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  • PS5 Remote Play on Linux – Chiaki

    Posted on by micha Comment

    Chiaki – a remote-play client for PlayStation consoles.

    Overview

    While playing Undertale on my PS5, I got a bit frustrated at some of the trophies. Spending hours spamming the X button didn’t really feel like fun and rewording gameplay. A brief search later led me to discover a remote-play option called Chiaki for Linux. 10 minutes later I had it up-and-running! Impressive.

    The remote-play session can be controlled by keyboard, or a PS5 controlled can be connected to the PC. In my case, it was just plug-and-play.

    I tweaked the config a bit to use 1080p instead of the default 720p resolution, and to use hardware acceleration. I also added Chiaki to Steam and configured it to open Chiaki using gamemode as otherwise the screensaver was kicking in. Unfortunately the Steam overlay and screenshot facility is not working (yet).

    Worked absolutely brilliantly on my setup – gigabit LAN and a 1080p-based Debian GNU/Linux 12 desktop PC.

    It was then also rather trivial to script spamming the X button using xdotool..

    Issues

    Chiaki 2.2.0 – “Extended DualSense Support” crashes the remote play session, forcing a restart of the PS5 before remote play works again. To be fair, this feature is marked experimental.

    Remote Play of streaming content (eg, PlayStation Plus Premium classic games) shows a black screen, with the streamed content being displayed on the TV. Not sure if the official PlayStation remote play application has the same problem.

    Installation

    Core Installation

    The steps were pretty simple:

    1. Install Chiaki:
      1. apt-get install chiaki
    2. Retrieve account ID (NOT your login or username)
      1. I used a python script provided by the Chiaki developers.
      2. Here’s a reddit post describing an alternative quite convoluted approach (didn’t try it)
      3. And here’s a webpage which retrieves it – by far the easiest method! (This does NOT require you enter any login credentials, but does require your account to be publicly viewable.)
    3. Enter required data
      1. Account ID
      2. Code from the console
        1. Settings -> System -> Remote Play -> Link Device
    4. ?
    5. Profit!

    Optionally:

    • Add it to your Steam library
    • Run it using gamemode
    • Tweak configuration to use hardware acceleration and higher resolution

    Linux PlayStation 📎and tagged

  • Undertale on PS5

    Posted on by micha Comment

    So I just played (and nearly completed) the cult-indy-hit Undertale on my PS5.

    Firstly, it’s an awesome little action adventure rpg thingy. If you haven’t played it, I can highly recommend it despite it’s rather old-skool looks. Quirky humour, interesting choices, and only a few hours long for a basic play-through although it has quite a lot of depth if you want to spend the time on it.

    It effectively combines puzzles and combat (via some nifty little mini-games) although exploration is quite limited. While there are some hidden areas, mostly it’s a linear story.

    My two main gripes are that there is no way to permanently speed up dialogue display and that it is very grindy to get money, which is required to get enough consumables for healing for the final fights if you’re not so good at those.

    Specifically on the PS5 port, whoever designed the trophies for this game really should go back to the drawing board; most of them are just filler and mind numbingly tedious repetition. It’s not even required to complete the game in order to Platinum it!
    Without going into spoilers, the game itself has plenty of opportunities for much better trophies which would properly reward the player. Somewhat amazed SIE approved half of these trophies!

    The game itself: 4/5
    The PS5 trophies: 2/5


    Computer Games PlayStation 📎and tagged

  • inFAMOUS (PS3) – completed

    Posted on by micha Comment

    Completed inFAMOUS today on HARD difficulty.

    Enjoyable game with good storyline. Apart from the very last battle, it wasn’t all that difficult. Unfortunately the game saves don’t track played time so not sure how long it took me as it was spread out across about 4 weekends and a couple of evenings.

    Only annoyance is that I didn’t end up with enough points to buy all the upgrades and now with the city pretty much cleaned up there’s no easy way to gain more XP. It is designed to be played multiple times, making different choices each time, but I’m not sure I’ve got the time to go through it again – much rather get started on inFAMOUS 2 now!

    For anybody starting the game, if you want to maximise your trophy collection with only a single playthrough:
    * do lots of fighting and leave some of the side-quests until later; this allows you to gain more XP in the long run. Side-quests can be completed after the main storyline is done.
    * save the game prior to every karma choice, then do each mission both ways.
    * carefully search each city block the first time you get to it and collect all the shards; otherwise searching for the last few shards will be a pain as you will have to comb the entire city for them.


    Computer Games 📎and tagged

  • Game Overview: Assassin’s Creed 4 Black Flag

    Posted on by micha Comment

    So I’ve been a bit quiet recently.  This is largely due to Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag.  Yes, I’m addicted.

    The game itself is, supposedly, in the same vein as the other Assassin’s Creed games. I don’t know because I haven’t played, or even seen, them yet.

    Generally the game is open-world, allowing you to explore the world, perform side-quests, or just live a piratical lifestyle until you decide to continue with the main quest.  The main quest varies in style (on-foot or on the ship, various types of sub-mission such as follow, eavesdrop, locate, assassinate, etc) although it’s usually quite linear within a given environment.  If you stray too far from the quest area or if you fail a primary quest objective it resets the quest.  There are usually secondary objectives as well.

    The world is quite beautifully rendered.  The humans less so – especially in some cut-scenes.  IMHO they suffer from the Uncanny Valley effect with wooden movements and unrealistic white glaring eyes being especially noticeable.  During game action this is not really noticeable though, and the main character is quite nicely animated as he performs a wide range of actions.

    Gameplay wise it’s quite varied – from parkour-style running exploration, captaining a sailing ship across the seas, pick-pocketing, sword-fighting, and even underwater diving exploration of shipwrecks.  The main character performs all actions with aplomb and the controls are reasonably simple with the character choosing the correct action depending on environment.  Unfortunately this means that sometimes he’ll try to climb a pole which is in the way rather than running around it…

    But niggles are so far few and far between, the only other one of note is that occasionally the camera won’t rotate properly.  This is most annoying when sailing as the camera controls are instrumental in selecting the ships’ weaponry during a naval battle.

    There’s also an odd “future-day” style sub-game, which pops up occasionally. Without spoiling it for others, I’d just like to mention that I personally did not find it particularly intrusive or annoying and it does add a twist, which, again, may be present in the earlier Assassin’s Creed games as well so may not be anything new for fans of the series.

    All up I think this is a great game.

     

    Pros:

    • Nice graphics and animation.
    • Open-world gameplay (when not in a main-mission) with lots of variety.
    • Interesting main storyline.
    • Uses plenty of historical data to make world seem believable.

    Cons:

    • Cannot choose style of character (ie, “nice” or “evil”).
    • In-game actions do not influence the storyline (story is “on rails”).
    • Some cut-scenes are constantly repeated and get “old”.
    • Character sometimes chooses poor actions, especially in complicated situations.

    Bugs:

    • Camera-control sometimes buggy.
    • Occasional “frozen” enemies which can’t be interacted with.

    Difficulty:

    • Easy – Medium

    Personal Score:

    • 9/10

    Computer Games PS4 📎and tagged

  • UPlay Rubbish

    Posted on by micha Comment

    Hey and welcome to my first blogged rant!
    So I’ve been playing Assassins Creed 4 for the last 2 days (great game so far, I’ll do a separate  writeup another time) but what is really starting to annoy me is UPlay. It’s a Ubisoft thing and in AC4 it prompts you to sign in. Twice. EVERY TIME YOU START THE GAME! Just bleep off and let me enjoy the game. Nobody wants it so just take the hint and stop bothering me.

    UPDATE: So I finally caved in and registered a UPlay account and Passport.  To Ubisoft’s credit, this is now free (despite the text still saying to purchase it), but frankly, I shouldn’t have to just to avoid 2 annoying prompts.


    PS4 📎and tagged

  • Game Completed: Killzone 2

    Posted on by micha Comment

    So I finally played through Killzone 2, figured I should have some background before embarking on Killzone Shadowfall.

    On the whole quite enjoyed it, playing through on standard difficulty, except for the end boss. Despite reading tactics I ended up wussing out and completing the last fight on easy.  Which is weird – everybody said -getting- to him was the difficult bit, actually taking him out isn’t that bad. For me it was the other way around, getting through his minions was doable, but one-on-one (Rico is worse than useless) proved impossible for me. Just have no idea how one is supposed to take down an invisible teleporting dude with a super machinegun and one-hit-kill if he gets too close to you, which he keeps doing because he teleports behind you.  On easy it was tough but doable – requiring significantly fewer hits.

    An FPS-maniac I, clearly, am not.


    PS3 📎and tagged

  • Game Overview – Tearaway

    Posted on by micha Comment

    I’ve been playing Tearaway over the last few days, another great little game from the studio which brought us LittleBigPlanet.

    The style is definitely recognisably Media Molecule and the game takes full advantage of the PSVita’s various controls and input mechanisms, including the front and rear touchpads, the cameras, and the tilt sensors.  At times this can be a little overwhelming, having to balance the PSVita on your fingers while trying to move the character using the thumbsticks – so certain levels are not really playable on a moving bus.

    There are a few other niggles which detract from this otherwise fantastic title.

    Progression

    One of the worst is the fact that while there is a bookmarks and restore point system, there is no way to save custom bookmarks or to return to a given restore point in a level. Coupled with the fact that some restore points are “invisible”, and that sometimes there are points of no return which aren’t clearly marked it makes 100% collecting a bit of a chore as it’s not always possible to return to an earlier part of a level.  So levels have to be replayed several times in order to explore the entire level.

    Camera

    Another issue is the camera – usually it is free allowing the gamer to rotate it about, but in certain areas or sequences it is locked down making exploring a bit annoying.  It also has a nasty habit of moving during some sequences which results in badly angled jumps.

    Luckily there’s a way to switch to a first-person view through the in-game camera (once collected), which allows free viewing of the world.

    Content Creation

    At various points in the game it’s necessary to create some simple custom content to progress. The idea is great and on the whole works well, but the lack of precision in the input mechanism left me disappointed with some of my creations. Not sure there’s any way to improve on this given the platform, possibly by adding more drawing tools, but that would be at the danger of taking away from the immediacy of the game.

    Bugs

    I only came across a single issue where the dialogue did not continue in a cut-scene, and had to restart the level.  Apart from that one time the game seemed pretty solid.

    Pros:

    • Lovely innovative paper-based graphics
    • Good use of the entire PSVita featureset
    • Fun 3rd person platformer with unique content-creation elements

    Cons:

    • At times the controls are fiddly
    • Camera is locked at times or moves unexpectedly
    • Points of no-return in levels are not obvious and make 100% collecting a chore

    Conclusion

    If you like platformers or titles which are a little bit different you’ll love Tearaway. It’s a great addition to the PSVita catalogue.


    Computer Games 📎and tagged