Remote Play Over The Internet – Playing The PS4 At Work

Back in the day I managed, after an awful lot of fiddling, to hook my PlayStation 3 up to my PSP for about two minutes whilst at home and it barely worked. It was a bit useless to be honest, there were very few games to play so all you could do was fiddle about on the XMB.

In his initial overview of the features, Blair could not get the PS4 and PS Vita Remote Play to work over the internet, so I was not holding out much hope that I would get any response from the system, considering that I was at work and the public WiFi here is rather slow. I had already synced up my Vita with my PlayStation 4 on launch day and I knew its big brother was in standby mode at home, but even so I didn’t expect it to work.

Nevertheless I turned on the Vita, tapped the PS4 Link icon and selected Remote Play. The Vita then spent about 30 seconds looking for my PS4 on the local network and obviously failed to find it, so went off to search the internet, the screen helpfully explaining this may take a few minutes.

Thirty seconds later the screen changed, and there was my PS4. It had worked! No fuss, no hassle, click a few icons and there was the new PS4 UI in glorious blue. I will admit to being utterly amazed when I realised that it had worked, Remote Play is one of those things that seems like a good idea that never works in practise, but it had.

It was time to try some games, so I clicked over to Resogun and within seconds of it loading up, the title screen was in front of me and the music was playing. There seemed to be a small amount of lag on the controls but as I mentioned earlier, I was running on a rather useless WiFi connection. The graphics occasionally glitched but again I put this down to a dodgy internet connection in the office (I run 100mb fibre optic at home, so it’s not that).

I have since tested Flower, Killzone single player and multiplayer, Contrast, DC Universe Online and Warframe on my Vita over the internet and they all worked. Killzone multiplayer was the worst in terms of graphical glitches and lag, probably because the PS4 is uploading data to the servers as well as trying to stream, so I spent most of time as a sniper but it was just about playable.

You probably won’t be able to play games – or at least not as well – that require split second decisions such as Need For Speed via Remote Play, but for slower paced games such as Contrast or Flower the tech works perfectly (including the Vita tilt controls mapping for those in a DualShock 4 in Flower), and the important thing to remember is this tech works now, today. So, in a couple of years from now, broadband speeds should have increased further and the graphical hiccups should vanish completely.

The only problem I can see is I that I still prefer to buy disc versions of games and obviously while you are miles away from the PS4 you cannot change discs. I shall be giving the Remote Play a through testing over Christmas whilst back at the folks, and if it works well then I may just have to start buying digital copies of games.

Have you had any luck with Remote Play over the internet?