OnLive made a string of announcements recently that should excite Mac gamers. We've written about the cloud-gaming service before, and love the way it streams high-def, low-latency video games directly to your Mac -- or even right to your TV through the MicroConsole adapter. The games themselves run on powerful computers in OnLive's server farms, letting you ignore hardware requirements and even play games only available for the PC on your Mac.
Recently, OnLive announced the PlayPack Bundle, which is a group of games you can play as much as you like for a flat rate of $9.99 per month. Games not in the PlayPack require you to buy a PlayPass for each game, which can be a three-day or five-day "rental" or a permanent purchase. But the PlayPack is a growing list of "back catalog" games that you can play as much as you like, whenever. As of this writing it's got 53 games, including the newest addition, Borderlands. (We reviewed Borderlands on the Mac here.) Think of the PlayPack Bundle like Netflix Instant Watch for games -- there's a free trial, and it's all-you-can-play, plus, if you ever cancel, you can resume later and they will have kept all your game saves intact. Not too shabby.
But the other cool OnLive news that has us salivating is the announcement that Duke Nukem Forever, the long-awaited sequel to Duke Nukem 3D, which has been in development since (no joke) 1997, will be hitting OnLive on launch day: June 14, 2011. It'll go live right at midnight (9pm on June 13 for us on the West Coast), so you can just fire up your Mac or MicroConsole and start playing without having to elbow fanboys out of the way at your local games store.
And if you preorder your full PlayPass for Duke Nukem Forever, OnLive will hook you up with the MicroConsole (which we reviewed here; it normally retails for $99) for free. The full PlayPass is currently $44.99, a 10 percent savings, and it's a permanent one -- you can play Duke Nukem Forever, well...forever. (The game won't be part of the PlayPack Bundle, in other words, at least not right away.)
Since every gamer who's been around the block since the '90s has wanted to shoot up the world as rabble-rousing Duke Nukem since, oh, 1996 or so, this is big. Duke Nukem 3D was available for the Mac OS, but no Mac version of Forever has since been announced (please correct me if I'm wrong), so as far as I can tell, OnLive is your big chance to play this on your computer of choice (cough, cough, Mac) right on launch day. Just thought you might wanna know.
