The new game in the Stories on Tuesday series is the iOS version of The Get Out Kids from Frosty Pop Games. I'm playing this on my iPhone 14 pro, using the Lighting to HDMI adapter to record the video rather than using the phone's own screen recorder.
Going into Part 2, i thought that it might be the final part of the story and i was right. but i was not expecting the ending to the story i got. without spoiling it, i thought the premise was just a child's imagination that the guardian was playing into. i also failed to expect what happened to each of the characters in this story, too. but i'm not saying it was a bad outcome. it was unexpected, shocking, and yet also satisfying.
This week's Cloud Monday video is part 1 of playing Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - Reunion on PS4 via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.
The title is the real headline here. unlike the PS2, PS1, and PSP games that have been released on PS4 and PS5 via emulation and can therefore save at any point by pressing the options button, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - Reunion is not one of these so i am reliant on the game's save system. in this video, you'll see that i'm stuck in the middle of a mission with no save point in sight. this game uses specific save points instead of manual saves via the pause menu or options menu. so when the 20 second warning came up, there was nothing i could do. i do have a save, but that was from before the mission i was doing.
In some respects, this version of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is worse than the original because the PSP version could be put to sleep and continued at a later date or the game could be paused and the screen turned off. because those features were PSP hardware features and not software, there's nothing equivalent to them when you stream a game from the cloud.
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - Reunion isn't a 1080p game, but the quality of the stream meant that the videos looked great regardless. from what i remember, the main game is basically an HD skin over the PSP version and in places it didn't look as high quality. playing the game, i noticed character movement was stiffer than expected and the faces often looked poor. But that's the game itself and not from the streaming from the cloud.
Another example of this was in combat. the character animation has priority, so i had to wait for one animation to finish before i could do another move. you can see in this video i was often pressing buttons to attack other enemies as i was expecting it to be more fluid. i didn't notice any delay due to this being streamed to me and a key example of this was the rumble, it always felt accurate to what was happening on screen and of course the original version of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII didn't have rumble as the PSP didn't have the hardware for it.
So streaming the game from the cloud felt great, until the disconnection happened. thankfully the last save point was only before the mission so it's better than Sonic Frontiers which took nearly an hour before i could manual save or other RPGs like Scarlet Nexus which also had fixed points i could save at but it's save points were more than 30 minutes apart. we'll see in Part 2 next week if save points become more frequent as we go but in an age of cloud streaming and when other Final Fantasy games have made it easier to save, it's a little disappointing that Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - Reunion wasn't updated.
For this week's Mobile Friday i tried Spin Break: Roulette Battle, from FIFTYONE PERCENT on my iPhone 14 Pro.
The Roulette aspect of the gameplay was what caught my attention. i was very curious how they would incorporate such a mechanic into the gameplay. would it be simple or would there be depth and strategy to it. the trailer for the game on the iOS page did tease the graphics and some aspects of the gameplay and it helped solidify Spin Break: Roulette Battle as being this week's game.
Once it's started, it takes you straight to a tutorial. at first i thought that it was good, but once i started playing the game i feel like the tutorial was a bit too basic in hindsight. there were on screen stuff in battles not highlighted, nor was the main home screen detailed. i would've liked more help with strategy and a deeper dive into the luck mechanic as throughout this video it felt like i didn't have much and was getting beaten by it.
Thankfully, if you do fail it's not a big issue as this is a roguelike. the only thing that carries over from the stages you completed is some of the blue crystal currency and one relic, out of however many you picked up. if you used a relic during that run, it's now gone, as are any cards and stat boosts you picked up during the run. when it's over, everything's reset to how it was before the start of the run.
the gameplay loop that i uncovered from playing Spin Break: Roulette Battle is simple. get blue crystals and use them to level up your character and your items. But because of how bad my runs where, i don't know a lot about this game. there is a power limit, it takes 5 to do a run and you only have 20 when it's fully charged. my guess is it takes 30 minutes to recharge 1 power.
I was genuinely surprised by how bad i was at this game. i couldn't defeat the first stage after the tutorial, it's 1-1. because of the game's luck mechanics and run to run randomness, i don't know if it was a skill thing or a luck thing either. that's kinda the main negative i have with this game. i'm bad at it, i don't know why, i don't know if it's meant to be like this, and i don't know how to get better at it other than grinding the blue level up crystals.
This isn't a fault with the roulette aspect of gameplay. i actually enjoyed what it added to the game. it's not simply choosing who goes first, if you land on red the enemy attacks and if you land on blue you attack, but there's a surprising amount of strategy to it as the deck building is also somewhat tied to it. if you're able to turn all spots on the roulette wheel blue, you unleash a super powerful attack. to turn the pieces blue you need to land on blue and then use cards. the cards are a mix of attacking the enemy, healing yourself, putting up shields, working the graveyard mechanic, and changing piece color on the roulette wheel.
This is where luck is powerful and not explained fully. there are times when your card will go up against the enemies card and who has the strongest card wins and deals damage. but then there's two luck mechanics that can turn a 70+% card vs. a 30% card from the enemy into a loss. there are also parts of the enemy UI that i don't understand.
I feel like there is a solid game here, but in it's current state it feels unbalanced and is hiding a bit too much from the player. the start of the game shouldn't be this tough. with some better tutorials, some gameplay tips, and perhaps making the first couple of stages part of the tutorial, Spin Break: Roulette Battle could be a game that'd be fun to keep coming back to. as it is now, i do think it's worth trying as the music is great and i did enjoy the pixel art. i liked the strategy aspect, too. but it'll put a lot of people off as it's not quite all there at the moment.
For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the PlayStation 4 version of The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II Story DEMO.
Unlike The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak which only got one demo before it's release, The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II has two and today i'll be trying out the Story DEMO and next week i'll try the Battle DEMO. I had forgotten that i tried out the The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak DEMO last year https://youtu.be/8Ow0x0EV_XQ. When i started this DEMO there was an option to watch a re-cap for the first game, The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak, and i decided to watch it. as i didn't play it, i was fascinated where the story ended up going and wouldn't mind playing it as it looks like it was a good story.
Once that video is finished, this DEMO starts by setting up the mystery, or one of the mysteries, that The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II will be dealing with. Then the story starts and as this is a Story DEMO, it's unsurprising that this is story heavy.
what i played took place mostly in the same area as the DEMO for The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak, so it was nice and familiar. but we did get to visit a couple of different areas. most of the people were also familiar, and again this isn't a negative. the speed of this DEMO felt slow, but because the location and people were the same, the speed of the story telling actually felt appropriate. the conversations were casual, people were familiar with each other, and ultimately i didn't really notice how long this video was until near the end, which is why this ended up being more than an hour. i was enjoying the story being told.
I would recommend checking out this DEMO. the save carries over to the main game if you choose to buy it. The DEMO also has it's own checklist of things to do. i didn't reach the end of it, nor did i finish the checklist. it wouldn't surprise me if there's another hour or so of DEMO left to play!
Welcome to Backlog Conquering. This is a series were i play a game from my backlog that i may or may not have played before. the goal isn't necessarily to finish the game, the goal is to play it. that way, i can have an opinion about it. The newest game in the Backlog Conquering series is the PlayStation Portable version of Final Fantasy. this is the downloaded version of the game, but it is also available on UMD. To help with this playthrough i'm proudly using a guide from GameFAQS. here's the link, https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/psp/937909-final-fantasy/faqs/55625. i'm not following it exactly, but it's useful to have.
I decided to edit Part 3 like i would normally in this series, and like how Part 1 was edited, so that you get to see the whole journey from A to B. I think i'll keep doing this going forward.
Part 3 was interesting as we managed to finish the 3 main quests we were doing. After finding the Marsh i explored it's 3 floors and found some nice items and beat the boss of the Marsh. We got a crown. so net i had to give that crown to the king from Part 2, and once that was settled we got an eye. In Motoya's Cave, the witch needed her eye back so we set off back there and she gave us a special tonic. i headed back to the elf town and gave the tonic to their prince. feeling better, we obtained a special key and set off to open rooms that had been previously locked.
The new game in the Stories on Tuesday series is the iOS version of The Get Out Kids from Frosty Pop Games. I'm playing this on my iPhone 14 pro, using the Lighting to HDMI adapter to record the video rather than using the phone's own screen recorder.
I previously played The Get Out Kids as part of Mobile Friday, https://youtu.be/pEhZEe0lyfE, and had a great time. back then i said i wanted to come back to it because i wanted to experience the story. It didn't win my Free to Play Mobile Game of the Year Award as it was a release of an older game that originally came out on Apple Arcade, but i had such a great time with it it did get an honorable mention.
In this Part, we started from the beginning playing through the same areas i played for last years video, but it wasn't long before we started experiencing new stuff. It was nice to come back to the game and focus on the story. there was one puzzle involving cars that i found difficult and actually failed. but it's not an issue with The Get Out Kids, the scene was restarted without penalty.
I'm looking forward to Part 2, and it might be the final Part. the story so far has been interesting but we leave it after something might've happened to someone close to us. my mind is racing with thoughts as to what might happen next!
This week's Cloud Monday video is part 1 of playing SkyGunner on PS4 via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.
In Part 1, https://youtu.be/f5OsmwasRy8, it was clear that this was going to be ok to stream from the cloud because we're able to save at any point by pressing the Options button on the PS4 controller. what we learned from Part 2 was that the only way to save via the game itself was to save and exit the game via the pause menu. so playing it as a PS2 game on PS4/PS5 is the best way to play it via the cloud.
In this part we also saw how it would play if there were some streaming issues. things like macroblocking weren't that much of an issue because of how big everything in the game is, we're not loosing the small pieces of detail as there aren't much anyway. but the stream tearing, when grey appears on the screen, was more of an issue because this game is 4:3. when the grey appears, more critical video of the action is missing. thankfully, as we're able to pause the game via the emulation software by pressing options, we can stop the game and either wait for things to improve or save and exit if we have to. it's not an ideal situation, but it's fair compromise as there are some games where we can't save at any point, where we'd have to sacrifice a cutsene to get to a point where we could save.
So for SkyGunner, the more difficult question is is the game worth being streamed from the cloud in the first place. i think it is. one reason is that it's a somewhat rare game that i hadn't heard of that came out somewhat early in the PS2 lifecycle. playing it via the cloud is easy and cheaper than trying to find your own copy of the game. i also enjoyed it's story. i was surprised that in Part 2 we got the story from a different perspective as i picked a different character in Part 2. it may take some time to get used to how it controls as it's not perfect, but i think there's enough here for some fun, even if you only play through the story from one character's perspective
