GRcade

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strawberry floating bellends! Just seen that I got the invite to join the test for xCloud but the bloody email went into my junk mail.

This was on Outlook.com so Microsoft obviously don't trust their own bloody emails!

Had a bit of a go with this tonight, unfortunately my router is having a bit of a moment and it's refusing to work on 5ghz so I was stuck in 2.4ghz and the results were not great - stuttery, lots of input lag, audio cutting out etc.

I need to fix my router and give it a fair shot before I can really comment though, hoping that will resolve some or all of my problems!

It doesn't work well at all on 2.4ghz wifi here either, just works on 5ghz for me.

Yeah I really need to get 5ghz working before I can assess it properly, it would be unfair otherwise.

I did quickly try it with my tablet hooked up to an ethernet adapter and surprisingly that didn't really make much difference either. I may need to explore some further settings on my router to see if it's holding things back in some other way.

Got my 5ghz WiFi working and boy did it make a difference!

Played a couple of hours of stuff last night and, for the most part, it was absolutely brilliant. There are still a few kinks and drawbacks like the occasional artefacts or sound blips and some games displayed a touch more input lag than others (Forza Horizon 4 was not really playable as a result of this) but overall it was very, very impressive.

Forza was fine for me for input lag, it's just games work for 10 minutes or less before the screen freezes up on me and I have to minimize and restore the app. There's also sound issues and the wierd visual stuff going on.

Yeah not quite sure what was going on with Forza because I played a bunch of other things that relied on fast input and didn't have the same problems.

Might give it another go and see how it behaves.

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Halo: The Master Chief Collection
Destiny 2
Sid Meier's Civilization VI
Batman: The Enemy Within – The Complete Season (Episodes 1-5)
Batman: The Telltale Series – The Complete Season (Episodes 1-5)
The Wolf Among Us
Wasteland 2: Directors Cut
The Surge
SUPERHOT
Portal Knights
GoNNER - BLÜEBERRY Edition
Kingdom Two Crowns
Sparklite
Tracks – The Train Set Game
Train Sim World 2019

Nice, although I still get too much input lag to make any kind of fast paced games a possibility with this which is a shame. Will give some of these a try and see if there's any improvement.

The games in the xCloud demo, do you have to own them to play from the selection? Did Microsoft say anything using xCloud on an Xbox? - ie. so you could access your library without needing to install your games.

No, the xCloud games in the preview are there for all in the preview. You are streaming from the cloud. No news on Xcloud on the Xbox itself that I am aware of.

That's pretty cool then. I really want to test this when they release the iOS version.

So I'm absolutely loving this, the technology isn't perfect but it's easily good enough to play games with. Currently playing Telltale Batman which seems like a perfect fit as any latency isn't a major issue.

One slight annoyance I have is having to resync my controller every time I want to switch between phone and Xbox. Is there any way around this? It's so annoying I'm actually considering buying another one just for mobile play.

I've been enjoying this but have used it less that I expected due to the slight latency making certain types of games off limits. For the right experiences (Telltale stuff is probably spot on) it is a great solution.

Update: Had another go at this last night, this time playing the original Halo CE from the Master Chief Collection and damn it worked really well! Controls were responsive, everything looked and sounded as if it was running natively on the phone and there was no lag or stutter at all for the whole time I was playing.

Not sure if there has been an update or tweak to the setup that helped with the input latency or if Halo is just a better game for it, but I'm going to go back to some of the games that I had problems with before and see if they feel better as well.