Monday, September 25, 2023

Cloud Monday - West of Dead - Part 1 - Streaming From PlayStation Plus Fails Repeatedly


This week's Cloud Monday video is West of Dead from Upstream Arcade. I'm playing this on PS4 and streaming it from the PlayStation Plus Premium Cloud Service. Well, i tried to.

This video is of two halves. the first half is my continued attempts to play the game, as it kept kicking me off, and then my attempts to play anything until eventually, in the second half of the video, i was able to play West of Dead.

The reality is, i'm often having to go through situations like this. West of Dead isn't the first game i've played to kick me off and stop the streaming from the cloud. All the hassle trying to get it to work is also nothing new. it's getting rarer and rarer when i can turn on my PS4 and just stream from the cloud. what i haven't shown, but may do next time, is that i nearly always have to restore my licenses. then i usually restart the PS4 as i end up with the same issues in this video. i did it today before recording but actually had restarted twice, hoping it would help.

PlayStation Plus issues aside, the goal of this series is to see how the game is for streaming and i can say that West for Dead, how little i've played so far, has some positives qualities and a couple of negatives. The negatives aren't that bad, they mostly revolve around the user interface. if at 1080p, for example, it's already a little small, it becomes almost unreadable when the service drops it's quality. But trial and error can help. As for the positives, the biggest one is that the game saves often as there are save spaces in many locations in the map. the game is also randomising the levels each time you die as you're meant to die in the game. so if you are disconnected, some progress is lost but not a lot.

I look forward to trying out the game again in part 2 and hope to have a better experience from PlayStation Plus Premium. I am thinking about making a video showing the hassle i sometimes have to go through just to play a game on the service.