This month's Splatoon3 Salmon Run item is the Octavio Dome. The goal for this video was to get 1,00 points. that way i get the item twice and have a go at defeating a King Salmonoid.
This Salmon run was quite good. in all but one job, my team mates and I managed to get to the third wave. unfortunately, we only managed to beat the the third wave once!
This Saturday, July 17th 2024, was the Mega Lucario Raid day in Pokémon GO. I went to Shin Yokohama!
It didn't quite go to plan. there was a Twice concert at Nissan Stadium so Shin Yokohama was packed full of people. so i wasn't able to record as much as i wanted because recording people isn't the thing to do in Japan. It was also meant to rain so i didn't bring my other camera and had to use my phone.
It's also the first time i've tried something like this, even tho i've been playing Pokémon GO since it came out here! so i may do something like this in future, kinda two birds with one stone. i get to do the day and i get a video out of it! Any suggestions are welcome!
For Mobile Friday this week is i tried out Bacon's Revenge, from CloudOcean Star, on my iPhone 14 Pro.
The screenshots on the app store looked nice but it was the description that really piqued my interest. It said Bacon's Revenge was a roguelike but one that also had merge gameplay mechanics. i was really curious how this would work together and after this hour, i think it worked really well.
Bacon's Revenge is a simple game, but it does get the basics right. there's a decent tutorial, too. But it could be a little better, there were some things on the home screen not tutorialised and maybe it could be a bit more aware of what the player is doing, or not doing, and offer some advice. But it is more than enough to get the basics across, and the first chapter we play through is simple enough so that the game isn't overwhelming.
The Roguelike elements of the game are generous so that helps lower the difficulty of the game. each time we fail, we still get gold, items to use when upgrading, and experience. It took me a couple of tries to get past the first chapter, but i learned something each time i failed and when i did succeed in finishing the 10 waves of chapter 1 there was a good sense of accomplishment.
The Merge aspect of the game does give Bacon's Revenge a sense of luck and randomness. i thought that it wasn't too inconvenient because the Roguelike elements were so generous, so progress however slight was always being made. we can choose which weapons we want to take into a chapter, but we don't start with all of them. we get a choice of 3 at the start and then each time we finish a wave. we have to choose weapons and place them in our bag. each weapon has a space requirement. if we get two of the same weapon, at the same level, we can merge them together and the weapon's now more powerful. but space is limited, so there's a tactical element to not only the weapons we bring into a stage but which ones we have equipped. we can add more bag space and we can also merge items outside of the bag. but if we get nothing we can use, we're able to use the silver coin we've collected from the waves to refresh the selection.
If i had to pick some faults with the game, it'd be that it's too obvious when the music loops. the music itself is fine, but the end and start are different when they loop. i mentioned the tutorial could be better, but the text could also be improved as on occasion it's too small or outside the boundaries of the art it's on top off. but these are fairly small faults in comparison to what the game gets right.
I would prefer there be a speed up option that wasn't locked behind Chapter 5 or a paywall. but other than that, i'm happy with my time with Bacon's Revenge. i do recommend it, Bacon's Revenge is easy but there's a lot to unlock and progress. it's also possible to play the game one handed so it's also recommended for commuters.
For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the PlayStation 4 version of Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road from Level-5.
Living in Japan, i have head of Inazuma Eleven and it used to be very popular, but there hasn't been a new anime or game for many years. i checked out the Wikipedia page and yeh, i was surprised that this game was originally set to come out in 2018! back then it was titled "Inazuma Eleven Ares" and was meant to tie into the Inazuma Eleven Ares anime series in 2018.
I doubt that the tech in Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road has much in common with Inazuma Eleven Ares. since it's first reveal it's had 3 more names and gained the PS5 as a release console. Honestly, for a PS4 game it did look really nice. many of the anime releases on PS4 have looked great. the animated cutscenes also looked high quality, but with their black borders i don't know if they're 1080p, scaled down to 1080p, or upscaled to it.
Whilst graphically Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road looks like a modern game, playing the game wasn't as impressive. i was bored playing it. Whilst i know of the Inazuma series, i've never watched nor played any of the games. what i played of Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road went against what i knew, in that Inazuma is a football/soccer series and yet our character hates it and moved to this school specifically to avoid it. after 50 minutes of the story mode, i felt like i knew more of other characters than my own.
The demo does have a second game mode, after story, called Competition Mode. But this felt unwelcoming to me, a new player, much like the story mode did. i had the choice of playing it online or against bots. i chose to play against bots but for some reason the game gave the bots more levels than me. so not only did i not know how to play it, i was up against much higher opposition.
And wow, it doesn't play like any football/soccer game i've ever played. in some respects, it's more like a strategy game. but it should've had some sort of practice mode. it tried to teach me what was happening, there were videos showing it in action, but it tried to do it in a game with a much higher opposition. so i would try to do what it said, but the opposition was so much higher levelled than me it didn't matter what i did.
So i didn't enjoy my time with Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road that much. sure it looks good and it was interesting trying out a game in a series i've heard so much about. it's just that it never felt like this game was for me. i didn't have the context for the story and i didn't know how to play it's style of football/soccer. thankfully, as it's a demo it does mean i can use this as practice for when the real game comes out. but as i didn't enjoy my time with the demo, i'm not really keen on getting the game. instead i'd rather try one of the other Inazuma games
I have stitched together all 10 parts of my gameplay of Tearaway: Unfolded into one video, from start to finish of the game. I tried to cut out all instances of when i accidentally used the Pause/Option button, but on my limited computer and how many hours it already took to make this video i wasn't able to cut out the many many times when i was sent back to a checkpoint or had to re-enter a fight.
The new game in the Stories on Tuesday series is the PS4 version of Star Trek: Resurgence, from Dramatic Labs.
Part 3, https://youtu.be/MlnRuF47B9E, ended when i died trying to do a stealth section. so today's part continued from there. the story started to pick up pace and it started to become clear what was happening, not only to the #Hotari and #Alydian but also on our ship. questions still remain, with perhaps the biggest being what is the end goal of the Scions of the Flame.
This week's Cloud Monday video is part 2 of playing the PSP version of Daxter on PS4 via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.
It quickly became clear in Part 1, https://youtu.be/8O1Ue63OQ7Q, that the PlayStation Portable game #Daxter holds up today just like it did back in 2006. After that part and this, i can comfortably say that this is one of the best PS1/PS2/PSP games emulated on PS4 and PS5. Daxter was already well designed for a portable system, and things like great checkpoints, immediate respawns, and manual saves carry over into streaming this game from PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service.
It's not perfect, there are some issues due to it's age and original platform it was developed for. there were times when i felt i was moving the camera and doing button presses faster than the emulated game could keep up with. this meant i was walking of ledges and not hitting enemies as i thought. this wasn't a huge issue, but something i noticed. something else is that it felt hard to walk in a straight line with Daxter. whilst out and about it wasn't a big issue but many levels have narrow ledges and platforms and more than once i ended up walking off and falling. thankfully, the emulated software has a rewind feature so i was able to quickly get back and try again.
