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High-end gaming on just about any PC or Mac, all streamed to your system through a tiny desktop client? That’s the promise of OnLive, a remarkable but controversial new “in the cloud” gaming service that launched this month. I’ve been playing big-name titles like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Unreal Tournament III and Red Faction: Guerrilla on my middle-of-the road MacBook Pro for almost a week now and have some hands-on impressions.

I’ve been pretty jazzed about the idea behind OnLive ever since the service was first announced more than a year ago. The concept is ambitious. Using a backbone of server farms spread across the country, all armed with banks of ultra high-end gaming PCs, OnLive aims to stream the hottest PC games straight to your desktop or laptop, even on systems without souped-up graphics cards or bleeding-edge processors.

All you need on your system, in fact, is a client smaller than 10MB that streams video and audio to your desktop — think of it as playing high-end PC games remotely over YouTube — as well as a decent broadband connection (at least 5Mbps or so). A “micro-console” about the size of a paperback book will let you play OnLive over your HDTV; it’s due later this year.

Of course, the question hard-core gamers have been asking is: How in the world will OnLive be able to pull all that off? What about latency — won’t precise running-and-gunning be impossible if there’s, say, a one-second lag between the time you click your mouse and your game character pulls the trigger? And how could the sterling graphics on a top-of-the-line gaming PC possibly survive the compression involved in streaming video over the Internet?

I’ve been testing out OnLive on a 2007-era, Intel Core Duo 2-packing MacBook Pro with a midrange graphics card for a little over a week now. And no, the experience is not like what you’d get from a hot-rod gaming system sitting on your desk. But to my eyes and ears — not to mention my itchy trigger finger — it comes surprisingly close.

For now, access to OnLive is by invite only. But you can sign up as a “founding member,” and if you do so before July 15, you won’t have to pay the usual $15-a-month access fee for your first full year of membership. You’ll also get the option of a second year for just $5 a month.

Installing the small OnLive client — just 8.5MB for my Mac — took seconds, with the service firing up almost immediately after a quick check of my MacBook’s specs. (A dual-core CPU and screen resolution of at least 1280 by 720 is recommended.) There is one annoying catch to using OnLive: You must use a wired broadband connection — although OnLive says the no-Wi-Fi restriction may be lifted once the service is “better established.”

Once you’ve fired up the desktop client, a window pops open and the OnLive logo appears, accompanied by an unworldly hum and some cool-sounding swooshes and techno beats. Next, a globe twirls into view, eventually zooming into a grid of nine main menu options, surrounded by a frame of windows showing live “look-ins” to games in progress. Cool.

After you’ve created a profile, you can jump right into the Marketplace of available games, which unfortunately is somewhat limited for now. Among the 20-odd titles are the ones I mentioned above, plus Assassin’s Creed II, Borderlands, Dirt 2, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, Just Cause 2, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction. Some casual games are also available, such as Brain Challenge, Lego Harry Potter and World of Goo. Titles on tap include Darksiders, F.E.A.R. 3, Warhammer 30000: Dawn of War, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Red Faction: Armageddon.

Prices range anywhere from zilch for a 30-minute demo to $59 for a full “Play Pass,” which entitles you to play a given game for as long as it remains available through OnLive. (The full Play Pass for some older titles is often cheaper; last year’s Red Faction, for example, is just $19 for the full pass.)

These “full” passes have, naturally enough, sparked an uproar among gamers, who wonder why in the world you’d pay full price for a title that might disappear from the OnLive servers — and indeed, if and when you drop your OnLive subscription, you’ll lose access to your full Play Pass games as well. It’s a fair question, and anyone who signs up with OnLive should consider those restrictions carefully before coughing up $60 for Prince of Persia.

Luckily, between the free demos and pricey “full” options lie some cheaper alternatives. For games such as Batman: Arkham Asylum and Unreal Tournament III, you can opt for a three-day pass ($4.99) or a five-day pass ($6.99), a handy option for those who aren’t necessarily interested in owning a game once they’ve beaten it. (Personally, I loved the Xbox 360 version of Arkham Asylum for the week it took me to finish it, but once I’d beaten the game, I sent it back to my Gamefly rental service without regret.) You can always extend a Play Pass if you want to keep fragging — and yes, your game saves will be preserved even after you let your Play Pass expire.

Besides the marketplace, OnLive also offers something called the Arena: a virtual peanut gallery that lets you watch in-progress games of other OnLive players, and you can even “jeer” or “cheer” their performance. You can also add and message with your OnLive “friends,” or shoot and upload “Brag Clips” of your greatest kills.

As far as how these games look and play, streamed over the Internet: That depends on your expectations and needs.

If you have a high-end gaming PC at home, you’re going to be disappointed by OnLive’s graphics performance, no question. Overall, OnLive’s visuals look a bit soft, and blocky, murky compression artifacts are clearly visible during moments of intense action like a huge explosion or bad guys swarming on-screen.

Looked at from the perspective of a mid- to low-end system, though, OnLive’s visual performance is a revelation. I’ve tried installing cutting-edge games on my 3-year-old MacBook Pro before, and I’ve consistently had to dial down the graphics to get anything approaching decent gaming performance. But with OnLive on my MacBook, I managed to get some pretty stellar-looking graphics with speedy, jitter-free frame rates. Batman: Arkham Asylum, Red Faction: Guerrilla, F.E.A.R. 2 and Dirt 2 looked far better on my aging MacBook than I ever would have imagined, making the occasional compression artifacts more than acceptable to my eyes. I even tried Red Faction on my super-light but graphically wimpy MacBook Air, which is most definitely not a gaming machine. Again, the graphics looked far better than I would ever have expected.

All right, so what about latency?

I tried OnLive using a wired Road Runner broadband connection, and even with my speedy throughput, I did notice a tiny bit of lag — maybe a fraction of a second or so, which was most noticeable as a slight “waggle” when I was navigating a game menu with a cursor.

Surprisingly, though, the ever-so-slight latency didn’t really bother me during gameplay. Punching villains in the face with the back of my Bat glove wasn’t a problem, nor was destroying buildings with my sledge in Red Faction. Yes, I crashed and burned quite a bit in Dirt 2, but I’d blame my performance more on my poor mastery of keyboard steering than on any lag.

The one time I did have a clear problem with latency was while sniping enemies in Unreal Tournament III. The slight waggle I mentioned made it tough to get a bead on baddies in my viewfinder, particularly when they were in motion.

Is OnLive a substitute for a high-end PC or a gaming console?

At this point, definitely not. If you’re a hard-core gamer and you expect the ultimate in graphics, plus pinpoint precision, you should stick with your souped-up $4,000 machine. And if you’ve got an Xbox 360 or a PS3 at home, you’ll probably want to double down on them rather than sink money in an online gaming service.

Other factors to consider include the sparse selection of titles available on OnLive (although the service plans to expand its roster rapidly in the coming months), as well as the fact that paying full price for an OnLive games doesn’t mean you “own” the title. You’re merely buying the right to play the game as long as OnLive supports it, and only so long as you keep paying your membership dues. If that limitation bothers or offends you, then by all means, stay far away form OnLive.

But if you don’t have a game console and you’re stuck with a somewhat middling PC or Mac at home, yet you still have a hunger to play the latest cutting-edge games, OnLive might be just the ticket. You’ll get graphics and performance that aren’t possible on entry- or mid-level systems, plus you don’t have to deal with the hassle of installing a game on your PC or blowing several gigs of storage on your hard drive (which you’ll have to do even with online game distribution services like Steam). Instead, games fire up almost instantly, and any updates and/or hardware upgrades are handled on OnLive’s end.

I’m curious to see how OnLive (as well as Gaikai, its yet-to-be-launched cloud-based competitor) evolves. From what I’ve seen, there’s a lot of potential here.

I hope the company will continue to improve its streaming and latency performance, especially as it gradually adds more players to the mix. I also hope OnLive considers lowering its $15-a-month membership fee to, say, $5 a month, or simply eliminate it altogether.

If access to OnLive were free for all (as opposed to just its “founding members”), it would be hard to see the downside of at least giving this “in the cloud” gaming upstart a try.

— Ben Patterson is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.