Has anyone noticed the price of console games lately? £40 or £50 pounds for a single game! And, you might not even like the thing after you bought it. Wouldn't it be great if you could (legally) try before you buy, or even better, never ever buy (and still legally). Well, a new raft of services could mean that you don't have to pay big bucks to play the big titles.

When you think about it, console machines are largely un-convinented devices. It's not like you can just grab your PS3 with you for a 2 week holiday. A laptop, iPhone or a iPad on the other hand, all make it fairly easy to play games on the go. Now this is something that the "old gaming media" companies such as Sony (PS3) and Microsoft (XBOX) should be challening - and they are, but only for smaller, more limited devices. Why can't you play a PS3 game on the go? Why can't you use the processing power of a console computer even when you are geographically positioned somewhere else? The thing is already connected to the Internet, why can't it transfer the game information between two computers via the internet? It sounds so simple. But it isn't.

But there are some companies who are challenging these questions. Gaikai is a cloud based gaming services which started early this year. The company offers console gaming straight to laptops, without the associated hardware. And that is because the game itself is actually running on powerful servers. The users laptop only needs to send the games moves and receive a video feed. No consoles, no game discs or downloads needed. The game, is wherever you are - if you are online.

We already have online gaming for simple games, but this promises high end action to low end laptops, opening the doors to many more players. If you look at a game like Farmville, on Facebook, it has over 80 million players, which is extreme, and it shows that it can be done once you open those doors of possibility, making it accessable and allowing friends to share. This should be possible for any game, and Gaikai are leading the way. They have even proposed offering users to play the games through their Facebook account, similar to Farmville.

However, that's all in principle. What Gakai are offering now is a little more basic. If you go to a site like Amazon or IGN shopping for console games, if your broadband connection speed is fast enough, you will receieve an invention to play a console or high end PC game streaming straight from the internet into a basic laptop.

In the coming weeks week, users in the US, UK and France can sign up for free trial versions, but the full service is expected to go public later this year.