part of my impetus for trying this game (beside it being a modern kart racer not called Mario Kart, which alone is enough to pique my interest) was to see how the PS+ Premium Game Trial service worked. so, in the interest of having this knowledge benefit everyone, here’s a rundown of how it works:
To start a trial, you need to download the entire game, or at least enough for the PlayStation to be able to launch it (since some games have a “ready to play” demarcation). Once you select “Play game”, rather than immediately launching, it will instead show you a splash screen with your remaining trial time (trials have been anywhere from 2 to 5 hours thus far) — you have to click through this last splash page to launch the game and start the timer.
The timer only ticks down while the game is actually running. To close a game on PS5, either launch a different game, or open the Switcher, select the active game, then select “Close game” from the context menu. I didn’t explicitly check whether the timer continues ticking down while you are in the PS menu or on the Home screen while the game is running or idling in the background, but I kind of expect it does — seems like you might be able to abuse that to milk more time out of it if it does actually pause the timer, since different games handle opening the PS menu differently
While playing the game, you cannot check the timer. You have to close the game or launch another game, then go back to the splash screen to check it. Your PlayStation will pop a warning at 30, 15, and 5 minutes remaining. When time is up, you will be instantly and unceremoniously kicked back to the PS Home screen, and the game will now shows its purchase price instead of “Play game” if you select it.
If you are interested in buying the game when the trial is up, keep in mind the game will actually still be running in the background when you get kicked out at the end, though you won’t have any way to get back in unless you buy it. This is relevant because if you are in the middle of something in a game and haven’t saved yet, you could hypothetically just buy the game and resume playing, as the trial ending doesn’t automatically close the game.
you can’t accrue boost while boosting, but you do get more boost from boosting such that the tail-off speed continues into a corner, as faster, sharper drifts accrue more boost
i’ve heard Sonic Advance 1 is the best one? i owned 2, because i got tricked by the first few stages into thinking it was on par with the Genesis games, but that is…not entirely true. Advance 3 had an interesting idea in its partner system, but suffered from awful hit detection (very easy to get crushed just by standing next to a moving platform, for example), so i dropped it quick
I finally got my Playdate device after waiting what seems like a hundred million years, well after everyone else I know who ordered one got theirs.
I now have to wait fucking twelve weeks to get all the games, including ones made by people I know IRL whose work I want to see and enjoy.
During the long wait for the device, multiple manufacturing delays, etc, I completely forgot that the idea of this device was to make a tiny gameboy ass machine where you have to wait and get all the games slowly over time. After waiting and seeing everyone else play them already, I am no longer a fan of this idea and I just want to play everything right now. I have no desire to live the creators’ dream; the dream was a dumb one to have, given the realities of the manufacturing process.
I just want to use this as a small device that I can sideload itch games onto. That’s its saving grace–I can sideload itch Playdate games onto this and play them on the train. It’s very cool that there are a ton of nice little games for this on itch and IMO it’s even cooler that almost all of them seem to be selling for small amounts of Real Money. The most expensive one I found was a mahjong game for eight bucks. I paid a dollar for some kind of digging simulator and a couple bucks for a picross thing. I can even make my own shit for this pretty easily as they have a browser based bitsy-alike that lets you put little things on it fast. I think that’s actually rather delightful. Considering making a Playdate game for the GGJ.
But I am extremely not down with doing some kind of guided game meditation over the course of 12 weeks and waiting and waiting to play my buddy’s game on this thing just because the creator decided I should have this emotional experience. I wasn’t a mega huge fan of either of the first two games you get in Week 1 of your guided game meditation schedule, so I put a picross on this thing instead and damn, it’s a nice little device.
Chrono Cross. Was disturbed by the casual heartlessness of the first quest. Hunt down, trap and kill fleeing baby komodos to get their scales. Their mother comes to defend them. Kill her too. Why the scales? To make a lame surfer necklace for your childhood girlfriend
Romancing Saga Minstrel Song remaster: Just learned that the the OG JP version had enemies scale up 2x faster? How?? I picked Jamil with that OG speed. Gave away almost all my possessions to beggars in the first city. Ready to face imminent death and accidentally save in an inescapable impossible spot, any time
there’s a lot of stuff like this in chrono cross that you typically don’t see as often in japanese games as in western ones, where it’s clear that the people who had the big ideas for the game direction weren’t really talking to the people who had to fill in all the moment-to-moment bits
You can write in to Playdate support and they will fast forward you to the end. I think they said they were adding a self-service option to do this via the website but I don’t know if that ever shipped
its completely in line with the rest of the game…chrono cross is literally a game with recurring themes of how humans dont give a fuck about the planet or anybody but themselves and love destroying ecosystems. of course the children are running around killing entire nests of animals for trinkets. It makes the hydra thing later better too, cuz that shit is just business as usual but you actually have to face consequences for having a complete disregard for other creatures
Yeah the playdate game schedule sucks and is dumb. It’s so dumb I’m having a hard time believing they shipped with this feature unadjusted after all their painful manufacturing delays. I may ask them to skip me to the end but my device is currently actually full of cool shit I haven’t played yet because the games people are putting on Itch for this thing rock. Turns out I can just ignore their dumb season stuff maybe haha.
I downloaded a bunch this morning. I think I spent fifteen bucks on like 7 tiny ass playdate games and a ton of these are like, things you could play for hours and hours. I’m so impressed. Check em out on itch here
it’s not really foregrounded much in the early game though and it clashes pretty badly with the really sumptuous audiovisual presentation – like, they plonk you down on this hunting mission without judgment and they spring a lot of other conflicts on you (in societies of wildly differing technological sophistication which kind of sticks out thematically as something they might’ve liked to import from CT but without thinking it through in terms of how damning it is to hunt for sustenance or w/e) immediately afterwards, so that one doesn’t amount to much, and it gets lost in “first dungeon” mindset.
my perspective on this for the record is that I really love thinking about chrono cross but I really do not like playing chrono cross
I’m gonna play through them all. Get the real scoop. And Sonic Pocket. And Sonic and Knuckles somewhere in there.
I got Sonic Advance 2 when I got my GBA and what I remember is bottomless pits. Ever stage was a rollercoaster you could easily fall off. Advance 1 has that in the later stages but clearly they are going for something. It feels like the slow stages of 1 and 2 in a good way.
which runs the games at full PC speed which would normally be unplayable but there’s a “ZEN” version of the Pac game that played at pretty much normal-type speed, almost as if it was made for that purpose.
Liked the graphical style but didn’t dig on the gameplay: blind running into ghosts in the scrolling maze and kinda floaty control.
