A few weeks back I got a DM out of the blue from whoever manages the ParsecTeam twitter account. Essentially they said that since I talk about Parsec all the time that they would like to send me a shirt as a sort of token of appreciation. So yesterday said shirt came in the mail so I thought I would post a picture of it here. It is REALLY bright blue, and the photo I took with it laying on the bed doesn’t exactly do it justice. Basically think how bright Twitch Purple is… but blue. I have this weird thing with products, in that I really only want to support the things that I truly believe in… and Parsec is definitely one of those given that I use it pretty much every night. I do not however have any sort of a formal relationship with the company and I am paying for services the same as anyone else. I opted into the Warp account thing more than anything as a way of helping fund development which I THINK is around $50 a year but I am not 100% certain of that.
The reason why I keep talking about Parsec is because it has been a game changer for me personally in opening up my options to play games on a system that effectively no longer supports decent gameplay. I’ve talked about this at length, so really don’t feel the need to dig back in this morning but if you are curious what I am talking about you can find the tales in these two posts: “In Home Streaming” and “Wireless Ethernet”. I guess throughout my life I have experienced a lot of things that I loved… that for whatever reason did not stand the test of time. As a result this has made me really want to show support for the things that products that make my life better. Parsec has definitely been one of those products and as such I keep mentioning it any time someone brings up wanting to swap around the way they game, or have a better mobile gaming option. I still would love to see native clients for the consoles, even if they can’t do bi-directional play and simply offers streaming from PC to console.
The thing I am the most curious about are the cloud options that they offer to rent. One of these days I am going to try out that Amazon Web Services g3.4xlarge even though I have no real need to do so. Mostly I am curious at just how viable it is for modern gaming and just how cost effective it would be to purchase one. If you were going to try and recreate my current gaming rig right now… even though it has some older parts in it… it would still cost around $2300. You could effectively game 24/7 for 52 days straight before you spent in cloud charges as you would on that system. My real question however is just how nice is the performance. At the moment I am streaming Parsec across my LAN with it configured to always try a local connection first, so I am not really sure how it is going to feel going out to AWS. One of these weekends when I don’t have another competing project I am going to give it a shot because I am super curious. I’m also curious what that big box feels like as compared to the much smaller specced $0.51/hour set up.
This morning went down a rabbit hole that I did not intend to go down. Originally I was going to make fun of my character in Assassin’s Creed Origins for somehow having two different bows, a battle axe, a sword and a shield slung across his back. Instead I talked more about Parsec, but legitimately I am going to try out the cloud option at some point. Mostly for folks that want to have a PC gaming experience a few hours a week without affording a PC… it might be a really cost effective solution. This is one of those things that I don’t need myself at all, but I would like to know how well it works before I offer it as a possible solution. I’m in a weird spot gaming wise where I am still playing a single player game, but not really feeling like I have much exciting to say about it. I’ve also been super exhausted this week, and need to wrap this up so I can get to work.
So readers… How is your week going?