious lag but there's really none at all. I imagine if I was playing a FPS or racing game I may not be as happy with it but for an RTS, its great.

So yeah. Like I said, so far, Onlive seems like magic to me. If you'll excuse me there's some Orks that need to be boltered.