This week's new Cloud Monday video is part 1 of playing the PS4 version of Vampire Survivors via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.
I had previously checked out the iPhone version of Vampire Survivors, https://youtu.be/JuPywdS5N2M, and i really didn't enjoy the experience. The reason i'm back trying it on PS4 is because i wondered if it's screen filling small graphics would be too difficult for a streaming service. YouTube, and others, have trouble streaming video with lots of small details like sand or confetti and i thought Vampire Survivors could suffer with issues.
Turns out i was right to be concerned. in fact, i could say that Vampire Survivors is soo bad being streamed from the Cloud that it shouldn't be on the service. Not only did i have stream tearing, when grey would appear on screen instead of the video, there were also frequent macro blocking issues, caused by the small details i mentioned above, and the service disconnected me twice! As well as that, we had the video crash we saw back in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita's Rewind - Part 1, https://youtu.be/jLALcYNyUJc, in this part.
What doesn't help things is that there is no manual save during a run. there's no checkpoint during a run either. when i got the disconnection notices, there was only one thing i could try and that was stopping the run and getting back to the main menu in time for it to autosave, or to try a manual save. the problem is, we only get a 20 second warning before being disconnected and it takes longer than that to quit to the main menu and save. so when the message comes up, that is it.
For some games i've played, a break up or decrease in visuals isn't too bad. to some degree, i'm able to carry on playing. I know that my character is in the center of the screen, but when things got bad i couldn't see the gaps between enemies. it was also tough to work out how close to me the enemies actually were. So when things got rough, i should've stopped rather than continue.
