Mobile Friday - Neodori Forever - When Style Comes Before The Player Experience

For Mobile Friday this week is i tried out Neodori Forever from Strobetano. when i recorded the video i didn't know that the game was also out on Switch and PlayStation 4.

It's hard not to go into this game thinking you'd be getting an experience similar to Ridge Racer or Out Run, basically one of those arcade style racers from the late Mega Drive early PlayStation era, and i admit i thought that was what i was going to get. it feels like that, to a certain extent, was the goal of the developers. the graphic style, the art style, the play style, and the music all work together to create a game which pulls on nostalgia but in a modern way.

You can hear it in my voice as i play the game how my excitement and enthusiasm dwindles and becomes more frustration with it. it has all the things i mentioned above but it seemingly completely drops the ball when it comes to the players experience playing the game. right from the off it drops you into a race with no tutorial or no option to practice in a time attack mode. there are other instances of it not providing information. for example, i still have no idea why i was collecting coins. i have no idea what the police did. and it took too long for me to work out that the fuel canisters were actually replenishing my health.

It's hard to think of what else the game did right. the only other highlight i can think off is how, in the settings, there was an option to resize the UI. i tried it out and found what i thought worked. but then throughout the rest of the game the Dynamic Island and the curved corners of my phone's screen got in the way. thankfully it rarely was anything critical or important, but it just highlights how the developers had a goal and implemented it but in such a way that it didn't fully take into account the player experience.

It's worth mentioning that there were no extra downloads starting the game for the first time. but i can't recommend this game for those on data plans due to the excessive amounts of adverts.  i recorded around 50 minutes of gameplay, but ended up having to cut nearly 7 minutes of it due to the adverts in the game. i think in all there were 18 adverts. each time, the game never asked my permission to play them. there was no warning either. there's no health system, there's no energy system, there's no countdown. the adverts just ended up playing after every race attempt, win or lose. imagine playing the game for 45 minutes 5 days a week. lets say that's 15 unskippable adverts. i dare to think how much data 75 video adverts would use up.

So, for the second week running, i can't recommend getting this game on iPhone. it's just a bad experience for the player. However, getting this on console could be much better as there wouldn't be soo many intrusive adverts, each with a different quality, length, and even aspect ratio. plus, console versions would be better adapted for controllers and offer rumble. as for me, i have deleted the game.

Puzzle & Dragons Tuesday - Nintendo Switch Edition - Miya Cup - Achievement Run

Welcome to Puzzle & Dragons Tuesday! Sit back and either watch me play through, with no commentary, the cup or leave it running in the background as BGM!

I play and earn all the achievements from The Miya Cup! (2023/6/5 9:00～2023/6/12 8:59 JST) in Puzzle & Dragons: Nintendo Switch Edition whilst using a GamePad and a docked Nintendo Switch.

This is up there as one of the shortest videos for this series. There were no connection issues, battles finished quickly, and there were no pauses. it's definitely one of the smoother cup runs i've done. in the 6 games i played, there were 3 wins, two 2nds, and a third place finish.

I mostly understood the gimmick this week, but i didn't manage to beat the boss. it looked like most the people i played with didn't beat it either. later on, you'll see i start adding more "L" shape matches but i don't think i quite grasped which colors gave me the bonus damage.

This week i played against:

ルーチア - Rank 65

しろねこ - Rank 62

キグナス - Rank 64

ブロ:BR - Rank 67

ふーー - Rank 78

Cloud Monday - Ghostbusters: The Video Game - Remastered - Part 1 - Control Lag And Other Things

Today's Cloud Monday is part 1 of playing Ghostbusters: The Video Game - Remastered on PS4 via the PlayStation Plus Premium Cloud Streaming Service.

This  is a game that i have played before when it came out before in 2009. i don't remember what platform i played it on, maybe it was Xbox 360. but i haven't played it since. Ghostbusters: The Video Game - Remastered is a new game to the PlayStation Plus Premium Cloud Streaming Service and i was curious and excited to go back to it after all these years. the length of this video is an example of how much i was enjoying it, but also how the start of the game just flows from scenario to scenario.

But it wasn't a smooth experience. quite quickly i noticed how much like a PS3 "Pro" game it looked like, and later on i'd wonder if the video had some Ai upscaling done to it because there was some sort of fuzziness to the details. Another thing that i noticed quickly were the controls. there was some sort of lag to them. in the video i stop near the beginning so you can hear when i press a button and when action happens on screen. it's enough to make my timing feel off and for it to affect gameplay later when we unlock the dodge.

As for the streaming, from the beginning, on the station, we have a couple of instances of macroblocking and zebra striping near the bottom of the screen. the striping doesn't happen again but there are a few instances of macroblocking throughout the video. there are numerous occasions when stream tearing happens and parts of the have grey on them. i don't think i noticed any resolutions drops, but there were some other instances were other things seemed to be happening that weren't related to the game itself. it's hard to describe as they were fleeting, but sometimes it looked like wrong colors, other times it seemed a combination of a tear and macroblocking. i don't know if the laggy controls are another symptom.

unfortunately, the video decided to die when i went to the speed test. thankfully the audio remained.

Switch Funday - Splatoon 3 - Playing The First Challenge Event

Welcome to Switch Funday.

I teased it in yesterday's video, https://youtu.be/RRILIgS2XWU, that i was going to try and do the first Challenge Event. i managed to get in 10 battles, winning 4, before i ran out of time.

What you'll hear throughout a lot of this video is confusion as i try to work out how this Challenge Event works. whilst the new weapons were all clearly shown, i feel like what this event is wasn't explained clearly enough. i feel that by the end, i got somewhat of a grasp of what this was all about. i'll try to explain it, but feel free to add in the comments if i make a mistake.

For the first Challenge Event, the challenge was simply playing the two new levels that were added in patch 4.0.0 (the Sizzle Update). a restriction was that only the primary ability of your gear would be activated (the first pin on your gear, not any other pins). A level/score for your ability is created over 5 matches. for me that was 808. any wins after that increases that score, whilst losses reduce that score. (i tried to show this a couple of times in this video). the "winners" are those who rank with the highest scores. you could play any of the three time slots, your highest score across all three would be your final score.

Looking at the Splatoon 3 Wiki, https://splatoonwiki.org/wiki/Challenge, it seems there's another challenge on June 6th so i may have a go trying to get in at least 1 time slot. the following other Challenges are listed but i don't know if i'll have time to try them all. but the challenge on 15th June sounds fun as i'll get to try out randomly selected weapons.

Online Saturday - Splatoon 3 - Playing The 4.0.1 Update

Welcome to Online Saturday.

Splatoon 3 got it's big Sizzle Season update with patch 4.0.0 so this weekend i'm back trying it out. for me, i'm playing with the latest 4.0.1 patch.

The Splatoon wiki, https://splatoonwiki.org/wiki/Sizzle_Season_2023, has a great breakdown of what was added to the game. I had hoped to try out some of the new stuff and thankfully my catalogue level was high enough to try out the new main weapon Painbrush. the stage rotation meant i didn't get to try out Barnacle & Dime or Humpback Pump Track, but i do have a video coming for Switch Funday where i try them out. they were part of this weekends new Challenge Mode.

I got to play 14 matches today but only managed to win 5 of them. as ever it was fairly competitive and there were some close games. there was also 1 disconnection but i'm not worried about that. 

Mobile Friday - F1 Clash - I Don’t Recommend it!

For Mobile Friday this week is i tried out F1 Clash from Hutch, it was formally known as F1 Manager when it was originally released in 2019. i played it for around 50 minutes on my iPhone 14 Pro, but it is also out on Android.                                                                                                            

I'm a big fan of F1 and have watched it since the 90's. so going into this game i did have a certain level of expectations. I know the rules of F1 and how things tend to go. From the very beginning of this game i had issues with it. F1 Clash starts with a "Tour" and i fully expected that to be the tutorial, for it to take me round each of the menus (maybe calling them facilities) and to somewhat hold my hand through my first interactions with the team. Nope, the first thing on the "Tour" was for me to design the car's livery. 

things don't improve when you do the first "Race". your two drivers are Daniel Ricciardo and Mick Schumacher, and then they're not your drivers anymore. it almost feels disrespectful how abruptly their participation with your team ends. Race is in " " because i totally misunderstood what kind of game this is from that first tutorial race. in the tutorial, you're racing against a full field of other drivers and teams. But actually, that's not the point of the game. and even now, writing this, i'm annoyed that i was made to do a tutorial that totally misrepresented what the game actually is. because what you're actually doing is racing other people.

But are they real people? i don't know. i wasn't signed into Facebook or Apple, so where did these other "online" people come from. when it was choosing them, the same backgrounds kept appearing. and the first two opponents had the same driver line-up. at no point did it ask me about playing online or say that was what we're doing, and yet it tried to give the impression that was what we're doing. this isn't the only time something like this happened as i pressed a "Free Rewards" button assuming it was a free reward, it said collect now. but as soon as i pressed it it started playing an advert. it never asked for permission. and it wasn't a short advert either. i cut about 1 minute 15 seconds from this video. as the game did that to me, later when i see another "Free Crate" in the shop i'm genuinely apprehensive about clicking it as i assume it's just going to be another video.

At least clicking on that did something. in the Race section, a new option appears alongside "Duel" and "Spinners" but i don't know it's name. it had the name of this weekends Race at Barcelona in Spain, but what it is actually called i don't know. i clicked it and it told me the rules and then took me to a screen that had many options but they were all locked. even now i don't know why. nothing in the rules explains this. the locked button never tells me why it's locked. it's never explained what i need to do to unlock it, even tho the game had no issues with letting me get to this screen. even now i have no idea what the point of that was.

That's not the only time where the game locks stuff off, or has a lack of information. right at the beginning when you're designing your car's livery, there are locked liveries with no explanation on how to unlock them. In the shop there are drinks you can buy with no information as to what any of them do. later on i find another screen else where that details what each drink does, but it should've been in the shop. When it comes to assigning drivers, every driver is listed. at the time they were listed by series and i had no idea what that meant. i later learned that it was do to with what "race" i had unlocked, but at this point in the game it was needless confusing.

And then there's the Formula One stuff of the game, but even that is not realistic. If you're a fan of F1, it's really difficult to recommend this game. the tyre rules are not respected, the Ai is a mess, the racing is unrealistic, there are soo many crashes it makes a series like Formula E look tame. i even had a moment when, in the pits, i had a car being worked on and it got rear-ended by it's teammate. there's zero consequence for crashes and yet when tyre life hits zero the cars crawl to snail pace, and who knows how long a tyre will last as there's zero information being given to you. there's no help, you have to guess all the way.

I could go on, but ultimately i just wasn't having fun. it's an old game that feels even older. the developers should've made something new in a modern style. i just can't recommend it.

Backlog Conquering - Foul Play - Part 1 - The First 50 Minutes

Welcome to Backlog Conquering.

This is part 1 of playing Foul Play on PlayStation 4.