Endgame Viable

How to stream a local video file to Twitch with ffmpeg.

It occurred to me one day that I have an occasional need (“need” is a strong word here) to show off a game video that I’ve recorded, but I don’t want to wait for it to be uploaded as part of my regular schedule of YouTube uploads. It can take months for a video I’ve recorded to show up on YouTube, especially if it’s part of a game series. For example, two nights ago, I played what might someday become “episode 7” of a Resident Evil 7 video series. But at this time I have no idea if I’ll ever finish the game or upload it.

I still have unfinished Morrowind and Oblivion seriesessses on my YouTube channel, which is a constant source of consternation, so I have resolved never to upload another game series until I’m finished playing the game. So a lot of game videos accumulate on my hard drive, waiting to be uploaded.

For example, as of this writing, I have the following game series videos in various states of completion: The Surge, Hellpoint, Resident Evil 7, Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition, Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, and probably some others I can’t remember. I might record Greedfall and/or A Plague Tale, if I can figure out a good way to do it. Oh, I also have a complete playthrough of The Witcher, and a partially-completed The Witcher 2 series.

Anyway it’s a lot of videos sitting around waiting to upload someday. The idea is to make sure I have enough videos in a hopper to schedule an upload every day for the rest of time. It takes up a lot of space, but the topic of storing and backing up terabytes of video files is another topic.

The point is, sometimes I’d like to be able to publish one of the in-progress videos somewhere, and I can’t do it on YouTube. For example, Magi mentioned Hellpoint in his Humble Bundle post, and I just happen to have played it recently because I buy most Souls-like games at one point or another. I have a video sitting right here that can show exactly what Hellpoint looks like.

But I can’t upload a one-off video to YouTube today, and then upload the same video six months from now as part of a series. For one thing, YouTube does a scan and doesn’t let you upload the same video twice, and for another, it would wreck all kinds of stats. It’d be like publishing part 4 of a blog series before you finish the blog series or even post the first part, which is weird.

The obvious answer is Twitch. But Twitch is normally meant for live-streaming, something I’m not terribly interested in doing. Still, it’s a useful place to distribute/store videos, at least temporarily.

There was a brief time period when regular peons could simply upload a video file to a Twitch channel, without having to be a partner or affiliate or whatever they call it. Apparently you can’t do that anymore.

Fortunately, Twitch, to this day, is rather lax about access to their intake servers. So you can stream anything to your Twitch channel, as long as you know how to connect to an RTMP server. It doesn’t necessarily have to be recorded live with OBS or Streamlabs or whatever. It could just be a video file sitting on your hard drive.

So I setup an ffmpeg script that takes a video file as an input and streams it to Twitch. Here is an annotated version of the command I use:

I developed the above settings when I was working on setting up my own Linux RTMP server to stream to multiple services at the same time (YouTube, Twitch, and Mixer, at the time). During that time, I made use of something called the Twitch Stream Inspector, which examines the bits and bytes of your streams. Some of those settings may have come from that tool’s recommendations.

Incidentally it’s baffling to me that Twitch doesn’t appear to do any authorization on that intake server. Guess somebody’s stream key and you can start streaming videos to their channel no questions asked. Feels like a pretty big security hole they would want to fix.

Anyway if you want to see what Hellpoint gameplay looks like, you can watch it here (there’s no built-in Hugo shortcode for Twitch unfortunately), at least until Twitch deletes it I think 14 days from now. It was streamed with a command similar to the above.

Another one I streamed in this way was an annoying boss fight in The Surge. I spent a bunch of time editing that video but I don’t know if I’ll ever actually finish The Surge and upload a YouTube series. You might have to hurry to watch that one, as it’s pretty close to expiring.

It’s pretty cool. Streaming without any of the hassle of streaming. :)

Another week of playing strange games for free with a free trial of Stadia Pro. It’s really a fantastic system for trying out new games quickly. The technology is very cool. The sticking point is who pays for it, and how much this luxurious convenience is worth to a consumer.

Finding a microphone that can also be used for content creation (aka. makin' vidyas) in a noisy room is challenging.

Part of starting a new job was moving my gaming PC out of my computer room to make a dedicated “office.” (Tax deductible!) So all my gaming stuff is back in the living room, where it used to be when I first moved into this house.

My living room is fairly big, with wood floors and groovy 1970s-style wood paneling on the walls. Readers who have done any music or podcast recording might be able to guess that it’s a very “live” room, meaning it reverberates a lot. Sometimes that’s good, like if you’re performing in a musical theater. In this case it’s bad. Anything that my dog or cat does in the room with me, or in the kitchen, or in the hall, or pretty much anywhere, comes through very loud and clear on any video. See: Any video on my channel between 2016 and 2017.

If this picture does not scream out 'crazy bouncing wave reflections' then I need to revoke your audio engineering credentials. P.S. this picture is from 2016 before I moved in. It is now filled with clutter, which actually helps a lot with the reflections!

That’s actually the main reason I moved my gaming PC into a smaller, carpeted room. (That and it was too cold in the living room during winters.) When you’re trying to record sound through a microphone in a controlled way, the basic priorities are:

A lot of audio engineers will tell you the room is the most important part. From a scientific, physics perspective, at least. You can record decent audio in a good room with a bad microphone, but it’s much, much harder to record decent audio in a bad room with a good microphone. Recording is all about the sound waves and how they bounce.

If you can’t do anything about the room, the only thing you can do is move the microphone as close to the source as possible and use the least possible gain. You can rely on the physics of sound pressure levels and that old reliable -6dB-per-doubling-of-distance.

For recording game videos in a noisy room, that means using a headset microphone, or possibly a lavalier microphone.

A lavalier would probably be my first choice, but good lavaliers are kind of a pain to find and setup, because apparently nobody feels like they need to make wired lavalier microphones with plain old XLR or even USB connectors for game video enthusiasts or streamers. This seems like an oddly large hole in the market if you ask me. I would think every Twitch streamer out there would immediately buy a USB lavalier microphone so they don’t have to wear those big dumb bulky headsets on camera and worry about it messing up their carefully-styled cosplay hair, or deal with the audio engineering headaches of a condenser mic setup (see: room noise), if one but existed in the marketplace. But alas, they don’t. So I decided to look for a gaming headset.

I started with a Corsair HS50 headset. It’s plain and black, like a headset should be, without any blinking gamer lights. It was about $50. I figured that would be a reasonable “mid-range” price point that should have a microphone that was better than awful, but perhaps not good enough for Abbey Road Studios.

Boy, was I wrong. The microphone in this headset is terrible.

Here are the only three videos I recorded with the Corsair headset. Keep in mind I did a lot of post-processing work to try to improve the quality of these microphone tracks. I used compression and EQ. I boosted the bass frequencies by a full +12dB, which is a ridiculous amount.

The headphones are fine, I guess. Big and bulky and closed-ear, which I don’t particularly care for because I get kind of anxious when I can’t hear the sounds of the world around me in my quiet house living by myself, but I expected that. They’re reasonably comfortable, with “memory foam” ear cups.

But the microphone is just awful. It’s by far the worst microphone I’ve ever purchased in my lifetime. The tiny little stereo microphones in my cell phone are far better. I’m pretty sure I have guitar pickups that could do a better job of recording a voice. Telephones from the 1970s did a better job.

Audacity spectrum plot of the Corsair headset microphone, something that every headset review should include but never does.

It’s probably hard to read that picture. It’s basically got a frequency response between 500hz and 5khz. Which is terrible. It sounds like you’re Neil Armstrong on the moon. The 5khz rolloff wouldn’t bother me so much, but losing frequencies below 500hz is the worst, because your 200-500hz range is where most of the best parts of a voice come from.

I never would have bought it if even a single reviewer out there had simply shown me that spectrum plot in a review, a task that might take them 5 minutes. But alas, every single reviewer of gaming products, without exception, is not very good at performing even the most basic of audio tests. A massive sweeping generalization that is 100% accurate. The best you’re going to get from a gaming product reviewer is “it sounds good” or “it sounds great.” Maybe a truly advanced gaming product reviewer might throw in “it sounds a little thin.” Followed by a lot of paragraphs about the dumb RGB lights. Gaming product reviewers are literally the worst reviewers. But I digress.

It’s not a fair comparison, because there’s EQ and compression applied to this sample, but here’s the plot for what I was using before moving back to the living room, a midrange Rode NT1 large-diaphragm condenser microphone I got in circa 1999:

Audacity spectrum plot of an old Rode NT1 condenser microphone.

That is a frequency range of 100hz up to about 13khz, with all the good frequencies intact.

The point is, the Corsair headset is so bad it would be a significant step backwards in the audio quality I’ve developed over the years. It’s probably an acceptable headset for video calls or maybe online gaming that you’re not recording. There’s an argument to be made that it’s accentuating the frequencies that make speech more intelligible.

But it’s hot garbage for content creation. In my opinion, of course.

This is the second time I’ve been disappointed in a Corsair product, so that gaming brand is now officially dead to me. I have a Corsair K55 keyboard, which is a cheap plastic $20 keyboard in a $50 package with blinky lights. In fact, I dare say most products “for gamers” are usually a waste of money, but that’s a different topic.

Anyway, back to the headset. I found myself having to make a choice. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do much about the sound treatment in my living room, at least not in the foreseeable future. So I could either continue to buy cheaper headsets, trying to find one with a decent-enough microphone by trial and error (good luck finding a review of a headset product from someone with even minimal knowledge of microphone technology), throwing good money after bad, or just skip all that and go straight to buying an expensive headset made specifically for my application from a trusted microphone brand.

I probably would have done the former, or even tried to stick with the Corsair, except that I just happened to have gotten a new job recently, so I splurged and went with the latter, and bought a Shure BRH50M broadcast headset.

It’s way more expensive than what I should have paid for making free game videos. I don’t recommend it unless you’re a person who enjoys dabbling in the arcane arts of audio engineering and recording, and such things are a fun hobby for you. It uses XLR and 1/4" connectors, so you’ll also need some kind of audio interface or a mixer to make use of it (I had those already). It won’t attach directly to a computer; it has no USB interface.

How’s the quality? It’s good. The microphone has a lot better frequency response than the Corsair, and it’s got a superbly low noise floor, the true indicator of a good microphone. (Noise floor is a very easy objective measurement that game product reviewers should also include, incidentally.) But it’s certainly not a replacement for a large-diaphragm condenser microphone. Unsurprisingly it’s roughly the quality of a Shure SM57 or SM58, the workhorse of the music industry. But it sounds like you’re speaking directly into the microphone, like the singer that’s “eating the mic,” because it’s a hypercardioid mic that’s literally an inch from your mouth. It’s got that sportscaster-at-the-big-game sort of sound (which is exactly what it was made for I think), and all the inherent problems that come with it.

But for my purposes it’s good enough, because it completely rejects any room echo or noise around me, which is exactly what I wanted. The dog and the cat could be fighting each other and knocking furniture over 10 feet away and you wouldn’t be able to hear it in a video. Just don’t expect to be recording any singing vocals with it because it’ll pick up a lot of plosives and breathing that you wouldn’t get with a desk microphone or a lavalier. It picks up a lot of sibilance too, so get your de-essers ready. I definitely wouldn’t record a podcast with it, unless you’re recording your podcast in a wind tunnel or in a stadium full of cheering fans.

Audacity spectrum plot of Shure BRH50M

I didn’t draw on that spectrum plot because I didn’t feel like it anymore. It should be reasonably obvious that it more closely resembles the Rode spectrum plot than the Corsair spectrum plot. It’s got a frequency response of around 100hz to 7khz, which is about what I’d expect from a dynamic microphone and perfectly fine for my needs.

Here’s one video with the Shure microphone. All my recent ones use it. I’m still tweaking the settings so it’ll improve over time. This game happens to be Human Fall Flat, which I’ve mentioned before, but it’s a pretty good physics puzzle game, so I don’t mind mentioning it again.

They aren’t the most comfortable ear cups I’ve ever worn, though, which is a bummer. They’re supra-aural, which means they sit on top of your ears, not circum-aural, which enclose your ears and sit on your skull. I kind of wish I could just wear plain ear buds instead. But for my use-case, I typically only play game sessions for 30-45 minutes at a time, so that’s the only amount of time I need to wear the headset.

Anyway I’ve inserted this Shure headset into my normal microphone audio path for all my videos now. My standard microphone path goes into a Mackie mixer (where I add a little low EQ and cut a little midrange EQ), through an outboard Behringer compressor to level out the ridiculously high dynamic range between when I’m mumbling to myself and when I’m yelping in surprise (it also has a noise gate), then into a Scarlet audio interface and into OBS. With an ffmpeg de-esser filter in post-processing, this new Shure headset doesn’t sound half bad. Still plenty of room for improvement, but good enough for now.

At least until I put up some curtains or something around my computer desk so I can return to a desk mic. Don’t hold your breath for that to happen anytime soon though.

Weirdly, though, this Shure microphone doesn’t sound that much better than a $30 Plantronics 478 USB headset I got some 10 years ago. A lot of people, including me, might not be able to tell the difference if they were played back-to-back. So it’s certainly possible to find a decent-sounding headset at a good price, if you can find one. (I don’t think you can buy the 478 anymore, though.) I would have used the 478 in the first place, except the foam on the earcups disintegrated, leaving nothing but bare plastic sitting on my ears, which isn’t very comfortable, even for just 30 minutes. Also the Plantronics picks up more room noise.

For comparison, this Valheim video used the Plantronics headset:

As for the Corsair headset, I unplugged the detachable boom mic and last used it to listen to podcasts from my phone while mowing the back yard. They’re not even very good at that, because they don’t block mower noise very well, either.

Setting up Hugo, the static site generator, to build my blog with Microsoft Azure.

Last time on The Quest, we mused about trying to merge blog posts, tweets, and videos into one web site. It’s still on my mind, and you can see some of that experimentation in the form of my weekly video posts. (Those posts are built with a Go program I wrote, a part of my “learning Go in 2021” process.)

But I’ve neglected to post yet about the massive blog overhaul I did at the beginning of 2021, which was something I wanted to document for posterity, because it’s already starting to fade from my memory. It’s a big topic, though, and it takes me roughly seven years to write long blog posts these days.

Way back toward the end of December 2020, I had setup the Hugo static site generator to locally build my web site the way I wanted it. Once the files were built, I could upload the HTML files from my hard drive to a web host through ftp, just like the days of yore, but that’s tedious and slow and generally awful. There’s a reason people stopped making web sites that way.

So I started looking for ways to automate the process. There are several places that host “static web sites” through a continuous integration platform. The Hugo documentation mentions AWS, Netlify, Render, Firebase, GitHub Pages, and several others. They all have pros and cons and various pricing structures. Most don’t let you make a free site bigger than around 1 GB, which is pretty small if your site has any images. (Endgame Viable accumulated over 2GB of images in eight years.)

But I stumbled upon a 2019 blog post at melcher.dev that discussed hosting Hugo static web sites on Azure really cheap, or even free if you can stay below a 5 GB free limit. I also found some useful information from a 2019 Medium post by @kurtmkurtm.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Microsoft’s Static Website Hosting is still in testing, which became a big problem toward the end. So I can’t quite use it to host the site yet, but I was able to set it up to build the site.

At least 50% of the information in those blog posts was already obsolete or didn’t apply to my situation, so I had to go off-script quite a bit. Here’s what I ended up doing, to the best of my memory:

After all that I could write posts on my local hard drive, commit them to git, push them to Azure and build the web site with one button press. It made a working Azure static website, but the link was https://endgameviable.z13.web.core.windows.net/. If you can live with publishing a link like that to the world, you’d be done. It’d be fine if you were starting a brand new blog I suppose. Unfortunately I had eight years of blog posts with very different-looking permalinks, and I didn’t want anyone to have to change their links.

So I worked on setting up a custom domain for the Azure static website, which turned out to be a major stumbling block. That’s also when it dawned on me that there is no such thing as an .htaccess file with static web hosting, so redirects are out of the question.

Limitations I ran into:

In the end, I had to keep my Apache shared hosting site, at least for now. I setup an Azure build task to sftp the completed web site to my shared web host (another fun adventure), where I can use .htaccess and the SSL certificates work properly. (SSL certs were a recent addition to my web host, finally.) That’s the current state of the blog.

Whew. I intended that to be a much more polished post with screenshots and everything, because it’s a massive topic. But this draft has been sitting around for five months now and it’s well past time to move on.

Next time, I hope to talk about moving from Azure to Amazon AWS, where many things will become possible, including a plan I’ve hatched to support comments without resorting to a “normal” comment platform.

And now we move into videos of games I’ve played during a Free Two-Month Stadia Pro Trial phase (which I got from someone at my new job). There are a whole lot of free games to click on and play with a Stadia subscription, but the down side is that 99% of them are games you’ve never heard of before.

Some Twitter activity prompted me to think about how and why I follow some D&D shows.

You might find this shocking, but D&D shows are just about the only form of media content I consume at the moment. I don’t watch any television shows or movies. I don’t have Netflix or Hulu or whatever the Paramount or Disney things are.

I think it’s a proven fact now that, thanks to streaming services falling all over themselves to shove any dumb thing out the door as fast and cheap as possible, most all scripted content is garbage, not worth anyone’s time. I’d rather play a game than watch television almost 100% of the time.

Note: It’s probably not a proven fact. It might just be me.

Because oddly, I keep seeing people talking about binge-watching tons of things during the pandemic. (For myself, I can’t think of a single movie I’ve watched during the pandemic, and I can only think of one television show that I watched, but it was only four episodes on Amazon Prime, the only streaming service I have, and I haven’t yet gotten around to the remaining episodes.)

Anyway, back to D&D, I think I wrote about Critical Role before. I still keep up with that one pretty much as soon as they release a new episode. I rarely sit and watch them, unless I’m eating, because that’s not really what you do with them. Instead I turn them on and do other things, as if it were a podcast, and I only pay attention to the screen when something interesting starts to happen.

It’s actually a lot like binge-watching Netflix shows, now that I think about it, except you’re supposed to do other things and not pay attention.

I think that’s the thing people don’t understand about D&D shows, and why people bounce off them. Roughly 90% of the running time, it’s boring as hell. Overall, D&D is quite boring to watch, especially if you don’t know any of the characters or what they’re doing. With Critical Role specifically, particularly lately, you have to anticipate that there’s only about 15-30 minutes of good content within each 4-hour episode.

There’s a YouTube channel that comes up in my recommendations sometimes that just makes a copy of each Critical Role episode and cuts out the boring parts, leaving roughly 30 minute run times. It’s a massive copyright infringement and I hope they go to jail for it, but they do a really good job of distilling down the parts of the episodes that are actually fun to watch. Critical Role themselves should put out an edited version of their show like that and I bet it would be very popular.

Anyway, you’re not really watching a “show” or a “story.” It’s more like you’re watching people brainstorm a story on the fly. It’s like watching the writing room for a show, where people pitch ideas back and forth around a table, and eventually something sticks and the story advances.

It occurs to me that watching a D&D show is basically the exact same experience as watching most sports. I find this comparison particularly funny, because D&D nerds are the kind of people who are most likely to say “sportsball” and believe that sports are dumb.

But if you think about it, a football game–American football, that is–is basically the same ratio of boredom-to-excitement as a typical D&D show episode, and they’re roughly the same running time.

You’re not really paying attention to a football game every second from beginning to end, you only focus on it when someone catches a ball and they’re running to the end zone and the crowd starts cheering. It’s the same with D&D: You only start paying attention when someone rolls a natural one while they’re crossing the bridge over the chasm of death. (Watch a live D&D game played before a crowd sometime and you’ll understand what I mean.)

It’s the slow buildup of tension and then the sudden release, so to speak. That’s the drug.

So if you understand why people like watching sports, then you should also understand why people like watching D&D shows. If you don’t understand sports or competition, well, I can’t help you much. And if you already understand D&D shows but you hate sports, well, you’re also a mystery to me, because my analogy is perfect and unassailable.

These thoughts were prompted by a tweet I read the other day, which I’ll anonymize to protect the innocent: “I’ve never been able to finish a single episode of any of those shows. I think their awareness of an audience spoils it for me. Is there a difference between roleplaying and acting? It always seems like acting to me."

I thought about that tweet a lot. I translated it into, essentially, “I don’t get it, D&D shows are dumb.” A lot of smart people think that. I used to think that. But why don’t I think that anymore? Is there a rational explanation? I mean, besides the one I just gave above about the sportsball, that is.

I’m pretty sure the transformation for me happened exactly when I got to Critical Role, Campaign 2 Episode 12, “Midnight Espionage." I talked about that before.

Specifically, the infamous “hospital heist” that begins around here. I couldn’t stop laughing through that entire thing, and I finally realized, “Oh this is why people like watching D&D streams so much!”

It’s the moments when everything goes wrong that make it all worthwhile, and how the DM pushes the players toward making reactive decisions, and how the players react, and how they play their characters during those reactions. It’s the “collaborative storytelling” that happens when the players all have great ideas at the same time. It’s pretty rare, but when it happens, it’s magical.

But if you’re a skeptic, I don’t think you’ll get it even if you click that one episode which I’ve identified as the pinnacle of D&D greatness and watch it on its own. Each episode is not self-contained. The antics and adventures and great moments in any given episode are only possible because of all the things that came before it. It’s the original version of “emergent gameplay.” Callbacks are a vitally important part of the D&D experience. So I was only able to become fully indoctrinated in episode twelve because I had made the decision to slog through the eleven episodes before that one.

An even better example of peak D&D is later in that episode, when they get to the actual heist, which begins around here and lasts for quite some time until the climax starts around here, which was a pretty impressive bit of storytelling, in my not-so-humble opinion. Honestly, Campaign 2 has continued for 100+ episodes since then and I’m not sure it’s ever returned to that level of quality since.

(Weirdly, Critical Role just put out an animated summary of that time period and skipped over almost everything that made that episode so great.)

That animated summary, by the way, is the best attempt I’ve ever seen at making a brief recap of D&D sessions. It’s still not great, but it’s better than the usual fare, which is someone just sitting theretelling you what happened, which ends up sounding like extremely boring exposition, the part you should always cut out of a book, no matter how excited the person sounds saying it.

That should be a lesson to all the DMs out there: I’m sorry to tell you, but every single time you excitedly tell us what happened in your exciting games, it sounds boring. Every. Single. Time. This is a weirdly fascinating topic to me: How do you write about and/or summarize a tabletop session in a way that is actually interesting and engaging to an external audience? Will we ever learn how to do this as a society? Who will be the first to finally crack this difficult conundrum? But I digress.

As for roleplaying versus acting, I couldn’t really think of a good answer to that. There’s a spectrum. I guess I would probably say “roleplaying” is when the player talks about their character in third person, while “acting” is when the player inhabits the character and talks in first person, like, you know, an actor. Different shows and different players behave differently. Depending on the player, there might be a constant shifting from one to the other and back again.

Critical Role is definitely a group of professional actors practicing their acting skills, which is the main reason they’re good at collaborative storytelling. And why their show has such high production values. It started out as friends playing at a table with terrible microphones and cameras, but it has evolved into a polished, professional production. They’re definitely making a “show” for an audience now, and the D&D part is secondary.

The vast majority of the other D&D streams are just people pointing webcams at themselves and trying to pretend that what they’re doing is somehow magically interesting to an audience. Most D&D games should not be broadcast. Unless you’re specifically tailoring the games to play to an audience, it’s not really worth the effort.

Here are the shows I keep up with fairly regularly right now:

And here are shows I have previously watched:

Welp I’ve run out of things to say so bye.

Smash cut to black.

Before and after I started a new job in March, my gaming time and interest plummeted to nothing, so I commenced a period of short gaming sessions of mainly free games and demos which continues to this very day.

At last, the Pillars of Eternity series comes to an end.

I had intended to play the DLC and come back to the ending later, but life circumstances got in the way.

Next on the channel will be a month or so of “random games.” I had to move my gaming PC to another room, which completely disrupted my recording setup. While fine-tuning the new setup, and adjusting to a new job, I tried out a lot of free Stadia Pro games and other samplings that didn’t require much time or energy investment.

Video adventures uploaded in the last week or so.

This post is a test of an automated script I’m thinking about using. The script fetches the RSS feed from my YouTube channel and formats the latest videos into a handy blog post. This will let blog readers know that I am, in fact, not dead, and still, in fact, playing games now and then. It’s quite a pain in the butt to keep updating a blog with that kind of information in a timely manner, not even counting writing about what’s in the games. (Some day I want to try out one of those open source AI writing services hehe.)

Anyway, on with the Pillars of Eternity adventures! (I’m almost finished uploading this series, just so you know. It will be followed by “various random free games I’ve tried out lately” videos.)

I got a two-month free trial of Stadia Pro and have been trying it out.

I was given a code to get two months of Stadia Pro for free. Apparently, a bunch of free games are available to play on Stadia Pro (every month?), so I’ve been clicking through them and trying them out.

My general opinion on Stadia after a week is that it works fine but there are occasionally noticeable artifacts and glitches and it’s not mainstream enough yet to commit to buying full price games on it. Based on how well it works, though, it wouldn’t surprise me if one or more streaming game platforms became the preferred consumer choice for casual gaming within 5 years.

For now, it’s quite good for sampling games you would never even think about buying in a million years, to confirm that yes, those games are exactly as little fun as you expected they would be.

Just click and play.

Here are the free games I’ve played so far:

Okay stealth/adventure/puzzle-style game with at least a mildly interesting dystopian start to a story and a cast of big-name voice actors. Not really my kind of game though.

Okay mix of No Man’s Sky and Borderlands and WildStar with a sense of humor that could be funny if it didn’t try just a little too hard at it.

Very cool meditative sights and sounds in a Tomb Raider-esque traversal adventure but not much … um … depth, hyuk, hyuk. Basically just wandering around collecting collectibles. Great graphics and music though.

Very cool graphics and setting and aesthetic, but it’s a side-scrolling platformer so I have no choice but to hate playing it. I’d rather watch someone else play it.

Bizarre arcade-style … something. Headache-inducing color palette. You beat up enemies and jump onto buildings and collect stuff and then you get points and level up or something. Just a bunch of nonsense game mechanics thrown together.

Somewhat like the flying part of No Man’s Sky and/or Elite: Dangerous. Nice graphics. I gave up quickly because it was impossible to control with mouse and keyboard. My brain can’t process flight simulators anymore ever since I switched away from “invert mouse.”

Sort of a game version of a Saturday morning cartoon. Very basic gameplay, but weirdly Souls-like melee combat. Mildly entertaining story (what happened to Ary’s brother???). “Wholesome” and “pure” if you’re into that kind of gross stuff.

My first experience with Superhot, I don’t know if this is an expansion or the original game. It’s mindless fun. For a few minutes, at least. Like a shooter except it’s more of a leisurely puzzle game for people who don’t want to or can’t play actual shooters. It’s a game you play while watching Netflix.

A tower defense game dressed up in pretty graphics. It’s also somewhat like a more interactive, far less complicated version of Dwarf Fortress, oddly enough. Silly graphics and voiceovers, to make murdering monsters fun for the kids, I suppose.

A super fun game about a kid’s parents getting killed in a car crash, and the resulting trauma, loss, and depression, in the form of an isometric puzzle platformer. I appreciated the metaphor, but it’s not my kind of game. (It wasn’t actually that fun.)

It’s a racing game with realistic-looking formula F1 cars. I won my first race, so I saw no need to ever play it again. (Admittedly I was playing with tons of assistance, but still, I left the AI opponents in the dust easily.)

A surprisingly fun physics puzzle game where you have to figure out how to traverse across terrain using your arms and body as levers. I expected it to be terrible but it actually isn’t. In fact I dare say it’s the best game in this list, if I had to pick one to actually buy.

I deliberately avoided clicking on this one because, even though the title makes me chuckle, I knew that the title was probably the best thing this game had to offer. I was right. The joke wears out very quickly and you’re left with nothing but unoriginal JRPG mechanics.