This week, folks looking forward to Mafia II can pre-order the game on the PS3 for $49.90 while those that missed out on Alan Wake can snag the Xbox 360 thriller for only $29 bucks. Also, PC gamers can pick up BioWare’s Mass Effect 2 for the ridiculous low price of $16.90 while wanna-be spies can sneak into the world of Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell: Conviction for $27.90. Lastly, Madden fans will soon get their chance to square off on the virtual gridiron and GoGamer.com’s punching your sideline seat for Madden NFL 11 with about a $7 savings off the regular retails price.

So, check out all of this week’s 48-Hour Madness sales and pre-order pricing specials right here and see if there’s anything you like.

Happy shopping!

The benefits of OnLive are many, none more so than for Mac users. For Mac fans worldwide, this is nothing short of epic. It gives the (previously relegated to second-class) Mac gamer the ability to play games that they never could before. That is a big deal. No, this is a VERY big deal…But there are many benefits for everyone, not just Mac users. For starters, there will no longer be a need to update your hardware to keep up with the times. You can play on virtually any computer (desktops, laptops, your friend’s, the hotel’s) without any kind of extreme graphics card or processor. Additionally, since it uses very little of your processor, you can do things in the background while you game. I encoded a movie and copied data to an external hard drive while playing Borderlands, something I could not have done if I was gaming locally. And if your computer completely crashes, no worries, you will not lose any saved data nor will you need to reload and re-patch every game you own, it will all be waiting for you when you reboot and reload the 8MB OnLive app. In fact, there is no patching at all – they do all that for you.

In addition to those benefits, the service offers an Arena where you can watch anyone play a game, a friends list functionality, and Brag Clips, which allows you to record the last ten seconds of your game in case you do something particularly cool. OnLive also offers demos of many of the games, though not all. But don’t be fooled by the word “demo”. What it really means is that you can play the first 30 minutes of the game. These two things are quite different, as I found out when I went to play the “demo” of Assassin’s Creed 2. As I said, it was actually the first 30 minutes of the game and, if you recall, the first 30 minutes of AC2 is Desmond running around in the present time. It really gives you no sense of what the game will be like at all. Until I had this experience with OnLive, it had never occurred to me how crafted the demos that we receive for games really are and I now have a whole new respect for them. So when you see “demo” on OnLive, take it with a grain of salt.

Those are all possible benefits of OnLive, but…

The first, and most important, requirement that must be fulfilled in order to reap the benefits listed above is for the service to work – and to work as well as playing the game locally. For me, it doesn’t – not yet. With all of the talk of OnLive over the last year, I have been made hyper-aware of the bandwidth requirements for the service – 5Mb/sec. Well I have Comcast cable and I average 20Mb/sec downstream and 4.5Mb/sec upstream. I was initially concerned that having only 4.5Mb/sec upstream wouldn’t be enough to run the service effectively, given the 5Mb/sec requirement that has been touted as the magic number. When I asked the folks at the E3 booth about it they said that 4.5Mb was way more than enough for an upstream number and that with 20Mb/sec down, I was ready to rock! Sweeeeet! Or so I thought.

There was another number to consider, and it was the one that really caused the issue for me. It was a number that I had never heard mentioned before in all of the information put out by OnLive – latency. When I fired up OnLive for the first time (which required a tiny download and was quite simple – after I turned off Norton), the OnLive application said that I had latency issues that would effect my experience. Well, it was right. So I dug through the OnLive website and read that anything over 25ms of latency would cause service interruptions. So I went to Speedtest.net to test it. My latency (ping on Speedtest.net) repeatedly came back as 16ms, well below their requirements. So why was OnLive lagging? After a while I realized that had been pinging a server in my own city, Denver. So I switched my server to San Francisco (where I know one of OnLive’s main cloud servers is located) and – voila! – 60ms of latency. I then tried Albuquerque (for no particular reason) – 104ms. So, therein lies the problem: latency caused by distance. Once there is a server closer to me, I should be good to go and, I would imagine, people in San Francisco are probably getting great performance from OnLive right now, but alas – not me. Don’t get me wrong, the games are playable, but they feel twitchy because of the lag. And I simply won’t pay for a game (and certainly not full price – but more on that later) that doesn’t play properly.

Other facts of note are that, currently, OnLive can’t be used over Wi-Fi (which is half the reason I would want it), and that it tops out at 1280×720 (720p) resolution. The Wi-Fi issue is a biggie for me, as Wireless-N allows me to get the same speeds on my laptop as on my desktop, and playing games like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Splinter Cell: Conviction on my laptop (which I currently can’t) is a big part of the draw towards the service. In their defense, however, on their Technical FAQ page OnLive has stated that the feature would become available at a later date, once the service has stabilized. Likewise, they have said that, when bandwidth allows, the games will be made available in resolutions up to 1920×1080 (1080p).

Ok, so what about pricing? Game prices are set by the publishers, as I was reminded multiple times at E3, but they seem to match dollar for dollar (or worse in some cases) with the market value. Borderlands is $29.99 on OnLive, yet it is $27.99 for the PC version and $36.99 for the console versions on Amazon. Assassin’s Creed 2 is $39.99 on OnLive while it retails for only $24.99 for the PS3 and Xbox version and $34.79 for the PC version on Amazon. In both cases it is cheaper to by the PC version of the game, which is currently the only way to play OnLive, and if you bought the retail version, you would actually own it.

That’s right, when you buy the games from OnLive, you don’t actually own them – you own them as long as you are a member of OnLive and the company supports them. How long will they support them? The website says they will support them as long as people are playing them, but for a minimum of three years. But what if you had to stop your service for some reason, wouldn’t you lose all of your games? Yes – but, OnLive has stated that you can suspend your account for up to 12 months and not lose your games or saved data. But once you discontinue your service, your games are gone. For me, three years is likely enough time to enjoy my games, but I totally get why some people might not like this fact. Likewise, I understand why OnLive isn’t sending digital copies of games to everyone who discontinues service with them – that’s simply not realistic. What I would like to see, though, is an adjustment in pricing for a game that I don’t actually own. The prices should stay, at least, slightly below retail value. But again, that is set by the publisher, not OnLive.

Pricing for the service itself is nebulous. For people who sign up now it is free for a year, and then $4.95/month for the second year. After that, the website says “At the end of the second twelve (12) month term, any renewal will be at the going membership rate for the Service at such time. These rates are not available yet, but will be made available at least thirty (30) days prior to the expiration of the second (12) month offer of $4.95/month.” So really we don’t know how much it will eventually cost. But, honestly, we don’t know what the service will be offering by then either. So it is hard to judge its potential value. For right now, the service is priced appropriately – free.

While this may all sound like gloom and doom, it isn’t. I still remain quite optimistic for the service, long-term. I think the folks at OnLive are merely trying to get ahead of the curve so that when bandwidth catches up to them (2-3 years from now?), they will have all of their infrastructure in place and are ready to rock. What I don’t get is why they haven’t been a bit more straight forward about all of this. All they had to say is “Look, this is technology in its infancy. We are getting it up and running now, but for many (read: most) people it won’t perform optimally for another (insert time frame here)”. By getting to market ahead of the competition OnLive is really establishing their brand, which can be a very smart thing. But they want to be careful to not associate their brand with disappointment. To do that, they need to manage expectations. They should be very careful that the user perception is in line with what they are able to deliver today. Users will understand if OnLive needs time to work this technology out. What they won’t understand is if they are told the service does something and it doesn’t – which is currently the case. Still, I am excited to see what the next few years brings in cloud gaming in general and OnLive in particular. How about you?

The Insurgency Pack DLC is slated for virtual release on Thursday, May 27. So, who plans on picking it up???

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So does this make up for the fact that Ubisoft put the world’s worst DRM onto Assassin’s Creed 2 for the PC? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

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@ubisoft doin thingz proper…been sittn playn splinter cell for like 5 hours…

Damn! I didn’t know Snoop spent five straight hours doing ANYTHING! Well, I guess I can think of a few things, but I guess playing Splinter Cell wasn’t one of them.

Anyway, how do YOU feel about SC:C? We’ve just posted our uREVIEW of the game so you can let your voice be heard (and that includes you Snoop!).

FACTS:

Publisher: Ubisoft Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Genre(s): Action, Adventure
Players: 2
ESRB Rating: M (Mature)
Release Date: April 13, 2010
Platforms: Xbox 360, PC
Official Website

GAME SUMMARY:

IMPROVISE. ADAPT. OVERCOME. You are a fugitive, ruthlessly hunted by the very government you used to serve. Your only choice is to improvise to survive. Experience original gameplay based on improvisation in which your environment is your top weapon. Always on your toes, you need to react on the fly to any changing situations and use the environment and the crowds around you to create diversions and deter your enemies. As a fugitive, quick thinking and adaptation are essential to turn the situation to your advantage. A gameplay experience delivering 100% adrenaline includes close combat and shooting sequences. To survive, build an underground network of allies who will help you obtain high-tech gadgets and stay one step ahead of your pursuers as you struggle to unmask the forces that frame you. You’ve never played Splinter Cell like this before. [Ubisoft]

NOTE: BEFORE CONTRIBUTING TO THIS EpicBattleAxe.com uREVIEW, PLEASE READ THE SUBMISSION GUIDE RIGHT HERE. All comments/ratings not within the guidelines WILL BE DELETED. Thank you.

So, like Dtoid before us, we’d like to issue props to Ubisoft for handling this in a pretty damn cool way. Discounting the special edition, ensuring the additional content gets to fans, communicating with the masses…Nice! Crap happens, it’s how you DEAL with it that matters…Now, about that DRM issue…

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