Xbox/Playstation Remote Play and Cloud Gaming

[Celery Man 21093]

I'm not a huge gamer - I grew up with an SNES and computer games, missed the N64/Playstation console era except at friends houses but picked back up with PS2 and onward. And here I am now with a kid and a macbook for my personal computer and I'm really limited to gaming when I can sneak upstairs to the game room with the xbox/playstation/etc. That mostly means about half an hour to an hour at night when I'm fucking exhausted, maybe a bit more on weekends. A reason I started playing Civ a lot more is because I can run it from my Macbook, so I can play a bit more during bits of down time in my office.

Anyways, maybe I just fucking missed the memo on this and it's old news to everyone here but holy shit I've discovered Remote Play on both the Xbox and Playstation, and now also Xbox Cloud (looks like Playstation has a similar offering). For Christmas, wife got me this gaming controller thing that you can stick your phone in

that is Madden playing on my Xbox upstairs and streaming to my phone in my office. It works pretty well. I'm shittier at quarterback without a 70" TV but still. That made me start investigating more broadly what you can do with remote play on xbox and playstation. Apparently you can bluetooth connect regular xbox/playstation controllers to your computer, ipads, etc. Xbox doesn't have an officially supported way to connect to your console from a mac, but I can play using a controller on my iPad. I can to either my PS4 or my PS5 using PS Remote Play on my macbook, using one of our old PS4 controllers to play games on either console. I finally ran ethernet cable to my desk because it is better wired, but it works either way.

One thing I discovered that was irritating is that you can't remote play backwards compatible Xbox games. I was playing through Fallout New Vegas in December and was irritated that it wouldn't work from my phone. But, if you have Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, you can go to https://www.xbox.com/en-US/play and fucking play many titles from the cloud, including some new ones but also some older ones like Fallout 3 and New Vegas. I've been playing Goldeneye, High On Life, and Chivalry II on cloud with my Macbook. I started another Fallout 3 play through, and I should really see what Flight Simulator is like on cloud.

Anyways, this is fucking awesome and solves a problem I was grappling with for a while - how to do some more casual to medium gaming without buying more consoles/computers/equipment, and how to do that in a more portable way.