Love playing your Xbox 360 games online? Join the crew…and please have your credit card handy, because Microsoft would like to have a word with it. Specifically, the word “more.”

On Monday, the company announced plans to raise the price of the Xbox Live Gold membership, making it the online network’s first fee hike in its eight-year history. Beginning November 1, gamers in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the U.K. will have to fork over at least $10 extra per year to enjoy the premium service, which is required for playing games with (or against) pals online.

In the U.S., the annual subscription plan — once $49.99, soon to be $59.99 — will remain far and way the most economical. The monthly plan will see a $2 bump ($9.99/month, or $120/year), while the three-month plan will jump $5 ($24.99/month, or $100/year).

Why the sudden hike? To Xbox Live spokesman Major Nelson, someone has to pay for all the stuff they keep adding to the network, right?

“Since launching Xbox LIVE in 2002 we have continually added more content and entertainment experiences for our members, while keeping the price the same,” he said. “We’re confident that when the new pricing takes effect, an Xbox LIVE Gold membership will continue to offer the best value in the industry.”

Well, that’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that Microsoft remains the only one of the big three console makers to charge a fee for online play. While Sony’s recently-released “Playstation Plus”upgrade gives gamers access to premium content, playing games online is still entirely free for all users. And though the Wii has lagged behind in the online gaming field, the relatively few games that support online play don’t cost players extra.

But with blockbuster multiplayer games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 selling like hotcakes on the 360, Microsoft hasn’t had a hard time convincing users to pay up. According to Bloomberg, a good 25 million Xbox 360 owners went Gold in the last fiscal year, netting the company about $600 million in fees alone and accounting for roughly half of Microsoft’s estimated $1.2 billion in revenue via the online service. With the Xbox 360 topping charts in July and surefire seller Halo: Reach arriving September 14th, the company might need to buy a bigger wallet.

It’s not all doom and gloom for 360 gamers, however. In a half-hearted attempt to make amends for the rate increase, Microsoft is letting current U.S. Xbox Live Gold members lock in one more year of membership for $39.99, a $20 premium over the coming price. Not bad, but an even thriftier move is to snap up a few discounted pre-paid cards at online retailers like Amazon. Redeem one now, then save one for next year to renew at the discounted price again. Sneaky…and sure to vanish quickly, so hop to it.

With its July 27 launch date fast approaching, Blizzard’s behemoth StarCraft II is about to give gamers a perfectly good reason to avoid that evil summer sun in favor of the warming glow of a computer monitor. The heavily-anticipated game is the biggest of the summer — and we don’t just mean in terms of expected sales.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Blizzard’s parent company Activision has spent over $100 million developing the strategy sequel. And that doesn’t include whatever extra they’ll spend marketing it over the next few months.

The good news for Blizzard? Other games to feature that kind of insane budget — specifically, Rockstar’s twin hits Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption — went on to massive success. Perhaps the more you spend, you more you make, after all.

So on the off-chance that terms like “build order” and “Zerg rush” mean nothing to you.

If the Star Wars Collection isn’t enough for you, Steam is currently running a massive 4th of July sale with huge discounts on hundreds of titles. One of the more interesting items is the THQ Complete Pack bundle which includes every THQ title on Steam for a mere $49.99. This includes Company of Heroes, Metro 2033, Warhammer 40k games, and more. Other bundles include Valve Complete Pack, Square Enix/Eidos Collection, Rockstar Complete Pack, and the 2K Complete Pack. There are also some deals valid that they have for individual games at a great price for those of you who don’t want $500 of games for $75.

If you haven’t been invited to any BBQs and need something to keep you entertained for the weekend, it’s definitely worth a look.

I personally now have a total of 76 games on my steam account :/

Steam 4th Of July Sale

In the realm of first-person shooters, it’s pretty clear at this point that present day is the new World War II. Between Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the latest games in two of the biggest genre franchises around , current-day settings for online shooting contests are dominating in terms of sales and player numbers. This trend continues with Electronic Arts‘ Medal of Honor, a reboot of the long-running franchise set in Afghanistan where American soldiers tangle with insurgent forces. The single-player portion of the game is being built at EA Los Angeles, but the multiplayer is being constructed by DICE, the same studio that created the Battlefield series and delivered Bad Company 2 earlier this year.

Maybe that’s why it’s not surprising that Medal of Honor’s multiplayer mode, which is currently playable in beta form, feels so familiar. Think of it as a sort of mix between Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company 2, and you might have a pretty good idea of what to expect from the multiplayer’s general layout. While much is similar about the structure and progression to other games already out, the moment-to-moment gameplay manages to have its own flow and feel.

That’s because getting killed in Medal of Honor is an easy thing. A quick burst of fire from an assault will put down pretty much anyone. It’s a routine occurrence to be shot without having any idea what happened , only to see on the post-death kill screen that you were taken out by sniper fire or an abrupt and unexpected shotgun blast. There’s still a little bit of room for survival – if you can manage to find cover after absorbing a single bullet the blood effects that ring the screen will gradually fade – but in general if you’re in the open, you won’t live long.

Given that there isn’t much time to react once you’re under fire, positioning and spatial awareness is of chief importance. Of the two maps included in this beta, the Helmand Valley map is the larger one, set in a dusty, sun-bleached mountainous region. It features a Combat Mission mode where the American forces must move sequentially through a series of checkpoints as Insurgents dig in and defend. Respawning across the map changes depending on which checkpoint is currently being contested, meaning the conflict in the 12 vs. 12 contest is always concentrated in a small area where nearly any exposed body part could be punctured by sniper fire.

This is not capture point-based gameplay like Battlefield’s Conquest mode, so teams don’t battle back and forth as map ownership swaps hands. Instead, the Americans are always on offense, and after capturing or blasting apart an objective, the lines of battle are permanently moved forward for the duration of the round.To ensure the hectic pace of battle never dies down, respawn timers are extremely fast – only a few seconds – which gives you enough time to pick one of the three character classes and get right back out into the fight. While the Insurgents will always spawn at the battle lines, the Americans can opt to spawn in the middle of the fight or back at home base, where you can hop in a light tank to help your team advance.

Though there are tanks, the focus here isn’t on vehicle combat. It’s instead just an aid for what’s otherwise a multiplayer mode that seems to emphasize marksmanship and quick reflexes. Hiding behind rocky outcroppings and behind the dusty walls of low-lying structures you’ll need to scan the countryside for movement while keeping an eye out for snipers who may be doing the same thing. Another good method of locating enemies is to keep an eye out for muzzle flashes, which can often give away their positions. Parts of the map do have a limited amount of destructibility, so if you want, it’s possible to mow down trees to clear more lines of sight on a map that’s packed with debris, hills, and structures that make it easy to pop behind cover should bullets start to chip away at the terrain in your vicinity.

What the game really seems to get right is the chaotic presentation of the combat. Every bullet you fire into rock and wood has a detailed impact effect, sending clouds of dust and chips spewing into the air. It’s not as dramatic when it’s just you shooting. But when your entire squad is lobbing grenades, firing rockets, and calling down mortar strikes on an enemy tank that’s chewing into your ranks with high caliber machine gun fire while the rest of the opposing forces support it with rifles, it adds an extra jolt of realism and excitement to the gameplay. I’m playing it on a powerful PC right now, and the game looks great, with landscapes that look cluttered, lived-in and authentic, sharp weapon models and believable effects. Its gunplay also has a satisfying feel, favoring those who can skillfully aim and burst fire instead of spray. The weapons have a sense of weight and proper recoil that feels like it makes sense, even to someone who’s never dealt with a real machine gun before.

The second map, Kabul City Ruins, is being played as a team deathmatch map right now. The only rule is to kill the other team faster than it kills you, yet the action stays entertaining because of how cluttered the streets are with cover and how many windows and two storey structures overlook the streets, meaning there’s always a spot to hide and another way to flank a pesky sniper who’s skillfully patrolling a rooftop area. Or you could just shoot a rifle grenade up there.

That leads into the types of options you get for class loadouts. The Medal of Honor beta offers three different class types: rifleman, special ops, and sniper. As should be very familiar to Battlefield veterans since the days of Battlefield 2 as well as Modern Warfare diehards, there’s a persistent unlock system that awards you bonus equipment and weaponry as you make kills in matches. For example, a Rifleman will start out with a basic assault rifle, but will soon unlock an extra magazine, red dot scope, a light machine gun, hollow point ammunition, and more as you make kills. The game also tracks your stats and hands out awards and medals for specific achievements, which is always a welcome addition.

Players who prefer a more specialized method of combat could opt for the Special Ops class, which eventually unlocks a shotgun, or the Sniper class, that can get access to powerful bolt-action rifles and high powered scopes. On the battlefield each class gets their equipped primary weapon, a pistol, and an explosive weapon type, including gun-mounted grenade launchers, rocket launchers, and remotely detonated devices. There’s also the option for a close-up knife kill if the situation demands it, and of course a trusty grenade for clearing out entrenched enemy positions.

Killstreaks, called scorechains here, are also in place, letting you pick between calling in an unmanned aerial vehicle to patrol the sky and reveal enemy positions on radar or specifying a spot on a map to drop a mortar strike after successfully achieving a string of consecutive kills without dying. Again, there are plenty of elements that make Medal of Honor’s online feel like other games, but the core gameplay and rich graphical style could be enough to make it stand out in the shooter crowd. I know I’m looking forward to playing more, as well as checking out more of the maps. The game’s set for an October 12th ship date in North America for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC platforms.

Motion controllers? Child’s play. High-powered consoles? Waste of money. If bold startup OnLive has anything to do with it, the future of gaming is up in the clouds.

Not literally, of course. OnLive promises to relieve your computer of the onerous task of actually running one of its selection of triple-A games — instead, it runs on one of OnLive’s massive servers, away in the “cloud” of the Internet. Your inputs are sent to the server; it sends back a high-definition streaming video feed of your gameplay, relieving the need for any fancy gaming hardware. All you need is a machine that can display a high-def streaming video, which these days is pretty much anything.

Sounds like pie in the sky, and since its announcement last year, OnLive has been treated with considerable skepticism by the gaming community. Many commentators dismissed it as a technological impossibility, a pipe-dream that’d never see daylight.

But it turned out to be neither. Last week the service launched, and OnLive is now in the hands of subscribers dotting the lower 48 states.

Its launch line-up includes about 20 games, around half of which are what you might call “top-tier” full-price releases: Assassin’s Creed II, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, andSplinter Cell: Conviction. More are coming. OnLive has agreements in place with every major publisher except Activision-Blizzard, so it’s going to be competitive, in terms of new releases, with download services like Steam.

But buying games on OnLive is way slicker. There’s no downloading: you just hit the “purchase” button, enter your password for confirmation, and after a brief loading pause, you’re in the game. It’s a buying experience that’s head and shoulders above everything else out there. OnLive is also ahead of the game in its social features — you can record and share short clips of your game, for example, and check up on the activities of your friends in a way that’ll be familiar to Xbox Live subscribers.

Chief among the predictions of OnLive’s critics is that its games will be ruined by the unavoidable time delay between you making a move, the server processing it, and your screen displaying the results. And yes, there’s a slight, but entirely perceptible, lag between you making a move and seeing it reflected on the screen.

If you’re a hardcore shooter player, this will be enough to put you off completely. If you’re not so tuned-in, you may not even notice. We found it significantly less bothersome when using an Xbox 360 controller than with a mouse. Set it next to a dedicated gaming PC and there’s no comparison, even with identical graphics. Which, thanks to OnLive’s somewhat washed-out, low-detail look, they’re unfortunately not.

But then again, OnLive will run adequately on machines that modern games wouldn’t even touch. And to some extent your experience will vary based on your connection type, your distance from OnLive’s server warehouses, the number of other people using your Internet connection, and probably the phase of the moon or something. But as long as you meet its modest minimum hardware requirements, it’ll work pretty much the same as on a whizz-bang supercomputer.

Unless, that is, you have a wireless network. OnLive flat-out refuses to run unless you have a wired ethernet hookup, so if you’re dreaming of slouching on the couch playing games on your laptop, resign yourself to running an extra cord. Depending on your home setup, that could be a dealkiller.

And speaking of dealkillers, let’s talk price. Thanks to a deal with AT&T, the OnLive service is free for the first year for the first batch of subscribers, but make no mistake: this ain’t going to last. Once you run through that year, count on paying $4.95 per month for access, provided nothing changes. You’ll also have to pay for the games.

If you’re scratching your head at the prospect of paying both a subscription fee for the service and full sticker price for the games, you’re not the only one. Stop paying the sub fee, and your games — the games you’ve paid for and own — are no longer accessible. That’s a pretty bitter pill to swallow.

Fortunately, that’s not the only option. OnLive also offers rentals for certain games, with prices in the $5-10 area for 3-5 day loan periods. That’s a much better deal. PC game rentals are a rare sight, and if you’re anticipating a heavy weekend’s gaming, it’s a great option for non-console gamers.

There’s one other OnLive feature that’s unavailable anywhere else: it runs on the Mac, meaning that nearly all its games can be enjoyed by oft-neglected Mac gamers. If you’re one of the millions who made the switch to Apple and you miss the world of PC games, OnLive’s going to be of particular interest.

Future plans for the service are impressive, too. It’s been demoed running on the iPhone and iPad, and later this year it’ll be getting a dirt-cheap “Microconsole” — a set-top box that can stream games straight to your TV. Exclusive games are in the works, the company’s founder told us, and with a whole server farm at their disposal they could be able to perform at levels home PCs just can’t match.

But is it really a feasible way to play games? OnLive is packed with more caveats than a cellphone contract: it depends on your connection, it’s pricey, its future is uncertain, the graphics aren’t as good, and there’s that perceptible control lag. As a technology demo, it’s spectacular; as a product, it’s unproven. If you’re curious — or you’re keen to play the latest PC games and don’t want to buy an expensive new computer — take it for a test drive. But it’s not going to change the world just yet.