ironymaiden | 6/366 cloudrig

C loves Battletech. he literally owns almost every game book published under all the publishers that have owned the property. it has zero appeal to me but it brings him a great deal of joy.

C has always wanted the video games, but my household has never been a part of the PC Master Race. C is a native Mac user; i'm OS-fluid but generally like the happy medium of the Mac candy shell over *nix. we had a PC for work-related reasons, but it had business specs (in 2009) and was never going to run games.

we talked about building a gaming PC, but the more i thought about building or buying, the more annoyed i got about getting a giant piece of hardware that might not even get used that much. (frex, the xbox is more overpriced bluray player than game machine. both of us are either obsessed with a game or not playing video games at all. i dunno why.) plus i'm the technician so the build would be my project to do and i just couldn't bring myself to care enough.

so i did some research to see where cloud gaming had gotten to, because setting that up would be fun. and the answer is that you can rent a prebuilt muscular VM*, remote in with Parsec, and run your Battletech game on an underpowered 13in 2015 Macbook. it works fine. i don't know yet about something that's super concerned about lag, but for playing a turn-based strategy game, there appears to be no downside.

well, so far. i just got C up and running tonight. he appears to be fully engaged and experiencing joy.

*it may be cheaper to do spot pricing on AWS in the future, but the Paperspace setup was so turnkey that i have no issue with paying them a few cents more an hour. there is an AMI for Parsec available and i have an account set up with permissions for the instance size i would need, but the AWS interface is really unfriendly - and i need C to be able to turn the VM instance on and off by himself.