EA's Origin service is one of the latest additions to the digital distribution field. It's an online PC games store and matchmaking service that benefits from some great design and technology, but suffers from the same problem every publisher-specific store does: its selection. You can only buy EA games on Origin, which means you have to look elsewhere for games from Ubisoft, Activision, Valve, or others. Like Steam, our Editors' Choice digital distribution games store.

If EA put out a game for the PC in the last few years, you can find it here. It's EA's full library of new titles, including Dragon's Age 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Unfortunately, it's only EA games. If you want a new game from any other publisher, you need to look elsewhere. Unfortunately, Origin doesn't offer much in the way of classic EA titles like Privateer or Syndicate (the classic strategy game, not the upcoming action game). For those games, you'll have to look at GOG.com, Steam, or eBay.

Pricing is the same as retail PC games, with full titles like Mass Effect 3 available for $60, expansions like The Sims 3 Pets available for $40, and older games like Mass Effect available for $20. Origin doesn't seem as aggressive with discounts and bundles as Impulse or Steam, so don't expect many great deals.

Origin offers a friends list for playing online, which is a nice feature for a system with any selection of multiplayer games. There aren't any achievements or trophies like in Steam, and there isn't much community support besides a friends list, but it's still present.

Like most other PC game distribution systems, Origin downloads games to the local hard drive and installs them as if they were installed from a physical copy of the game. However, Origin has the added benefit of GaiKai, an OnLive-like cloud gaming system that Origin uses to offer free and almost instant streaming demos of games. I jumped into the demo of Alice: Madness Returns, and in a Java window I saw a surprisingly smooth copy of the game itself play, without any installation. I had full control through GaiKai, and could play through the first part of the game. Only a handful of demos are available on Gaikai, and most of them can be played on Gaikai's website (along with demos for non-EA games), but it's a nice system that should see some growth, for its flexibility.

Origin is a full-features and accessible digital distribution store, but its small library holds it back. EA makes many great games, but it doesn't make all the great games, and if you have to switch between different publisher-based game stores to buy and play different games, it loses most of the convenience. Compared to Steam's massive library and excellent set of community features, Origin falls short.

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