It’s Creator Appreciation Week here in Blaugust-land. In years past, I’ve used topical week to talk about podcast that I love. I haven’t been listening to many new podcasts as of late, so this year I’m switching it up and giving a shout out to Parsec. If you’ve never heard of Parsec before, it’s an extremely low-latency remote desktop application geared towards gaming. And it’s free for personal use!

My main use for it is using it to play games that don’t support online multiplayer. My friend group is spread throughout the US so we use it a lot to play couch co-op games like the teenage mutant ninja turtles game. We’ve also used it to play single player games in the “pass the controller” style while sitting on our virtual couch like Little Hope.

I’ve been using it for years and it has always worked as advertised. We still get some latency, nothing is perfect, but for the most part controls are smooth and the frames don’t stutter much. We’ve even used it to play a mildly successful run of Dark Souls 3 where each of us were in charge of a single control of the character. I was on attacking, Blades was on healing and dodging, and CC was on movement. It was wild!

It’s a nice application, and while it can have some weird audio issues with Discord sometimes, I haven’t found another program like it.