Earlier today we posted about PlayCast ($9.99), a third party utility that had been just released on the App Store. It advertises the ability to play PS4 games on iOS devices via the same Remote Play functionality that allows you to play PS4 games on the Vita. After waiting what felt like forever for my PS4 to update itself (I don’t even remember the last time I turned it on), and the same simple setup process that the PS Vita goes through to link it to the PS4 I was… well, playing Rocket League on my phone. Or, more accurately, trying to play Rocket League.
Out of the box and without an MFi controller, PlayCast relies on a pretty gross explosion of virtual controls to do anything. It works well enough for navigating menus, but it’s pretty difficult to imagine anyone actually playing a game using the virtual controls- Particularly as it seems there’s no way for the app to emulate virtual analog sticks. So, anything that is slow paced, and only requires the D-Pad and face/shoulder buttons should, in theory, be totally playable with some patience.
Pair an MFi controller to your iOS device and you’ve got a whole new world of possibilities in PlayCast. Fast-paced games actually become playable, although the app warns that you should have your PS4 wired via Ethernet and your iOS device connected via a 5ghz WiFi network. That’s the setup I have at my house right now, so getting PlayCast cooking at 720p and 60fps (the highest resolution and framerate offered) was no problem. Aside from a few random stutters here and there, the performance of the Remote Play seems to be identical to what I’ve seen the PS Vita do. Much like the (currently defunct) OnLive, artifacting is a considerable issue when there’s a lot of action on screen, as you can see from the following screenshot:
Everything gets a little muddy and blurry when there’s a lot of action, but again, it’s totally workable. When playing on an iPhone, most of this gets obscured by the small screen size so it isn’t as immediately apparent as looking at a still screenshot on your computer screen. The only (potentially significant) caveat to playing on your iPhone is it feels like the experience just sort of sucks compared to playing on an actual TV. In this day and age, a 30" TV is pretty tiny, so playing games made for a 30" to 60"+ display on a 4.7" cell phone screen is… Well, a little weird. I couldn’t really find a way to get comfortable either, as it felt like I needed to hunch over my phone and get real close to the screen to see a lot of the text or UI elements which would just be normal sized on a TV.
MFi controllers are obviously missing the L3 and R3 buttons from the PS4 controller. (Those are the names of the buttons you press by clicking the analog sticks in.) PlayCast has come up with an interesting solution for this in that you can map a combination of button presses to emulate pressing L3 or R3. I set mine up so pressing L1 and L2 together was the same as pressing L3, and the same for R1 and R2 for R3. It worked alright, but when you trigger L3 by pressing L1 and L2, PlayCast stops telling the PS4 you’re holding down L1 and L2. In the case of Rocket League, this is a little weird because you use the shoulder buttons to accelerate and you click the analog stick to look behind you. With this setup, you can look behind, but it momentarily releases the throttle. I’m sure with some experimentation you could come up with a combo that mitigates this a little better, but how well these things work will largely depend on the game and what you also need to be doing while hitting R3 and L3.
Playing on the iPad Pro (shown above) is a significantly better experience than playing on your iPhone, but it comes with the drawback of the relatively low 720p resolution and artifact-heavy Remote Play stream being considerably more obvious. Again, it’s not unplayable, but it’s just nowhere near playing on an actual TV. This all sort of raises the question of what use case exists where PlayCast is something you need?
If this were 1988 and I was fighting for screen time with the rest of my family on our single TV to play Super Mario Brothers 3 on the NES, something like PlayCast would’ve been a godsend. I played through more than my fair share of objectively terrible Game Boy games exclusively because it was something I was always able to play instead of just something I got to play when no one else was using the TV. I would have put up with somewhat low (by today’s standards) 720p resolution and lots of visual artifacts to play my “real" console games in the same way I could play my Game Boy uninterrupted.
On the other hand, with how incredibly cheap TV’s have gotten, it’s hard to really imagine too many households that have a PS4 that wouldn’t just have an extra TV you could hook it up to. (Hell, if you don’t care about size or brand you can pick up an HDTV for under $100, or potentially way way cheaper, or even free, on Craigslist.) I guess maybe if your PS4 was hooked up to your TV downstairs and you wanted to play in bed on your iPad, that’s a decent use case for PlayCast, but, eh.
Overall, PlayCast is giving me the same vibe that the various iOS emulators that have snuck on to the App Store over the years do. Is it undeniably cool to be able to play PS4 games on your iOS device with an MFi controller? For sure, that’s super neat. Is it something I’m going to do more than once to go, “Huh, that’s pretty cool that I can do that?" Probably not. But, this is coming from someone who has their PS4 hooked up to a projector blasting on to a 10′ screen in my basement, so for me, the overall experience could not possibly be more night and day. For what it is though, PlayCast works surprisingly well, provided you’re willing to put up with a few caveats. Just beware of the real possibility that it could be a $9.99 “Huh, that’s neat."
The term Metroid-vania has so much baggage. The genre needs a real name.
Imagine if every platformer was called a "Mario-like". And think how much you groan every time you hear a developer describe their new game as Mario-like.
Believe it or not for like a decade most first person shooters were called "Doom clones" because ID straight up defined the genre with Wolfenstein and Doom. It's not surprising that we still call all side scrolling exploration games Metroid since that game defined THAT genre.
Speaking of which, I LOVE Symphony of the Night, but why is the Castlevania series attached to the Metroid lineage? That has always confused me. We call these games "Metroidvania" but...it's all just straight up Metroid. Castlevania adopted Nintendo's formula YEARS after Metroid. And only a handful of games from that series even used it!
Super Metroid was released in 1994, and SOTN in 1997, so while you're definitely right, it was these two games that really popularised the genre, and both happened to be completely ground breaking and phenomenal games (which hold up incredibly well today). I don't know about the immediate origins of the word, but I think it's become popularised because it's better than comparing it to a specific game or series, which makes it seem a little unoriginal. But really I have no idea haha
Metroid, though, was 1986. Yes Super Metroid was the mainstream success that popularized it. SOTN brought it to the Playstation crowd a group that had plenty that didn't have Nintendo growing up I guess. So someone felt they had to combine them and it caught on? Castlevania 2 _did_ have some exploration elements.
Castlevania and Metroid both came out in 1986. Metroid is scifi and Castlevania fantasy, both utilize large maps, ability-unlocks, and backtracking so anything evocative of either fits within the Castleoid...scope (although I must agree, most I've seen recently (sadly long since any of the phenomenal DS Castlevanias) seem to have clung to the name strictly for marketing reasons (they're my favorite kind of game but also probably super hard to make (especially when they throw in the hundred hand drawn creatures, thankfully IGA's kickstarter game Bloodstained looks to do that someday). Wolfenstein came out before Doom, but Doom I think had a bigger media impact, and it's faster to same "Doom clone" than "Wolfenstein." So much of the world is marketing.
I remember the moment where you fight in the clock tower level where you at the right time the floor beneath you opens and you step in a gage type of lift to fight a sort of ghost and the game finished,but when you had the two rings blue and red equipped you see the real enemy above the ghost's head and when you kill him you see a cutscene where the castle turns upside down and you could play the game again with tougher enemies and a different upside down layout had such great memories of SOTN great stuff and very rare these days I can't recall a game that did something like that.
Haha and then you realize the completion rate goes up to 200%, that's cool though I'll have to youtube that fight though, thanks!
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The Nintendo DS games do that too with multiple endings: bad if you lose the fake final boss fight, good if you win, and then with the right equipments/souls you get to unlock an extra section of the game and fight the real final boss for the excellent ending. There is a real cryptic reference to what you're supposed to equip to get through further sections, which harkens back to the days of the original Nintendy Castlevania games that required you to speak to a villager and then kneel at some point facing a wall and a tornado will take you away (CVii: Simon's Quest), or more likely buy a Nintendo Power or back then have a friend that told you how to beat the game (in DS's Aria it was the souls and armor that gave you the abilities of Dracula (panther's speed, succubi's bite, and I can't remember which armor I'll have to look it up something fluffy I think, the Angry Video Game Nerd has a great video about the OG Castlevanias if I recall correctly).
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Ya I love that kind of innovation in gaming too (probably why so many live SOTN), and I was happy they continued it in the DS line-up (I also had ideas for my own, who doesn't!?!), and it's been a while since Order of Ecclesia but hopefully they'll keep it up! Even Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid is a fan of Castlevania (and would comment on it in-game if you had a memory card with a Castlevania save, well he would say something like, 'looks like someone's a Castlevania fan'), and I always liked the innovation of having to switch what port your controller was in to keep him from reading your character's mind and thereby dodging your bullets! These cool game moments make such a great story too!
Yeah great the part where Psyo Mantis "read your mind" and told you about games you recently played and I thought how is that possible????later on I found out they did that to read data from your memory card if you had Konami saves on them but sure a memorable moment the PlayStation was a huge leap forward in comparison what the SNES could do.
Until we find another name for this genre we have to deal with it :/.
Anyway, For those who who loves Metroidvania genre, this page offers: Reviews,Recommendations, Gameplay videos and jokes; about New & Old Metroidvania games : https://www.facebook.com/Me...
I see where you're coming from, and I agree that the term has an awful lot of baggage - it leads to fanboys like me making immediate assumptions of any game that has that label. However, at least at the time, it was a pretty fundamental description of a certain type of game. It's a lot less wordy than 'side scrolling non-linear action title with a massive map and progression through upgrades' or whatever, while comparing a game to Mario doesn't mean much more than platforming action.
Maybe a less loaded word than 'Metroidvania' would be better, but it's stuck now so we're going to have to live with it unfortunately.
Too good.
Watch-listed.
Wow, definitely watch listed!
I think shadow complex is the last metroidvania I've really enjoyed. We need a new one of those.
Head lander
Haven't played it yet but I did think of Shadow Complex when I saw Headlander footage.
Head lander looks dope, just beat axiom verge recently.. Such an awesome game
I'm still trying to get through that on my Vita. Amazing and tough game...
The animation resembles the old Prince of Persia rotoscoping, which doesn't work for me when your character looks like he's using wires.
I could do without the parkour, too. It's quickly becoming the new steampunk, where a developer adds it because nerds think it's cool.
Looks like an pixel-ly (8-bit?) parkour simulator to me...
It looks cools at any rate, just not sure how it would play...
We're looking forward to getting builds out to people. We want to hammer on the game-feel until it's buttery smooth.
That looks similar to say sonic the hedgehog or a side scrolling endless runner. I hate games like that because I like to explore and find all the secrets and nooks and crannies. Games like this where everything is blazing by makes me feel like I'm missing something and the completionist in me freaks out and it stresses me out I could be missing something lol. Yes I'm cray.
Yeah I get that too. Fallout 4 right now might as well be "Trash Hoarder and Wiki Checker 4 with some Fun Shooty and Story Bits for me." And that's not even a Sonic speed game...
Cray Fo' Lyfe! Squiggly light bulbs!
That one GIF gives the wrong impression. The game is a 'nooks and crannies' game for sure. But there are bits of action to spice it up. You'll run from a squad of footmen, then stop and continue to search for the quest items on your list etc.
I never liked Sonic/endless runner games either. Into the Rift is inspired by Zelda, Metroid and the back-tracking Castlevanias.
Well that all sounds like fun! Please keep up the great work!
i remember seeing this game posted in an indie dev forum on facebook, everyone was mesmerized how the gif was looped to perfection! definitely getting a prince of persia vibe from it, looks awesome
Looks like an endless runner but it's too early tell. The term Metroidvania is used way too loosely these days. There ARE true and great Metroidvania games out there and on the horizon (Chasm, Bloodstained), but it's used way too much, even saw it used for a first person game here.
Morphite, right? The game that's patterned after Metroid Prime? That does bring up an interesting point - is Metroid Prime a Metroidvania? Personally, I hate the term. But nobody has coined anything better yet. Non-linear action game? Lock-and-key platformer?
Looking at Morphite, yes it was that one dubbed a Metroidvania. Metroid Prime is considered a first person action adventure game, bordering first person shooter. The defining aspects of a Metroidvania are that its a platformer, is inspired by both the 1986 Metroid title and first Castlevania titles, has exploration and a large map with connecting rooms/segments, and portals/keys to advance to new areas. Some may consider Metroid Prime a Metroidvania and that's fine since it carries many of those aspects and the term does not have a specific rule set. It's just that when many people see Metroidvania, myself included, they vision a certain look and type of game inspired by both of the games the moniker derives from. Perhaps a safer word to pinpoint the genre would be to call it an Igavania. Morphite being more like Metroid Prime seems to me like a Metroid-like (an all encompassing term) or first person action adventure like Metroid Prime is considered. Well damn, I'm a rambling man. Who knew it was so thought provoking and fun to discuss unofficial but beloved video game genres.
Shouldn't surprise me if the dev has been inspired by "Prince of Persia" this looks so great nice graphics and beautiful animations a real gem I hope it is a "paid once"game can't wait to play this.