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 Pixel Sitri Cup Revival! (2023/12/11 9:00～2023/12/18 8:59 JST) in Puzzle & Dragons: Nintendo Switch Edition whilst using a GamePad and a docked Nintendo Switch.
This week is the Pixel Sitri Cup Revival. i have played this cup before, https://youtu.be/oxQec5wx4ZM. That video is short like that one, but in that video i was unable to defeat the boss whereas this time i did it!
The gimmick this week was one that i't a fan off. but i was lucky in that it didn't get in the way too much. The gimmick is a square that changes the orb, inside said square, color. But this gimmick didn't change color to all the available colors, instead it was limited to a small set of colors. There were also fewer stages this week in comparison to last week so it was easy to get to the boss but it was very tough. i only managed to beat the boss once. This was also the second week running where i only played against 2 other human players.
This week's Cloud Monday video is part 1 of playing Game Republic's Genji Tales of the Blade, tho i think i got the name wrong a few times in the video. this was a PS3 launch title when it came out in 2006.
I got a PlayStation 3 at launch, but i went with Resistance: Fall of Man and F1 so i have never played this game before. But as i was playing games at launch, i went in with realistic ideas about what this is. To be honest, after just playing this part, it mostly met my expectations of a HD PS2 game with some fancy effects.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing. i actually enjoyed most of what i played. The combat is a little basic and feels a little disjointed, but there was no lag from playing it online from PlayStation Plus Premium Cloud Servers. there were no visual issues either outside a frame or two of stream tearing. as a game being streamed to me, it was a near perfect experience.
But as a game being played in the cloud, it has the same critical issue that Scarlet Nexus had in that you can't do manual saves and there's a big gap between saves. When the service is going to kick you off, due to poor internet bandwidth or connection, it only gives you a 20 second warning. unfortunately, in Genji: Days of the Blade in this part i played it was almost 20 minutes between saves.
So as a part of PlayStation history, i of course recommend people at least give it an hour or so. But this does come with a warning that if you're kicked off, it'll probably be frustrating to play the sections again.
For today's game i wanted to try out the Game Boy game Castlevania Legends from Konami. it's a relatively late release on Game Boy coming out from 1997 but it's not one i remember. I didn't get into Game Boy until the Game Boy Color and Pokémon. but i am familiar with the Castlevania series and i was curious as to how such a game would work on Game Boy.
I was pleasantly surprised how faithful to the early Castlevania games it felt like. the team at Konami did a great job bringing the series over the Game Boy. Every enemy looks distinct and clear, the backgrounds are slight but work. even the music is great. But that difficulty is too much.
all the monsters move faster than your character and the controls seem sluggish, too. often i felt like i was inputting commands but it wasn't happening on screen. This game also suffers from respawning monsters, something i'm not a fan of. I tried out the game on the regular difficulty, so perhaps on "Light" mode things will be toned down. I speculated in the video that maybe it's hard because the game is short. looking at the map, it did seem like there weren't many areas in the game.
Another issue, like with many of these old games on Switch, is the lack of a manual. this game comes from a time where the manuals explained so much of the game, maybe even provided backstory and more. here we just have the game and itself has no in-game tutorial. so more than once i felt like i wasn't fully understanding what i can do, what i needed to do, for example i never worked out how to use the Soul Weapons!
I was surprised that the game uses a password feature. i initially expected all Game Boy games by this point to come with internal batteries for save files, but thinking about it it's possible that this late into the Game Boy and a game that wasn't expected to sell a lot meant they decided against it for cost reasons. Maybe it was more of a Budget Release when it came out.
I'm not feeling well today. So here's a video with no commentary.
There's nothing special happening this weekend in Splatoon 3 and as i'm not feeling great i just wanted to play some games. it's actually been a while since i just sat back and played some Turf War in Splatoon 3. i had bought some weapons and not used them so that was today's "goal", give them a go. I used the new Undercover Sorella Brella and Foil Squeezer, and the Tenta Sorella Brella that was released in the previous game update.
For Mobile Friday this week is i tried out METRIA The Starlight on my iPhone 14 Pro. This game from Asobimo is also out on Android.
My fears with it's small file size were true as there was a further 738MB once the game is opened. Whilst that isn't a surprise, with many other RPG's seemingly doing the same, what was a surprise were the frequent loading screens. i can't remember a game i've played that has needed to do as much loading as this game does.
An hour isn't really enough to judge the story of this game as i feel like it hadn't got going. Some interesting things had happened and others had been teased, but an hour isn't long enough for this game to judge whether the pace of the story is slow in general or just slow at the start because they have to do tutorials and character introductions. Both are handled well in the hour i played.
I was genuinely surprised when the game introduced two gatcha mechanics completely out of the blue and then never went on to give an in-game universe explanation for them. this game also seems to clutter the screen more than other games i've played. the right side of the screen had a lot of buttons i could press. most of it is accessible, but they started to get in the way of camera controls as a few times i pressed a button instead of moving the camera. I don't remember if it's possible to move the buttons to the left side for left handed players.
For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of Gunbrella . This game, from developers Doinksoft and publishers Devolver Digital, is already out not only on Switch and PC.
The demo for Gunbrella, and the game itself, has been out for a few months now so the complaints i might have with the game could all be resolved by now if the game has been patched. i don't have the game so i can't do the comparison, but if you have it and played it it would be great to read your comments about how things have changed or how they are now in general.
There's a lot to like about this game after playing the demo. graphically, it looks great. more detailed than 8 or 16bit games but also not too blocky. there's a decent amount of movement in the foreground that helps give life/energy to the world, with decent backdrops helping to set the scene, and a sky with rolling clouds. The music is also good to listen to and works well, especially with the boss at the end of the video. i would be interested in hearing more of the music for sure.
For the most part, the controls are really good too. general movement is responsive and whilst the initial jump may not be that high it does feel satisfying in how it works. When we get to use the Brella for an additional jump, the sense of movement and speed is greater but i mostly felt able to control things just as easily. But, movement is also tied to shooting. If you jump up, the gun points up. if you move right, the gun points right. The right stick is also tied to shooting and something about having both control the gun just didn't work well with me.
I admit that it's only a demo and i could just need more practice. i often had issues when dealing with enemies. i would jump at an angle, try to shoot, my gun would be pointing up at an angle, i would miss the enemy and typically end up getting hit by them. It could be that after practice and more time i would be able to adjust and come up with a different strategy. But in the hour i played with the game, i never really got the hand of it.
The game didn't offer any tips or suggestions beyond the basic tutorial either. and that's something that i wasn't impressed with during the demo. It felt like the game did the minimum when it came to tutorials for the player. last weeks game, Knight Vs. Giant: The Broken Excalibur https://youtu.be/2slErl63Nz4 showed how to not only do text on screen but how to use the space effectively with added video tutorials. the text on screen approach here felt dated like the atheistic the game is based on. It wasn't just the tutorials. the items in the store and inventory had the bare minimum information. i had items that sounded like permanent upgrades and some that seemed to be time based. but the game never told me any of that. It's the same when looking up your tasks. there's a lot of space used by such few words.
One of the more annoying parts of the demo is when i follow the instructions of a text box and it doesn't work. the game explained about food. i did what it said, and nothing happened. There were a couple of instances in a library section where text seemed to be out of order. i would encounter a scenario, get past it, and then read a text warning me of it.
One weird thing about this demo is that in the more than a hour i played, it never once said it was a demo! It's possible it might've after the boss i couldn't beat. i suspect that's where the demo might've ended, or after the quests related to it had finished. after trying that first boss i feel like i should've tried this demo on Easy, not the Normal i picked or the Hard it defaulted to.
I'm glad i tried out the demo. i was a little curious about this game. i now know that it's maybe not for me, but i can come away from it appreciating what it got right and maybe if a "Directors Cut" or "DX" edition were to come to other platforms then maybe i'd give it another shot.
CounterSpy is the current Backlog Conquering Wednesday game. i'm playing this version of the game on PlayStation 3. It came out across the PS4, PSV and even mobile in 2014 from developers Dynamighty.
I'm definitely feeling the increase of difficulty. In one level i died so much that i triggered the DEFCOM countdown and had to race past the bad guys to stop it with mere seconds in hand! The difficulty is done with a mix of increasing the number of enemy soldiers in a location and giving them helmets so it takes more bullets to headshot them. But this highlights how, in my opinion, the game isn't balanced enough for it. the price of ammo is so high and it's rare to find any in a level. we don't get much money for completing a level and after paying for ammo, it rarely feels like we have enough for the formulas we use to help balance the difficulty better.
The story is still enough to keep me going, but i'm getting to the point where not much else is. gameplay wise i feel like i've seen it all and it's just getting more and more unfair as i play.
There will be a third part to this game. whilst the gameplay is getting difficult, the story is getting interesting.
