Today's Cloud Monday is part 1 of playing the PS4 game Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom on the PlayStation Plus Streaming Service.
This is a game that i've been interested in for a long time. it's art style has always interested me and now it's on the PlayStation Plus Premium service i took this opportunity to play it. i also thought that it's bright bold clear art style would highlight the highs and lows of streaming the game. and it did.
First things first, i'm fairly sure we saw a new issue in this video, Zebra Striping! i don't know the technical name for it, but this seems the most apt. there were a few occasions where instead of the bright colorful art, it was replaced with stripes of black and white (or maybe a greyish color). it kinda felt a bit like stream tearing so maybe the information was just missing. it didn't happen often, but as the title hints at, but that was the case with many other things in this video.
There wasn't just one issue in this video. each of the usual suspects, macroblocking, stream tearing, resolution dips, etc, cropped up at some point. it was often just one thing at a time and not for very long. it's like the video is peppered with occasional blips of issues but no one big thing. the issue is, even tho it didn't get in the way of gameplay it was very noticeable because of the games bright clear art style. each time it happened, even if it was brief, it stuck out like a sore thumb.
So on one hand it was fine to play, on the other it was distracting and took me out of the experience of playing the game. i'll do part 2 next week at a different time and day so we can see if it's something that persists.
