VAL0R
Banned
I haven't been a PC gamer since the old days of point-and-click adventures when I was a kid. My computer is a 5-ish year old very basic Dell. No graphics cards, whistles and bells or anything like that. I pay a little extra monthly for a good internet package because my son is a competitive Halo tournament player. So my internet is decent.
My son had been hogging the Series X in the basement during the Halo flight beta, while I was itching to try The Ascent. So I decided to give it a whirl on the Xcloud beta from my bedroom PC. I went to the website and I logged in with my Microsoft account. My son came up to help his old man out and I asked how to get the controller working. He tells me to just plug the Series X controller into my PC tower's USB port. I said, "that's it!?" Sure enough, my controller is immediately recognized in seconds and I just start using it. I d-pad over to Ascent's game tile and press A. It starts loading in seconds. No download. No menus. This is all totally brainless and just works. I'm expecting that I'll play for a few minutes, but the lag will force me to move to console. But it wasn't bad at all! 100% playable.
I've heard from some gaming press talking heads that the game was too difficult. So I thought streaming might prove unacceptable for twitchy twin-stick shooting. On the contrary, I'm loving the challenge, even when playing through two of the more difficult encounters in the game that others were complaining about. The game feels very satisfying and responsive.
Can I notice some lag, some visual artifacts and other occasional issues that give away the fact that I'm streaming the game from some server rack 100 miles away? Yes. But despite that, I'm having a great time and am very impressed. And it's a free additional feature to the already stupidly good Game Pass Ultimate sub. Xbox is just crushing it with this tech. This is the future, I now have no doubt.
TLDR: Having fun. Tech works great and is caveman simple. This is the future.
My son had been hogging the Series X in the basement during the Halo flight beta, while I was itching to try The Ascent. So I decided to give it a whirl on the Xcloud beta from my bedroom PC. I went to the website and I logged in with my Microsoft account. My son came up to help his old man out and I asked how to get the controller working. He tells me to just plug the Series X controller into my PC tower's USB port. I said, "that's it!?" Sure enough, my controller is immediately recognized in seconds and I just start using it. I d-pad over to Ascent's game tile and press A. It starts loading in seconds. No download. No menus. This is all totally brainless and just works. I'm expecting that I'll play for a few minutes, but the lag will force me to move to console. But it wasn't bad at all! 100% playable.
I've heard from some gaming press talking heads that the game was too difficult. So I thought streaming might prove unacceptable for twitchy twin-stick shooting. On the contrary, I'm loving the challenge, even when playing through two of the more difficult encounters in the game that others were complaining about. The game feels very satisfying and responsive.
Can I notice some lag, some visual artifacts and other occasional issues that give away the fact that I'm streaming the game from some server rack 100 miles away? Yes. But despite that, I'm having a great time and am very impressed. And it's a free additional feature to the already stupidly good Game Pass Ultimate sub. Xbox is just crushing it with this tech. This is the future, I now have no doubt.
TLDR: Having fun. Tech works great and is caveman simple. This is the future.
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