play! progress report (01/02/2026)
Checking on my list of "okay, I'll get back to this game at some point [MONTHS GO BY...] ... I forgot so now I'll need to start over since I don't even remember how to play" titles, Wizardry - Tales of The Forsaken Land ate most of my time. To be honest: it was a fine "waste of time", the game is addictive once you get past the 1HK ninjas (they will come back at some point, specially after the end of the game). So I went back again to some other RPGs just to remove them from my list, which now confirmed the entire .Hack series as fully playable (all the games, all regions of each game). Let's poke at he playables list:
New verified playable games [01/2025]:
Wizardry - Tales of The Forsaken Land
Princess Lover! - Eternal Love for My Lady
Taito Legends
Samurai Champloo - Sidetracked
.hack//fragment
.hack//Infection
Wizardry - Tales of the Forsaken Land: many hours of testing (including the painful post game giant dungeon), game is now confirmed as fully playable with good performance.
Princess Lover! - Eternal Love for My Lady: tested for the first time, the game wasn't able to reach the main menu. The issue was fixed by adding a delay for a specific part of the memory card emulation code (https://github.com/jpd002/Play-/commit/43d8cde41fbabd1e59c8eda2bf2e2a4b7a28c7d9). With that fix the entire game became fully playable.
Taito Legends: finally had some time to check on the rest of the games in this compilation, so here we go with a +1. Note: performance is already good but can be further improved in the future by adding an idle skip patch.
Samurai Champloo - Sidetracked: I already has a save with some levels done, so I just went and... deleted the save to play it from start. I know this sounds weird, but it's very important to not use old save games if the latest time you've played the game was with a much older version of the emulator since you could skip new issues that you would never know about unless you retest the entire game. It's painful if a game is very long (like with your avg RPG), but very needed to be sure we don't let some annoying regression show up. Game finished for good, and playable with good performance.
.hack//Fragment and .hack//Infection: I've been slowly finishing those two for the past few weeks, and now I'm finally done. All the rendering issues we had while starting the tests with the series are gone, so the entire series is now confirmed as playable.
I've just started my tests with the game Sled Storm as well. The first impression was that performance could be improved... a lot. Good news is that the developer already made an idle skip patch that fixed that and I couldn't find anything else wrong with the game (up the point I've reached so far), so expect for it to be fully playable this month as well.
There's a ton of other titles added to my TODO list, so I hope for a similar or better list of playables in the next report ;)
As always: thx for your support and see you all next month <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