Stories on Tuesday - Coffee Talk - Part 1 - 22nd and 23rd of September

The new game in the Stories on Tuesday series is the PS4 version of Coffee Talk from Toge Productions. I've downloaded it as part of PlayStation Plus.

Coffee Talk is one of those games i've heard people talk about, i've seen it online and in shops, but i know next to nothing about it other than there are stories being told. when i heard it on podcasts, people talked about it without getting specifics. so there are moments in this video where i'm by surprised by things. the biggest being that this isn't a game with just humans. 

I have downloaded this game from the PSN as it's part of PlayStation Plus, but i'm having some tech issues with it. it'd be interesting to know if anyone is having similar issues with the PS4 version of this game. i know it's built on Unity and there's another PS4 game i'm playing that's crashing to XMB that's also built on Unity so maybe it's a Unity issue. i haven't edited it out because the music in the game continues whilst the gameplay seems to have paused. in future parts, i'll just keep quiet so we can all enjoy the music.

An unwelcomed surprise was when i had to make Latte Art. i have no idea what i had to do, there was no tutorial or practice before the day started. so the panic is genuine and i wasn't happy with what i made. it's worse than when i played Tearaway as in that game i'm able to try and reset and try again. in Coffee Talk i don't think there's a way for me to do that, i think i can only choose to trash the drink and start again. trying to make a drink is also a little difficult. i don't know a lot of coffee drinks so most of what i'm making is just me guessing. this has resulted in my first bad drink already.

But the point of the series is to play the story that we get. so it's possible my drinks and mistakes will lead to a slightly different story. if it does, let me know in the comments how my couple of days differed to yours.

Cloud Monday - Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings - Part 2 - It Has Bugs And Issues, But I Recommend It

This week's new Cloud Monday video is part 2 of playing Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings on PS4 via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.

Across both parts, it's become clear that Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings isn't the best game ever made. I'm not sure whether this is unique to this emulated version of the game or if the original also has it's own problems. but these aren't game breaking bugs and are minor frustrations at most. but they are noticeable.

There's also no denying that the game design is well suited for playing the game from the cloud. But, as we've also seen across both parts, there are moments when it doesn't work quite as well. Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings plays like a movie and there are often cinematic moments. but when there are moments of stream tearing, it does kinda take us out of these cinematic moments. it's because of this, i would also recommend downloading the game to try and preserve the cinematic mood.

personally, i'm going to continue playing Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings from the cloud. i'm satisfied with the performance of it being streamed from the cloud. i have enjoyed my time playing it and i genuinely want to see where the story goes. it's not the best but that doesn't stop my enjoyment of it.

Mobile Friday - Tribe Nine - A Polished Debut For An Action RPG With A Cool Graphic/Art Style

For this week's Mobile Friday i tried Tribe Nine from developers Akatsuki Games on my #iPhone 14 Pro.

Tribe Nine had been available as a pre-order on the app store for a little while now and i admit i kinda forgot about this game until it downloaded itself onto my phone. it's launch was the 20th but as i'm recovering from being sick i decided to wait a day. that decision might've helped as on the 21st the game got an update to help with server issues. during my first hour with the game, i didn't notice any server issues.

But what was a huge frustration was the additional data download. it was over 5GB. many of these games have them but what was frustrating with Tribe Nine was how it dealt with it. a recent example is the Infinity Nikki and in that video, https://youtu.be/hrqBnBzDM8w, we're given a music video to watch and listen to. with Tribe Nine, there's nothing exciting. there's just a near static screen and a progress bar. no music either. it took over 13 minutes to download this data as well.

So starting the game for the first time, the first impression from Tribe Nine isn't great. then it gets weird as we start to play an 8bit style rpg and our screen gets a crt filter put on it. but this is a nice weird as the app store screenshots show nothing like this. then there are people walking in the sky, and then this world all falls apart and reality starts to take over.

With this change of story it's also made clear that a mix of graphical styles are going to be used. when talking face to face, animated 2.5D characters appear on screen and look really quite good. when it comes to battles, it's full 3D characters in a 3D world. and when you're walking around in the world you're 16/32bit looking pixelart characters. i think it works, but it does take a little bit of time to get used to.

Combat is interesting, but i don't think they quite explain it well enough. there's the standard attacks of light and hard and their typical pros and cons. you have team mates fighting along side you and they seemed to be doing so smartly. as this is an action RPG, we're all running and moving around the arena dodging and attacking enemies. but there's another system at play called Tension. it's used by both us and the enemies, but for them it's a little different. for the enemies, as battles go on they get more tension. when their tension bar is full, the enemies attack full power and also randomly. this was clear to see when we had our first boss style fight. the enemy had been easy to dodge and counter, but as soon as their tension bar filled they were much harder to read, they attacked us randomly, and it really changed up how we fought against them. for us, this is where i don't think the game successfully explains or demonstrates the tension system well. everything up to this had been decently explained and clearly shown in battles. but after using it i don't know how the tension system works for us good guys. there's a combo system that's introduced first and that seems clear. when it's possible to use it, top right of the screen the heads of our team mates appear and you press them and they attack. the tension seems to add to this. i think when our tension bar becomes full we're able to use the combo system and then end with a super attack. but i don't know how to charge the tension bar or what the blue squares next to the floating heads mean.

Even tho Tribe Nine has an extra data download, the rest of the gameplay experience has been great and i'm really curious about the rest of the game, the world, and more importantly i want to experience more of the story. i do recommend it, BUT you have to download it and start it at home first to get that big data download.

Version 1.0.2 Played.

Demo Play Thursday - Turbo Overkill On PS4

For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played Turbo Overkill on PlayStation 4, from developers Trigger Happy Interactive and publishers Apogee Entertainment.

I grew up with late 90's early 2000's shooters so playing Turbo Overkill was fun and nostalgic. but i was also impressed that the developers tried to modernise this style of shooter from just being another Doom/Quake/Unreal clone into something unique. 

We're immediately greeted by two big themes of the game when we start the demo Cyberpunk and blood. Turbo Overkill's interpretation of Cyberpunk wasn't just the music, i felt that the world and plot of the game fitted well with what i imagine a cyberpunk style "world" to be. this helped make what story i found not only interesting but also a story i wanted to see where it went and what would happen next. the visuals and music were good on PS4, but i did think the music looped a little too soon.

For me, the Turbo Overkill demo was long because i kept making platforming mistakes. it's something that can happen with first person games. i felt that up to the point i got stuck, the landing platforms i've had to get too were big/wide enough so landing was easy. but there was this one platform that was tiny in comparison that took a few times to get. thankfully, falling to the bottom didn't kill me as the game's level design is smart and built vertically so we can get right back there fairly easily. i am just a bit concerned that these sort of platforming sections might become a little too frequent.

As a demo, i think it works all right. it doesn't say demo on the home screen nor is there a way to get to the PSN Store from there, something that many demos do nowadays. i think this is the start of the game and i think they've made it long enough to so we get enough story to be hooked, enough of the shooting and platforming mechanics so we know if we like how it feels and plays, and we've had a couple of goes with the upgrades to our body. but i do think it could've pointed us to the options or done a tutorial to help with how fast the camera controls are. i knew from the start that the camera was moving too fast and i had to go into the options and sort it out.

Backlog Conquering - Final Fantasy On PSP - Part 6 - Getting The Earth Crystal

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 #PlayStationPortable version of #FinalFantasy. 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. 

Part 6 started with some shopping. after my first time going into The Cavern of Earth drained my supplies, i knew i had to go and get more as we'd be going down further into the dungeon. once i was fully stocked up, we went into The Cavern of Earth and came across the Earth Crystal's boss surprisingly fast. one of the problems with Part 5 is just how many battles it took to get anywhere. but here we got kinda lucky. the boss wasn't too difficult either. Defeating the boss played a short cutscene of a statue breaking apart, but that's not where i went next.

The guide i'm using wants me to go after the Fire Crystal next. i'm a little unsure if i've missed out on some sort of story beat or if it doesn't really matter. another example of this is at the start of the video when i went shopping. it was easy to go back to Cornelia but whilst there, i found a shadowy figure and i have no idea what that's about.

Part 1 - https://youtu.be/QWXAyHh-R0s

Part 2 - https://youtu.be/95BsHWcN6K0

Part 3 - https://youtu.be/eMh6cvudEOA

Part 4 - https://youtu.be/LCrkwFxlEJs

Part 5 - https://youtu.be/6SKK1o1QGV0

Cloud Monday - Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings - Small Levels And Good Auto Save Help Streaming

This week's new Cloud Monday video is part 1 of playing Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings on PS4 via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.

I'll be honest and say i didn't know that this game came out on PS2, let alone was out and part of the PS2 emulated games on PS4 and PS5. it was a late PS2 game and Wii game, but i have never played it before so i was curious if the controls would hold up. i knew graphically it might be a little rough, but other than some poor faces, i thought this did alright for how old it is.

as it's part of the PS2 games emulated on PS4 and PS5, we're able to save when ever we want by pressing options. but it also seemed like Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings has it's own robust auto save feature. we're unable to manually pause and save, but the game seems to save after every set piece your progress in the story and it saves when you pick up a collectable. this means, if you forget to save via the options button, you're only a few minutes away from your previous save.

One issue these emulated games could have is how they control. i thought Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings controlled fine. the camera may want to fight us a little, but if you leave it alone it's ok. one kinda quirk with the controls which i'm assuming is the game itself rather than a result of it being streamed from the cloud is that the Indy character is a little slow. he's slow to stand up and get down, he can be a little slow moving and dodging. it's something that takes time to get used to, another famous example would be how slow and "heavy" the characters in Killzone 2 and 3 felt on PS3 in comparison to other shooters out at the time.

there were brief moments of stream tearing, when grey appeared on the screen, and it was very noticeable. but it was less frequent than the games apparent own bugs. there were times when a line would appear across the screen for a very brief moment. this happened more than anything i noticed from the stream so it's possible that Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings could be patched by the time i do Part 2.

Mobile Friday - Snaky Cat - A Fun Take On Snake Diminished By Intrusive Ads And Poor Tutorial

For this week's Mobile Friday i tried Snaky Cat, from developers Appxplore on my iPhone 14 Pro.

I grew up during the heights of Snake on mobile phones so i was instantly curious to try out a new take on the genre. The app store page does a good job of selling what the game has. But when i played Snaky Cat it felt like the game itself does a poor job highlighting the cool aspects of gameplay.

It starts off so well with a cool little video. but after that, there seems to be no fun cat stuff to the game besides getting new ones to use and using accessories. for example, there's a cat in the middle of the home screen but nothing happens when you touch it. the food to collect isn't cat themed either. it feels like cats were chosen because they're popular but as the game doesn't lean into it the main animal could be anything.

The tutorial is the same. it starts off being very helpful but doesn't teach us crucial gameplay mechanics. i have a couple of examples for this. as i'm someone who played the original Snake, one of the biggest rules was that you couldn't touch your own body. for most of this video, i was playing by that rule as i didn't know otherwise. it wasn't until i saw someone else touching their own body that i guessed that critical rule no longer applies. The other gameplay mechanic that's not revealed is how the boost works. it took me 7 or more games before i realized how it worked. the boost is powered by how many doughnuts we have eaten. the more we eat, the longer we get and the higher our total score is. but when you use boost, your using your score and your cat is shrinking in size. it's one reason it took a while before i started to get decent scores.

What frustrated me the most playing Snaky Cat was the advertisements. many games have them and i have no issue with some of them. but in Snaky Cat, the first advert came before i knew the value of the items being sold. it's a mistake that happens often, but what most games do now is let you touch or long press on each item to learn about them. But the biggest frustration came with the intrusive adverts. after about 25 minutes, or so, when i went to start a match, the game would launch an advert without my permission. i do these videos on wi-fi so there's no data cost to me. but for those playing on their network, these video adverts slowly eat into your data. playing Snaky Cat showed me that there get's to a point where you'll be watching one of these videos before each match. if you're not careful, it slowly eats into your data cap.

The basic gameplay idea behind Snaky Cat is solid and, from a nostalgic point of view, it was nice playing a Snake style game again. but the game as it is, this close to it's worldwide launch, isn't good enough for me to recommend. the adverts are a part of it but it's also the poor tutorial/unexplained game mechanics, and ultimately the gameplay loop came across as very simple and repetitive. many games have more unlocks or longer stories, or someone to vary up the gameplay over time. Snaky Cat needs something like the random level modifications that Squad Busters uses to help keep things fresh.

Version 1.0.2 Played.