Cloud Monday - Battlefield 2042 - Part 2 - Go To "Portal" And "Browse" For Online Matches

This week's new Cloud Monday video is part 2 of playing Battlefield 2042 on PS4, via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.

In Part 1, i was unable to find an online match. so my goal in this Part was to try every online game mode and give said mode 5 minutes to find a game. Because i did this, i found where the Battlefield 2042 community is, they're in the Portal Section, so use the Browse option to pick the best game near you.

The video i got from PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming service wasn't as good as in Part 1, nor was the audio. with how short you're alive for in this game, the visual issues weren't much of a problem. but the audio was a little frustrating. it sounded either low quality or like it was too loud for the speaker but then that sound is played back to me at a normal sound. 

What was frustrating about Battlefield 2042 in Part 1 continued here. if the community is all in one place, why haven't the developers changed the UI to send us straight there. there was a Conquest 64 mode being highlighted instead. it baffles me why the developers chose to copy the poor Call of Duty UI and then have no tutorial for how it plays. i still don't know how to lay on the ground.

But with how bad the game is, streaming it does become an option. there's not much of a community behind it so installing the game onto your PS4 could be seen as a waste of space. but now we can stream it from the cloud, well you can check which, if any, modes are populated without having it take up space on your PS4.

Mobile Friday - Switching Heroes: Action RPG - A Good Looking Simple Action RPG With Poor Widescreen

For this week's Mobile Friday i tried Switching Heroes: Action RPG from developers ZillionGames on my iPhone 14 Pro.

I've had Switching Heroes: Action RPG on my phone for a while and had seen that it's been regularly updated by it's developers. the only reason why i hadn't played it earlier is simply that i forgot it came out this year.

The screenshots in the app store made it look like the game had good graphics and decent action and after playing for nearly an hour i would agree. i wasn't disappointed by the artstyle either. i thought the monsters looked good and the different places we went to also looked distinct from each other. it would actually be the music and sound effects that stand out as being particularly poor in comparison.

There is a story, but it really didn't add anything to the experience and is very rarely mentioned again. every now and then on screen an image of the tower would appear and we'd overtake someone. but i didn't really know what was happening. Switching Heroes: Action RPG does have a tutorial and at times it's great. but they fail to have a consistent level of quality throughout the experience and the tutorial never talks about the icons on the top right or top left.

i didn't know that the game had both a vertical and horizontal mode. unfortunately, it's hard to recommend the horizontal landscape mode. it feels more like the game can do it, like a check box could be ticked, rather than being designed to use it. it's weirdly zoomed in, the UI doesn't cover the whole screen, and all the text is tiny on the screen. switching to vertical makes things much clearer. 

The core gameplay to Switching Heroes: Action RPG is good. as i've played a few of these before i know what to do. it took about 35 minutes before the grind kicked in. it was only brief as i was able to continue to make progress fairly quickly. it's easy to play Switching Heroes: Action RPG one handed and in short bursts, which makes it a good choice for those who commute. i would say that Switching Heroes: Action RPG is a good one of these, but it's probably not making it into my top 5 free to play mobile games of the year.

Version 2.70 Played.

Demo Play Thursday - BUSTAFELLOWS season2 On Switch

For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of BUSTAFELLOWS season2 from Nippon Cultural Broadcasting Extend and PQube.

I haven't played the original game that came out back in 2019 so going into this, and any continuation of a story, i'm interested to see if that lack of knowledge would be a hinderance. 

This demo is the prologue of BUSTAFELLOWS season2 but it is also different from the start of the game. this means that the save data from this Prologue will NOT work with the main game. for spoiler reasons, it's not made clear what the differences are between this version and the final retail version. I did like that the demo makes this clear before it starts. there's a memo from the developers about this prologue. unfortunately, it's only on screen for less than 2 seconds so for this upload i have extended the time it's on screen so you can read their note.

Personally, i'm not a huge fan of how this prologue told it's story. i admit that i didn't get to the end of it, but with this video already over an hour 15 and my enthusiasm for the story dropping, i thought this was long enough. we start with an introduction to a lot of people who know each other, in a way that didn't quite feel as natural as i'd hope. there's a shocking development, and then the story goes back in time a little. we're introduced to more people who seem to know each other, but then we do get introduced to two new people who seem like they're going to be important to the story.  then i ended the demo.

Backlog Conquering - Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition On PS4 - Part 7

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.

In Part 7, I got ever closer to the game's Boss. we beat the Jaguar guy and reached a point where the game suggested checking out previous places we've visited before going forward to the end game. i decided to go back to the chicken trainer and finally beat the last set of combo's. it took some time but i got a trophy for it. the next goal was to go back to the mine and finish it. i didn't realize that when you finish a shaft, it unlocks the next one. i had already finished the first shaft so in this video i did the second shaft and then struggled with the third. i came soo close to defeating it's boss, but this video was already over an hour so i decided to give up for today and try again in Part 8.

You can watch other parts:

Part 1 - https://youtu.be/y20ZZ5IllmY

Part 2 - https://youtu.be/OxoUuZ8dYno

Part 3 - https://youtu.be/aSABHs1VrF4

Part 4 - https://youtu.be/RkrZPlBT1f4

Part 5 - https://youtu.be/WZHkHZEaD0Q

Part 6 - https://youtu.be/VMNT2XpjDhE

Stories on Tuesday - Visual Novel: I.B. - Part 4 - Chapter 4

The new game in the Stories on Tuesday series is the iOS version of Visual Novel: I.B. from Entabridge. 

This is Part 4 and it covers the game's fourth chapter titled Malice.

You can check out the previous parts at these links:

Part 1 - https://youtu.be/yclMfGCp1Uo

Part 2 - https://youtu.be/pKZdQNymjhk

Part 3 - https://youtu.be/I0W5ejOVq6I

Mobile Friday - Space Squad Survival - Assortment Of Bugs Keep This Great Game Off Game of the Year

For this week's Mobile Friday i tried Space Squad Survival from developers Rebel Twins on my iPhone 14 Pro.

I was quite excited to play Space Squad Survival. the screenshots and video on the App store reminded me of FTL: Faster Than Light, a PC game i've played but never finished. 

the game starts explosively and the first thing i noticed is how weird the controls are. it certainly took a little bit of time to understand how it worked. all the while, the game's story is still going. when it came to stuff on our ship, the tutorial was simple but effective, perhaps lacking a reason why we're doing what we're doing. But when it came to the planet stuff, that first planet was a blur. the ship is talking to us, there was my shipmate and I trying to adjust to the controls, dodge what's attacking up, whilst there's a timer, and then the whole stage blew up. and wow, it's a lot to take in. i didn't really grasp what to do until by the end of the second planet we visit. 

Quite quickly the loop of what's expected of us is revealed. we need to go to other planets to gather resources. we then use them on upgrading or building new elements on/in our ship. at the end of the video i discover there are other 300 stages, i only got to stage 5 in an hour. so there is a lot of content in the game.

Unfortunately, the game is too buggy for me to recommend right now. i encountered a game ending bug where i was stuck in the ship. the game forgot i had completed a stage by watching a video and by using gems so i lost the games and had to do it all over again with no compensation. 

As these bugs effect gameplay, they will knock Space Squad Survival down the list of the best played games this year. but i still had fun playing it. perhaps the biggest surprise was how Space Squad Survival does adverts. there is an actual countdown to when the advert plays. that's absolutely fantastic and something i've been asking developers to do for years. and it's not just text on a screen, they've created art that fits the game's to tell us this. I cut out about 6 minutes of adverts from this video, but as the player it never really bothered me because of the game's approach to it.

I would recommend Space Squad Survival in it's current state. i think that there's enough to it and enough that works for it to be an enjoyable experience, i know i had one. at the very least, it's worth downloading now and checking update notes when they come out. it may not make the number 1 spot, but it could still make it into the top 5 of my free to play mobile game of the year awards just 'cause it's fun to play.

Version 1.0.06 Played.

Demo Play Thursday - Hogtie On Switch

For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of Hogtie from RedDeer.Games and Alacrity Games.

there were a decent number of puzzles to playthrough in this demo for Hogtie. as you play it, it's clear where the cut off for the demo is. as there appears to be no story, such a cutoff doesn't feel weird. what's nice is that we're given puzzles across two different biomes, which means a greater number of types of puzzles are available. in this video, i played through all the puzzles i could, but i didn't get all the stars. for the purpose of this video, getting all of them wasn't important. but it does seem that progress is gated behind ability. So if you're bad at this game, you won't gain access to much of it. it's not ideal but as this isn't a story based puzzle game it is understandable. What's unknown is whether our playthrough of the demo would carry over to the final game or if we get a bonus start or two in the main game for playing it.

i'm not great at puzzle games, so i always hope that there's a clear tutorial or a sensible ramp up in difficulty, or preferably both. With Hogtie, i appreciated how they showed each new ability in action and the controls needed. what they didn't show was when to press the controls. so i had to experiment a little with tapping, holding buttons until i understood. but the videos were very clear in showing what the goal of the puzzle was. i also appreciated how quick the puzzles were to restart by hitting the replay button on screen during the puzzle or the replay option at the end. but i don't know if "replay" is the least confusing word to chose. when it's after the puzzle i would suspect it means watching a replay of our game. i think retry would've been a better choice.

This communication problem occurs at least one more time. some of you may be watching and thinking the audio is quiet, and i would agree. i have not turned down the game audio. actually, i've turned down my commentary audio a little. and yet, i show in this video the audio options and i genuinely couldn't understand what it meant. if you have labels, they must be universal and clear. but i've seen all 3 of those labels used for all sorts of audio stuff. i even turned it up in-game. so i have to imagine the audio is a little broken in the demo so let us know if the final game fixes it.

Overall, i thought this was a good demo for Hogtie. if you're curious about the game and the puzzles in it, trying this demo is a great place to start. remember, the game is skill based so if you struggle to complete the demo then you're unlikely to get enough stars in-game to progress. the controls are good, the tutorials are great, the art is fun, and the mood is casual. it's a nice game to have and to make slow progress through.