After spending nearly a year in the U.S. with people going crazy for the cloud gaming experience, the OnLive game system went live in the UK last night and was the highlight of EuroGamer today. The line of people wanting to register for OnLive and pickup their free OnLive game system did not stop all day, and stretched around the show floor most of the day.

We know everyone loves something for free, the hardware in this case and your first game for one pound, there had to be more to this new cloud gaming service and after giving it some hands-on time, we could see why.

Some of the games had cartoon like graphics but others, especially the racing games, had really crisp and impressive lag free graphics. The on-demand video game service will stream some of the latest games to your HDTV via a small OnLive box, which looks professional and comes with a smart game controller to match.

Look out for our first impressions and hands-on review over the coming days; remember to join our Facebook and Twitter pages for the latest updates. “OnLive will change everything,” said Brian Jaquet, OnLive’s Director of Corporate Communications, and we think he’s right on the money there. Find out more at onlive.co.uk.

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The hands-on video comes to you courtesy of Engadget, who managed to spent some decent time on Gaikai, sampling a demo of popular shooter Mass Effect 2, as well as quizzing Gaikai chief Dave Perry on the key benefits on the service.

To put it in a nutshell, Gaikai will be free to gamers, and instead of offering full games for a fee, Gaikai will provide an advertisement of a selected game, which will then offer gamers the chance to play a demo of it – depending on your internet connection.

Engadget used an ‘up-to’ 18 megabit AT&T U-Verse internet connection to test the service, and they claim that they were able to produce 10-15 megabits of download bandwidth, and a latency of between 25 and 35 milliseconds when playing Mass Effect 2. As for resolution, they state that they managed to hit close to 720p, which is pretty impressive, especially if you are trying Gaikai out on a low-spec computer.

They do pick up on moments of lag and mouse precision not being perfect, but overall it looks like they were satisfied with what Gaikai brings to the table. The whole idea here is to offer gamers the chance to play demos straight away before they buy it, on any computer without having to spend the time downloading files, since the games will be hosted via Gaikai’s servers.

Check out the video demo below and let us know your initial impressions of Gaikai. Is this something you would like to try out? The service is due for a public release sometime this month.

More About: Cloud Gaming, gaikai, Mass Effect 2

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