The new game in the Stories on Tuesday series is the PS3 version of XBlaze Lost: Memories from Arc System Works and Aksys Games.
This part started with me choosing the other option from Part 10, that gave us the game over. this is a bit more of a happier part, in comparison to the previous few, but it's still frustrating watching Es make the same mistakes as before and not trusting those around her enough. But it does seem like she has forgotten why she's back so maybe we can cut her some slack.
This week's new Cloud Monday video is part 2 of playing the PS4 version of Digimon Survive via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.
In the first Part, https://youtu.be/kjyaV_4XsyY, it was clear how good the game's save system was. it was an Auto save that's pretty clear to see on screen when it's in action, typically before/after a talking set piece, and there's also the manual save option which can save the game at a specific point in a conversation. when we start this Part, we load right in to the middle of the conversation we left the game before.
When there's only a 20 second window to save before being disconnected from the service, being able to save and knowing when the game itself last saved is crucial and Digimon Survive does a great job at it. One of the reasons i feel like it's one of the better games we've played via the Cloud also comes down to the game's art style. none of the Digimon we've encountered so far has fine detail. their art style is simple and relies on expressions. if the game was to suffer from macro blocking, so instead of fine detail we get larger squares of color, there's a higher chance of such squares not getting in the way of the Digimon's design. their character models are large so there's a higher chance of the squares appearing in color anyway. the subtitles on screen are also rather large. if macro blocking were to occur in the subtitle box it would be obvious, but it's unlikely to obscure the whole world due to the size of it so for the most part text should be legible enough. if things did get rough then it's easy enough to pause and maybe even save and wait for this macro blocking to pass.
The visual novel style of gameplay also lends itself to being played from the cloud. this game has a "Backlog" feature, something fairly common amongst visual novels, where you're able to look back at text already spoken. so if there was macro blocking obscuring text you're able to check what it actually said. I think you're also able to check what was set in a cut scene, if you had to end it to save, but i haven't tested that out.
Digimon Survive isn't a large install, the PSN Store say's it's 6.34GB so for many installing it will be a sensible option. but i do feel that playing it from the cloud is just as good of an experience. there is one added benefit for those who sometimes forget what they've installed on a console and that's whilst the icon will be on the home screen no space is taken up. so if you do forget to uninstall it when it leaves PlayStation Plus, it'll take up no space and you can add the icon into a "To Buy" folder as a Wishlist" of sorts on your console.
This weekend is November's Eggstra Work Event in Splatoon 3 on Switch. I have felt terrible since Friday with a migraine and general queasiness, so i was unable to Live Stream during the weekend. i got out of bed for a little bit to take part in the event. i got 10 matches done before i gave up due to general fatigue. my highest score was 139 in my tenth and final match. i don't know if this is good enough for bronze. let me know in the comments what your scores were!
For this week's Mobile Friday i tried Seven Knights Re:Birth from developer Netmarble on my iPhone 14 Pro.
I've had Seven Knights Re:Birth installed on my phone for a while and had noticed that the game was constantly being updated. But at 251.4 MB, there's even more to download once you start the game. to it's credit i did appreciate that the game let me start with a guest account and it gave me a heads up about the additional 5GB download, warning that it was best to download it over Wi-Fi. what surprised me was that the game was able to tell me that i was currently connected to Wi-Fi. Games have warned that these data installs should be down over Wi-Fi, but this was the first time i remember a game saying what my current connection was.
The install section is just a short slideshow with 1 song playing on loop. but when it stops and you launch the game we're greeted by a cinematic intro that looks cool. again, the game surprised me by then seamlessly transitioning from the cinematic to a gameplay tutorial to back to the intro, to gameplay story telling. it makes a fantastic first impression.
With such a spectacle for an introduction, the bar is high for the game to reach during normal gameplay and for the most part i think it reaches it. Seven Knights Re:Birth is a turn based RPG that gives players the choice to control the fight or to watch it happen. personally, once the ability to watch was unlocked i never went back to controlling the characters manually because it was such a pleasure to watch. It's a similar effect to Football Manager, a game where you spend time building the team and then watch them in action. in Seven Knights Re:Birth i was assigning characters to the team, equipping them, and then watching them attack enemies.
Between the action stuff is the story stuff. i'll be honest, i kinda saw the direction it was going to go and correctly guessed it. So the story maybe a little generic, but the presentation of said story is well done. the character interactions on screen remind me of larger console games. for a game like Seven Knights Re:Birth, this video isn't long enough to get a sense of the true story but for now there's enough here for me to want to continue playing.
For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the PlayStation 4 version of Angry Video Game Nerd 8-bit from Retroware, Mega Cat Studios, and Programancer.
Whilst i have been watching their video content probably from near the beginning, i have never played any of the videogames. when i recorded this video i thought that this was just a port of a previous Angry Video Game Nerd game but i have since learned that this is a brand new game. so apologies if things get a little confusing in the video.
My history with videogames starts more from the 16bit era with the Mega Drive, but i did play a few 8bit games on the Master System and i've played pixel looking sidescrollers before so for me it wasn't too unexpected when the game started with no tutorial. But as this is a demo there's a chance that the final game has a tutorial of sorts. you'll have to let me know in the comments if this game does have one or not.
Graphically, it sure is an 8bit looking game and it comes with some of the gameplay limitations i expected from such a game. an easy example is how you can only shoot horizontally. there's no up or down shooting. But what was unexpected and very welcomed was how the game isn't sticking to the rules i was used to back then. it was common in games to have jumps into the unknown but here the stages have been built in such a way that you can always see at least 1 platform to aim for when jumping down.
Personally, i found the normal difficulty to be hard and changed it to easy to beat the demo. difficulty in game's like this are rather subjective so whilst i'd recommend starting on easy then going up to normal, for those who like a challenge and like learning pattens the normal difficulty could be a good start.
There was a bug at the start of the game. the FMV sequence featuring the Nerd himself was out of sync. when i changed difficulty and started again, the same sequence played but it worked fine. i don't know if this is unique to the demo or a bug in the PS4 version. you'll have to let me know in the comments. but i will send an email out to the developers to let them know what happened.
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.
Our new game is the PlayStation 3 version of Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy from the 2012 The Jak and Daxter Trilogy that remastered the games and brought them into HD. This series is my first time playing any of the games from the initial trilogy, tho i have played the PSP game #Daxter.
