ps3 Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Impressive but Still Beta

July 8, 2014 by Belghast

Auto Update

“Wow, I’ve never seen that happen before” is generally something you never want to hear uttered from an auto mechanic. That said at this point my wife’s vehicle is fixed and ready to go and seems to have no negative impact. Apparently on the Pontiac Torrent there are two different sizes of bolts that can be used to attach the tensioner. Quite simply when they replaced that part they used the wrong one, and as we were driving Sunday the vibration and force sheared the bolt off completely causing the serpentine belt to shread, and at the same time stopping the flow of motion to both the water pump and the alternator.

The good folks at Hibdon were more than willing to fix the problem, and after getting the vehicle towed there yesterday morning they had already fixed everything by mid day. It is one one of those “honest mistake” type situations, and I don’t fault them for it… especially since they are also the ones responsible for making it right. It was a grand inconvenience but thankfully my wife really had nowhere that she needed to go yesterday. I cringe when I think how much worse this could have gone had the bolt sheared and she lost power to major systems while out on the highway with no place to really pull to the side of the road. We were likely saved by the fact that it happened so close to our home and we did not drive it long enough to cause a radiator boil over.

Steam In Home Streaming

One of the problems with having multiple machines is that ultimately the game you happen to want to play is not installed on the machine you are sitting at. Yes I realize this is a first world problem, as I am extremely lucky to be able to have both a nice gaming laptop and gaming desktop, but this is something I have tried to deal with for some time. I’ve tried gaming over various versions of remote desktop, and none of them work well enough to offer a passable experience. I am not sure who mentioned it first, but the other day I said something about steam logging you out when you tried to log in a second machine. Apparently this has not been the case for some time. What happens now is that you see all of the games available installed from all of the machines you happen to be logged into on your network. The cool thing about this is instead of the play button you now see a Stream button as shown above.

Last night I decided to try this out, and I had some mixed results. This all started because I decided that I wanted to play catch up on True Blood which meant needing to hang out downstairs with my laptop. True Blood is one of those shows where about halfway through the third season it went off the rails and I stopped caring about it. That said at the same time I felt like after spending that much time watching it… I felt committed to seeing it through to the end. Like if I stopped my choice to watch it in the first place would have somehow been invalidated. Sadly this is how I end up feeling about most television, and why I am still watching Bleach after all these episodes… when essentially every season is EXACTLY THE SAME. All that aside the game I wanted to play last night was not installed on my laptop, so it was either steam streaming or a 10 gig download over wifi.

Impressive but Still Beta

I have to say that the actual game play was rather impressive. The game I was streaming was not exactly fast paced and action oriented… in that I was playing Divinity: Original Sin. There was a minor input lag, but I seriously might be the only one who actually would have noticed it. For example I refuse to use a wireless mouse because I can feel the slight hesitation of the wireless lag… whereas none of the rest of the world seems to be able to. The biggest thing I noticed is that it felt like I was watching YouTube video. Since you are in essense streaming video across your network, there was a certain measure of blurring and artifacting of the screen. This was most noticeable when confronted with large areas of a dark color, but it was not bad enough to be anything more than an annoyance.

The deal breaker for me however was that every time I tried to alt+tab out of the game to check something… the stream would crash out, and in a game where saving your progress is important this meant that a couple of times last night I lost a bunch of progress. Alt+tabbing is something that is just habitual at this point, and I have done it before I even realize I did it. So all of the problems I had with Skyrim apply here, in that either I have to force myself to NEVER alt tab… or I have to deal with the consequences of my actions. As a result I decided to just simply deal with installing yet another game in two places. Unfortunately since Divinity: Original Sin does not use the steamworks cloud save functionality… this also means I will be manually copying saved games between the two machines each time I decide to switch systems.

Steam in home streaming is of course still very much a beta product, and hopefully they will fix the alt+tab thing. When they do I can see myself using it quite a bit more often, especially as my laptop ages. What this really gives you is the ability to play games using the full horse power of your gaming machine, while on another machine that simply acts as a viewer and input device. I’ve even seen video of someone playing games at full frame rate using a chromebook with linux side loaded onto it. If they ever get internet streaming working, and manageable lag wise… this means there might be a time when you could play all the games on your home machine from your tablet while travelling. What I would love to see is for this to work in a more universal fashion, so I could play the games from my PS4 while sitting at my PC or versa vicea. I don’t think we are anywhere near there yet, but it gives me hope that maybe at some point we will be.

Old Addictions

Over the weekend there was a point where my wife needed to get out of the house and do anything. She had been sitting in the house for over 72 hours at that point, and just needed to see something other than the walls around her. While we didn’t really have much in the way of errands to run, I decided to co-opt the trip and run around and visit a few pawn shops. I’ve always loved going to pawn shops, because you really never know what you might find there. Since I hate paying full price for anything, they are a smorgasbord of potentially awesome things for cheap. One of the various ones we went to had a bunch of their Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 games for as low as $5 a piece. I picked up used copies of Tekken 6, The Simpsons Game, Metal Gear Solid 4, Heavy Rain and a copy of Fallout 3: Game of the Year edition.

One of the things I have always been curious about is playing Fallout or Elder Scrolls on a console, so for $5 I could not pass the the chance to see “how the other half lived”. When we got home I had this grand idea of testing out all of the games… but never actually made it past Fallout 3. I booted up the game and spent the next three hours playing it before I realized how much time had passed. This is one of those games that I can play over and over and never quite get bored of it, and I always thought it was the ability to modify it that made it so intriguing to me. Playing on a console I have no modding at all available, so I realize it really was the game itself. I am completely happy to wander around with wastes with nothing but a pistol, dispensing justice.

Last night after we finished our walk I went back upstairs to cool down, and made the mistake of turning on the television and continuing the journey into the wastes. Next thing I know it is 12:30 and I am scrambling to get back to Megaton extremely encumbered, but at the same time completely unwilling to drop any of my plunder. This will be interesting to say the least. One of the “mods” I always install when playing the PC game is something that removes encumbrance, because I absolutely hate playing the inventory management simulation that is a Bethesda game. That said at this point I feel committed to seeing just how well the Fallout 3 experience translates to a console. Additionally it has been a really long time since I have played Fallout 3, as more recently I tend to play New Vegas when I get the fallout itch. It is amazing just how much more I like Three Dog, than Mister New Vegas.

#SteamStreaming #Fallout3 #PS3

Raiding Tombs

July 5, 2014 by Belghast

Process Automation

One of the things I have figured out over the years is that things work really well only if you aren’t thinking about them. For example if I have a repetitive data entry task, I can seem to do it awesome and at full speed… only until I actually stop to think about what I am doing. Hell even typing itself works amazingly well and I can compose perfectly at the keyboard with zero typos… until I stop to think about what my hands are doing. At that point I screw everything up and get the sequence completely out of whack. As a result I try and commit as many things as I can in life to a sort of ritual. This frees me up to daydream about whatever the hell I want to, while still performing the task at hand on autopilot. My morning routine is much like this, a sequence of events that happen essentially on their own, and works awesomely until I am forced to think about it. When I do have to think about whatever I happen to be doing the process breaks down completely.

Each morning I get up out of bed, walk across the room to turn off the alarm clock. I turn on the television, make sure it is on the local news channel, walk to the kitchen and turn on the keurig and then hop in the shower. When I am out of the shower I get dressed, make coffee, deliver a mug to my wife and take mine upstairs into my office where I sit down at my computer and do a blog post. After I’ve finished that I head back downstairs, feed the animals, give our eldest cat her medicine, run back into the bedroom to say goodbye to my wife, grab my chromebook and then leave the house. At which point I head to QuikTrip, grab breakfast and consume said breakfast while I drive to work. Finally about the time I reach work I am capable of physical exertion because my body is for the most part finished “booting up” and I walk leisurely the 1000 steps or so it takes to get into my office. After sitting at my desk for thirty minutes or so checking email and catching up on my blogroll, I am finally at that point ready to engage in conversation. All of this happens pretty much on its own, and any false step along the path causes the whole sequence to fall apart.

The weekends have naturally had an abbreviated version of this process, as a lot of the activities simply do not need to happen. However the last two mornings I have decimated this process entirely, and I have been paying the price. At first yesterday I thought maybe I just was not awake enough to go walking. So I got up, sat up in bed and watched an entire episode of Pokémon, thinking that surely my body was fully awake at that point after having to explain why Ash Ketchum cares about collecting gym badges to my wife. But still, even after that prep work… my body had no clue what in the hell I was doing to it. I feel like maybe I could add a walk into my existing process…. but essentially that would defeat the purpose, since I doubt I would be awake enough to perform until I have at least had a shower and some caffeine. I think today will be the end of this experiment and I will return to my modified weekend process tomorrow, because right now I feel completely out of sorts.

Raiding Tombs

I have to admit that I was never a big fan of the Tomb Raider franchise. Maybe I am not “male” enough, but I didn’t find the previous incarnation with its two big breasts and two even bigger guns that amusing. There were so many times in the games where I had no clue what was going on, and rarely made it more than an hour into the game before giving up. So when the 2013 reboot happened I had no real fondness for the series, and was not even really paying attention to it. That said something interesting happened… all of my friends raved about just how amazing the game was. Even more interesting to me was how most of said friends raving about the game… were Female. So I knew at some point I wanted to give it a try, but that said I have technically owned this game in one form or another for the better part of a year, but this weekend was really the first time I had given it a play.

Traditionally I do not go in for this sort of game. I have tried multiple times to play Uncharted, but the whole “playing a movie” aspect has always been a massive turnoff for me. Something I just realized last night is that for the better part of the last two decades I have had my head firmly in one MMO or another. During that time I have nibbled at single player experiences, but never really sat down to to the buffet. In that time we moved from the golden age of 90s sandboxy rpgs like Baldur’s Gate and Fallout… to a world where most games are cinematic on-rails experiences. The dissonance of this cultural shift honestly took some getting used to. I would poke my head out of MMOs long enough to consume the more free form gaming experiences like Fallout, Elder Scrolls and even to some extent Mass Effect that allowed me to go off the rails and wander freely, but I have resisted giving myself over to the “narrative experience”.

Stop Fighting It

Basically I give up… I cannot fight the direction my beloved game industry has gone in. I have spent my time resisting it, and as a result have essentially turned into an old man yelling at the kids to “get off my internet”. So after hearing yet another friend talk about just how amazing this game was… I decided to give myself over to the experience. To get the full effect, and keep myself from trying to use the old crutch of “mouse and keyboard”, I opted to play this game entirely on my Playstation 3. It was given away some time ago as part of the Playstation Plus package. For awhile I considered trying to pick up the double special extended deluxe remastered edition available for the PS4, but I really don’t care about how pretty her hair is… or how realistic her sweat movement is. The game looks gorgeous regardless of what platform you play it on, and in truth I kind of prefer the “clump” of hair rather than being distracted by seeing each individual particle.

I like this Lara Croft so much better than the previous one. Firstly she seems to have human proportions as well as human emotions. The previous incarnation was essentially Wonder Woman with guns, and felt like playing a guy with tits at times. I actually enjoyed the series of Angelina Jolie movies, but this Lara feels like a product of her circumstances, rather than someone trained and bred to be mind numbingly amazing. In the course of this game, your character goes through some truly horrific things… things no one should ever have to. Each time she becomes stronger for it, and you start out as this visibly naive girl and turn into a woman with razor will and a desire to survive at all costs. Quite frankly… everything about this franchise is just better than the previous incarnations. This is a Lara I would love to see in a movie, but in reality that is essentially what we are seeing… movies played out through our actions.

Many Narrative Elements

One of my favorite constructs in the game is that of the “day camp” system. Every so often in the game there is a camp spot, be it a formal camp or just a clearing with a makeshift fire ring. When you are at camp all of these interesting interludes happen. Sometimes it is interaction between two characters, other times it is Lara talking to herself… and then there is a series of asides that involve her watching pre-shot footage from the video camera of another of the characters. These little moments help to flesh out the story, and the character interactions making them all far more three dimensional in the process. This combined with the various journal entries you find scattered throughout the levels helps to create a very three dimensional feeling of Yamatai and the characters that inhabit it.

I think another aspect that has helped to make me fall in love with this game quickly, is that the setting itself is extremely familiar to me. Playing Tomb Raider is like playing out what happened to Oliver Queen on the island of Lian Yu in the television show Arrow. The fact that the best weapon Lara has at his disposal is a make shift bow… that slowly improves over the course of the levels really underlines this feeling. So it gave me a point of reference that I already cared about that I could latch onto with both hands and use to pull me closer to the story. The funny thing about surrendering to the narrative, is that it has allowed me to do something I rarely am able to… Play a female character and enjoy it. Most of my game play experiences have been about inserting myself into character character I happened to be playing. So as superior as the writing of “Femshep” might be, I could never disconnect myself enough from the character to make that work. Now it is not like I am playing a character, but instead watching a story unfold in front of me… and it is working.

Old Dog Learns New Tricks

Now at this point I want to go back and try again some of the game that did not work for me in the past. So often times I wanted them to “let me play the game” and stop with all the “cutscenes” never really grasping that the game had changed, and I was simply not prepared for that sort of a game play experience. Another thing that has helped this process is that I have forced myself in many cases to start playing with a controller. Earlier this weekend I was playing Bioshock Infinite with a controller, and not absolutely hating it. I still feel like a controller does a poor job at fight targeting control, but for the most part it works well enough, and I have now reached a point where controlling my character with two thumbs has reached a place where I no longer have to think about it. Movement and Aiming is starting to become “ritual” and as such I am rejecting it considerably less.

Not every game is going to work out to be better because of this little revelation I have gone through. I tried to play the original Witcher again last night, and realized that “nope, it still sucks”. That game has one of the most uncomfortable and unorthodox control schemes I have seen in some time. No matter how awesome that storyline is… I will likely never play it, because I cannot get past how horrible it feels. This is the sort of game that I guess “lets play” videos exist, because while I would love to know what happens storyline wise… there is no way I am going to play it. I’ve given it three tries, at separate times and come up with the same rejection. I guess this is literally a case of three strikes and you are out for me. There are many games however, namely console titles that I look forward to dusting off and trying to play again.

#TombRaider #PS3

Recording Console Games

June 19, 2014 by Belghast

Bombing Run

Yesterday was an interesting day, partially because I dinged another level and am now officially in my “late thirties”. Most of the morning was spent in preparation for my wife to fly in, and doing a last minute run through the house to “pick up” a bit. Honestly this year I somehow managed to pick up successfully as I went and didn’t really hit the point where I simply stopped caring that there was a pizza box on the kitchen counter. So it really only took a few minutes, and I streamed some Warlords of Draenor while waiting. For a reason that I did not know at the time… none of my voice over was coming through in the stream, but I will get to that later.

I picked up my wife around noon and we ran across town to my favorite Indian restaurant… where I proceeded to order something completely new in honor of the occasion. My standby has always been Chicken Tika Masala medium hot, and no matter how many times I consider ordering something else… I always end up back on that. The new dish was a sort of super spicy egg fried rice with chicken in it that they call Desi Rice. In any fashion it was pretty freaking good. Overall the day was pretty relaxing, and it served as the perfect break in the working week. It was awesome to have my wife back, even if it is only for a few days as she flies out to the second conference of the year Sunday.

What completely overwhelmed me yesterday was all the well wishes from my internet family. Both my twitter and g+ feeds were blowing up with well wishes all day yesterday, and upon logging into teamspeak that night I got another round. I feel completely bombarded, and I thank all of you for that feeling. It kinda feels like the whole Sally Fields “You like me, You really like me” moment. But amazing friends aside… I find it always interesting to see which bot wishes me a happy birthday first. This year and I believe many of the other years recently… the reward goes for the WoW Ace Forums… who wished me a happy birthday at 7 pm on the 17th, which I can only assume is on Australian time? In all seriousness… I am humbled by the amount of support I get from you all.

Recording Console Games

One of the coolest things about the PS4 is that it can stream live to twitch. It also happens to be one of the most disappointing, since the twitch streaming rate is locked to 480p which shocked me. I pretty much religiously stream in 1080p so it was frustrating the first time I cracked open one of my Destiny Alpha videos and saw how blurry the footage was. The other nuisance is that it seems to only record MY voice chat as part of the stream, and not that of the other people I happen to be partied with. The end result is this disjointed experience of listening to an often times hilarious one sided conversation. I figured there had to be a better way.

For some time I had looked at a capture card, but honestly that whole concept was foreign to me. After doing a ton of research I realized there was a huge problem there, with the way the streaming worked. The two consoles that I most wanted to stream from were the Sony Playstation 3 and Sony Playstation 4… both of which I absolutely love. The problem is that in both cases they use HDCP or High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection aka a screwball system that tries to encrypt the video data from the source to the television. Apparently the Xbox One also struggles with this, and for some reason in all of these systems it is either on all of the time… or turned on the first time you play a movie and then stays on. Normally this would prevent you from recording gameplay footage, because the recording device is not “HDCP Compliant”.

The widely accepted workaround is to plug these consoles into the capture card using component cables. This however causes its own stream of problems as you take a digital signal… convert it to analog and then convert it back to digital. The end result is often blurry and color shifted and just not something I wanted to mess with. So after a lot of research I stumbled on the above video. Basically the idea is to use an HDMI splitter to get around the HDCP lockout without actually stripping the HDCP protection and making the device illegal for sale. All of this is voodoo to me to be honest, but I wanted to give it a shot. I managed to find an Elgato HD Capture device on Craigslist and got a ridiculously good deal on it, therefore enabling this entire thing to work. As of last night I had the set up going and it worked successfully, after a few attempts to work out the kinks. Sorry for the twitch advertisement spam on twitter.

Rube Goldberg of Streaming

This ladies and gentleman is my streaming setup. I decided to diagram it out in part because it made it actually make sense rather than the jumble of cables that I have running around my desktop. Right now I have both the PS3 and PS4 hooked up in this fashion and will ultimately move the Xbox 360 in here as well. For the setup I am proposing you need the following materials.

The Elgato comes with one HDMI cable and the necessary Micro to Full USB Cable. Like I said I got mine through a craigslist deal for $75 enabling this whole setup to work. So the only thing I was actually missing was the splitter. After doing a lot of research on the subject it seems like only a few splitters do what is needed. Thankfully the one I ordered and linked above is both tiny and works great. Ultimately I want to get some much shorter usb cables because right now… having all these 6 foot cables is a mess. Essentially you hook all of your game systems to the HDMI switch, and then hook the switch to an HDMI splitter, and then hook one of the two outbound ports to the Elgato. That then passes the signal to the television and your computer. You can download software from the Elgato website that does a decent job at capture, but I simply integrated all of this into my existing OBS setup.

Trial and Error

After a lot of trial and error I was able to produce a video of me playing Castle of Illusion on the PS3. I do a rather horrible job at playing the game, but that is entirely beside the point. Basically I could have died over and over and still would have been amused because the setup was working. The only problem is… I seemed to be unable to record any dialog from my microphone. I spent the better part of this video fiddling with my settings in OBS trying to make it function again. The video however looked great, and was streaming to twitch and exporting to youtube in glorious 1080p. The trouble with my headset started over the weekend when I decided to disconnect it from my machine and hook it to my ps4 for the purpose of grouping up in Destiny.

Being a USB headset, everything seemed to go wonky when I did this and everything from mumble, to teamspeak to obs treated the headset as though it had never been connected to the system, forcing me to remap everything. Then I remembered… I had hooked the headset previously directly into my machine, and was now trying to go through my powered hub. So I pulled the headset out, hooked it directly into the machine and bam… all of the sudden OBS started working again. This second video has dialog coming across and with the help of my good friend Ashgar, I managed to sort out the volume levels so that I could actually be heard over the game audio. So I feel like right now I have a repeatable solution for streaming HDMI connected consoles over twitch.

Now my specific setup is not a requirement… there are lots of different ways to do this. Some folks have had good luck installing a cheap capture card in their PC and streaming through that. The Elgato seemed like a more hands free solution to working out the finer points of video conversion. There however are a bunch of different devices on the market that do essentially the same thing. I wanted the Elgato simply because it did not require an additional power source and could draw power entirely from my PC over USB. Since the HDMI switch and splitter each have their own power supplies, this just cut down on the total number of cords needed. Right now the hole thing is a colossal mess, and at some point I want to hook it up with significantly shorter cables. For now however it works great and I am super happy to be able to do this.