play! progress report (01/04/2025)
Visual issues being fixed in a single game... and many others being fixed by "accident", now that's something I love! This month I've asked the developer to check into a specific issue that wasn't gamebreaking, but still annoying: the geometry on some monsters in Dragon Quest: Shounen Yangus to Fushigi no Dungeon were messed up. As usual, I always check on game that had similar issues just to be if they've improved (or regressed), and to my surprise this same fix covered many other games as well (I'll go into some detail about the ones I've confirmed later on this report), but for now, what's actually playable for the month?:
New verified playable games:
Dragon Quest Characters: Torneko no Daibouken 3: Fushigi no Dungeon
Dragon Quest: Shounen Yangus to Fushigi no Dungeon
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni: Matsuri
Crash: Mind Over Mutant
Drakengard 2
Metropolismania 2 (US)
Metropolismania 2 (PAL)
Metropolismania (US)
Metropolismania (PAL)
Naruto Shippuden: Narutimate Accel 2
Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus
Dragon Quest Characters: Torneko no Daibouken 3: Fushigi no Dungeon: a game previously untested and since I was on my "Dragon Quest Maniac" mode, I had to give it some hours to check if it was playable.
Dragon Quest: Shounen Yangus to Fushigi no Dungeon: yet another "mystery dungeon" spin off, this was the game that caused the biggest improvement of the month. After fixing the monsters not being rendered properly, I only had to put a ton of hours into actually finishing the game.
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni: Matsuri: just had to finish it, no changes this month made any improvement or regression to this specific game
Crash: Mind Over Mutant: the game was probably playable but used to look terrible since a lot of the terrain geometry was missing. With the Dragon Quest game fix in place, this game also started to render everything properly and I had my excuse to 100% it.
Drakengard 2: another hit into this great combo. Visual issue here was a combination of dark parts of the scenario + some textures being 100% black on the model of the dragon + some parts of the scenario geometry. All fixed and the game was finished to confirm nothing else was left unchecked.
Metropolismania 1 and 2: both games I didn't had finished before because... no time I guess. This month I was able to verify them and their other regions as well.
Naruto Shippuden: Narutimate Accel 2: one of the last Naruto games left untested (at least not enough testing to finish it until now).
Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus: nothing other than "yet another game I had confirmed as in-game" in the past and never came back to test again. Sadly, the other two games on the series still have rendering issues that make it very hard to enjoy (broken shadows making the game much darker).
Other than this nice combo, some other games (like Grandia Xtreme) also improved, probably many others I don't even know about for now but I'll keep testing stuff to cover as much as possible to keep you guys up to date. Last piece of this report is the performance improvement patch made for Star Wars: Battlefront. With the idle loop detection working, this patch made the performance no longer a major issue, but I'll need to test every single map and mode to be sure nothing else is broken.
That's it for now, I'll be hunting down some more improvements and try to finish some other RPGs as well (I can already spoil that Grandia Xtreme showed a very annoying error... that's very random and hard to reproduce for now, but this looks like the only problem on the game so far), see you all next month and thanks for the support <3
Useful Links
play! site: https://purei.org/
play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List
play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play-
play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002