It’s not perfect, but it’s more than enough.

I’ve been a fan of video games my entire life, from the days of the legendary SNES to now, where I have a few home consoles in my living room. Games have been with me my entire life, and while I’ve never really been able to get into mobile gaming, I’ve found a solution: use my phone as a console.

For the past few weeks, for one reason or another, I have been unable to spend time playing games on my video game console. I simply cannot find the time or space to sit on the couch and enjoy a few hours of gaming. My idea was take advantage of cloud gaming to bring video games to my handheld deviceand the result was a truly satisfying experience: although I admit that I prefer playing on my living room TV, playing on my mobile phone is more than enough.

I don’t know if cloud gaming is the future, but it’s enough.

Or at least, that’s enough in many cases. Cloud gaming can offer an almost perfect experience if we talk about titles with a single-player campaign: playing games like Control, Alan Wake 2 or the Yakuza saga, for example, can be a great experience on our mobile screen. This is because in this type of games We do not rely on a perfect connection for multiplayer.you only need an acceptable response time to enjoy the combat and the story.

To use my mobile phone as a portable video game console, I took advantage of the benefits of cloud gaming: thanks to the PlayStation Remote Play application, I was able to access my entire PlayStation 5 games catalog from the cloudstreaming. At home, with a 100 Mbps connection, I can enjoy my game catalog without any problem.

The result is similar when using the Xbox app and an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription to access a hundred games in streaming. Indeed, while the PlayStation application requires that I own a PS5, I can access Xbox games via the cloud without needing the console, simply with an active subscription to Game Pass Ultimate.

By adding these apps to a mobile joystick accessory, or a PlayStation or Xbox controllerwe basically have a portable console with access to many games via the cloud. Some of the games I have enjoyed the most in this way are: the Yakuza saga, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Genshin Impact, Fallout 4 and Persona 3.

Of course, the streaming gaming experience isn’t perfect, even for games with a single-player campaign. gap (or latency) and connection problems can harm the experience, although nowadays they are less of a problem, especially if we play connected to a WiFi network with good speed. These applications allow us to access our favorite console games from our mobile without sacrificing too much. I even dare to say that it seems like a futuristic experience, like A glimpse into a time when we won’t need consoles anymore but we can enjoy our games on any device.

It is not necessary to use these streaming applications to turn our mobile phones into video game consoles. The Google Play Store offers a wide selection of demanding games, with campaigns that last several hours and go beyond what many expect from a mobile game. Even With a Netflix subscription we can access a wide catalog of high-quality gamesincluding three classic games from the Grand Theft Auto saga.

I don’t think mobile phones will replace consoles, but smartphones will be a platform increasingly important for the world of video gameswhich will allow us to have access to more “Triple A” titles on our handheld devices.

Cover photo | Eduardo Marín for Xataka Android

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