play! progress report (01/05/2025)
Hello and welcome to "I've played 100+ hours of a specific game just to be sure" report. The specific game that consumed most of my time this month was Final Fantasy X and yes, I'm happy to announce that the game is finally fully playable! The gamebreaking issue was a softlock after the firt summoner trial. With that fixed nothing else prevented my progression, performance is as good as it gets and there's just one minor visual issue (corrupted background texture at the input screen for skills/overdrives, that won't last more than 1 second so I guess most people won't even notice it). For the other playables, here's the list:
New verified playable games [04/2025]:
Sarugetchu - Million Monkeys
Ape Escape - Pumped & Primed
Nuga-Cel! Nurture Garment Celebration
ToHeart 2
Vampire Panic
Star Wars: Battlefront
Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu
Final Fantasy X
Sarugetchu - Million Monkeys: with the rendering improvements from the last month, this game was blessed with the fix as well. So, nothing else to prevent me from finishing the game, right? Well, this is correct but I really wanted to verify the game in english. Recently, a fan patch was released, translating around 72% of the game text (more than enough to finish the entire thing), and this is where I've found a softlock. With that fixed, both the original retail game and the english translated ISO can be played properly with "almost" no issues (there's some known issues that are from the patch itself, you can download it and follow future improvements here https://github.com/hypermegacrash/MMTextGadget ).
Ape Escape - Pumped & Primed: same as above, but this one was available in english in the retails release, so with the visual issues out of the way I just had to finish it.
Nuga-Cel! Nurture Garment Celebration: yet another "ok, now I have time to finish this and remove it from my TODO list" case.
ToHeart 2: 50% finished last month, forgot about it and resumed it till the end 2 days ago.
Vampire Panic: Another game that had double verification (both with the original unmodified game and the english fan patch), fully playable with both cases.
Star Wars: Battlefront: a new idle skip patch was made for the game and performance no longer became an issue. All missions verified, fully playable. As a side bonus, the developer also made a patch for the second game, but with the performance fixed I've found another issue with the rendering: at some space missions, the screen can go almost fully red and hard to even see anything. You can avoid this by saving before a mission in-game and restarting the emulation (but the status of the game will remain "In-Game" until this is fixed).
Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu: this specific game reached in-game recently and I've asked the developer to make an idle skip patch (since the performance was bottlenecked by the EE emulation), which made it fully playable. The "BUT" note: there's a small input delay, even with the game running at fullspeed. That's not enough to break inputs during combos or playing it, but it's there.
Final Fantasy X: my eyes are still dry from testing this. Around 130 hours later, yeap, it's playable! Maybe I should try FF X-2 next? Hmm...
Those are the results for now, maybe I'll try FF X-2, but for sure I'll put some hours into... King's Field IV. The reason for my pick is a combo of "we could be running it it slightly faster" (which means new idle skip patch, if possible) and "I have too much time in my hands so I'll cherry pick a single visual issue on the sky textures" (which could lead to an improvement in rendering this specific game, but I'll bet this will affect something else as well...). Without much else to say, thx for all the support and see you all next month ;)
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