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  • Infinite Wealth Steam Deck Review – An RPG Masterpiece – TouchArcade

    Infinite Wealth Steam Deck Review – An RPG Masterpiece – TouchArcade

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    When Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth was revealed, I was actually a bit disappointed. I adore the series, but I was hoping the team would build on Ichiban’s story to take the franchise forward rather than bringing back Kazuma Kiryu after he had a great finale in Yakuza 6. If you’re new to the games, we basically had a soft reboot in ways with Yakuza: Like a Dragon (titled Yakuza 7 in Japan) that not only brought in a new protagonist, but also was a turn-based RPG rather than a brawler like prior entries. I love Kiryu’s games and consider Yakuza 0 as one of my favorite games of all time, but Yakuza: Like a Dragon felt like the breath of fresh air the series needed.

    Since then, the team released Like a Dragon Gaiden (link to review), which I ended up loving as well despite its one annoying issue. At that point, I was more or less sold on Kiryu being back, but was cautiously optimistic for where the story in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (titled Like a Dragon 8 in Japan) would go. I’ve been playing it for a few weeks now, and after putting in nearly 105 hours into the game across PS5 and Steam Deck, I consider Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth to be a masterpiece of an RPG, and one of my favorite games in a very long time. Note that the screenshots in this review are my own from both Steam Deck and PS5.

    When I began the main story, it felt like a great opening, but I wasn’t ready for what was coming next. With each chapter I played, mini-game I discovered, side story I found, and more, I genuinely couldn’t believe what Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and Sega pulled off here. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is one of Sega’s best games ever, but what surprised me is how it also felt like two complete Yakuza games put together and then some. If you played Yakuza 0, you experienced a dual protagonist system there. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is a monstrous experience through its main story and all the optional content. Even after over a hundred hours into the game, I haven’t done remotely everything I wanted to in the game world.

    Before getting into what I love about Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, I want to go over what I wanted fixed from Yakuza: Like a Dragon. Yakuza: Like a Dragon was the team’s first turn-based RPG, and one that felt like a brilliant first attempt from Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio. It did have some teething issues in its gameplay, and one massive surprise difficulty spike in the later half of the game. The team has addressed all of these issues in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth with huge combat improvements and enhancements, and the team even took care of the difficulty spike by actually giving you recommended gear and levels for specific story points throughout the story. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is basically the culmination of not only the newer games in the series, but also as chock full of quality content as Yakuza 0 was, while respecting the series’ legacy as a whole throughout. This is Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s magnum opus.

    Having avoided watching most story-related trailers, I came into Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth relatively blind barring what I experienced in the demo included in Like a Dragon Gaiden last year. I was curious about how both protagonists would be handled, and I think the team did a fantastic job. After a strong opening few chapters, you start to see not only different perspectives of the story, but also some superb interactions between the new parties here. I wasn’t worried about how Ichiban’s side would be handled with the new characters introduced, but I was curious about how I’d find characters from Yakuza: Like a Dragon like Seonhee, Nanba, and Saeko in Kiryu’s party. In the last few years, there have been some strong JRPG main casts like Xenoblade 3 having one of the best, but Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth has surpassed that quite a bit. This might be one of my favorite casts in gaming now.

    In addition to the banter during exploration and combat, the characters are further fleshed out not only during the story, but also for their own backstories through the Drink Links system. After you’ve raised your bond level enough through interactions, gifting them something, eating with them, or fighting alongside them, you can experience a Drink Link at the bar. This lets you learn more about a party member and even help them out with their problems. Some of these may even involve actual in-game battles. I ended up completing Drink Links for every character but one in my first playthrough, and they were all worth it.

    Without getting into any spoilers or even mentioning what I saw in some of the trailers, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s narrative and the payoff are consistently fantastic. I’m curious about how not only longtime fans, but also newer players react to some moments from the mid to late game. Out of the new playable and non playable characters, Chitose and Eric are well-written, while the new interactions we see between the likes of Seonhee and Nanba with Kiryu and Kiryu’s interactions with Ichiban give this the feel of two legendary experiences coming together for a grand conclusion.

    Speaking of the conclusion, there’s a big build up to how I expected things to go in the story, but I realized I was only halfway into the game. It constantly surprised me, and even baited me into thinking how specific characters would act only to do the opposite. All of this is elevated by great cut-scene direction with a mix of in-engine and pre-rendered scenes. There is also quite a bit of voiced dialogue throughout which is a huge deal for a game as long as this one.

    I can’t believe I’ve not even mentioned so far that Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is set in Hawaii, the first time a game in the series focuses on a locale like this. Hawaii isn’t just some location added for a substory, but a huge, colorful, and dense location full of secrets, specialty coffee shops (a huge win in my book), powerful foes, and a ton of mini-games and NPCs. In fact some of the locations are so dense, I even noticed the frame rate drop in the PS5 version there. After knowing prior locations like the back of my hand, it felt great having a new location in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth to discover and also look for secrets and collectibles across the hidden locales.

    Outside the main story, there is a wealth (I couldn’t resist) of side content through different kinds of substories, mini-games, and a few that could be fleshed out into their own game. The Dondoko Island mini-game could be its own budget priced standalone release. It has that much effort put into it, and it almost pushes the game engine too much in its scope. Then there’s Sujimon which has its own raids, battles, training, boss fights, and even a very cool thing you unlock after completing it. Barring these two, Sicko Snap and the delivery mini-games were highlights. There are the usual arcade games and more that the Yakuza games include, but I ended up spending too much time on karaoke as usual.

    Speaking of substories in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Kiryu has his own set of substories and memoirs essentially that you can collect. I won’t specifically spoil what these include, but longtime fans of the series and fans of Kiryu over the years will find a lot to love here. Some of the moments here surprised even me (in a good way) with how the developers tackled certain characters. I’ll leave it at that.

    A lot of elements in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s story, gameplay, and optional content had me thinking whether it would end up being a “too much of a good thing” situation, but the team proved me wrong. I only thought maybe one or two hours out of the over hundred hours I put into Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth were not fun, and that’s because I tried pushing my luck in a dungeon or story moment where I went in without gearing up.

    Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is structured a bit differently because of the two protagonists. There are some story chapters where you play mostly with only one party, and don’t see much of the other, but most end up letting you do a bit with both Ichiban and Kiryu. The story starts unfolding perfectly the more you play, and everything slowly makes sense with character motivations, and also with Ichiban’s character coming into its own. Kiryu’s character was always going to be amazing, but the real star of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is definitely Ichiban.

    When I unlocked the job (combat class) system, or the ability to change jobs in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth I was almost spoiled for choice immediately. You start out with a few jobs unlocked, but can unlock more by visiting specific locations or completing certain mini-games. I didn’t spend too much time experimenting during my first playthrough because I was very happy with my party setup for both protagonists, but I’ve been having a blast with the new jobs in the post-game.

    One worry I had was how the game would be balanced around multiple jobs with the robust job system, encounters, difficulty, and also equipment. Barring having to remember to equip your best gear when you are playing the other character, I had no real issues with how anything was handled difficulty wise. I even tried pushing things by going into a story scene multiple levels below the recommendation with lower quality gear. It was doable, but definitely a wake up call. I would take those game level recommendations seriously if I were you.

    When it comes to the gear or equipment in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, the game features crafting, equipment per job, character-exclusive equipment you can unlock later, and also an upgrade system to enhance your gear. The materials you use to craft or upgrade are found all over the game, but some will be much easier to obtain through mini-games, especially if you’re after the ultimate weapons for each character. Ichiban’s ultimate weapon helped me out a ton during the final area of the game as an example.

    At this point, you’re probably wondering if these level recommendation messages are just a warning for difficulty spikes, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. If you keep running from enemies and skip battles, you will be lower level for sure, but the game has a few ways of letting you get up to speed or even grind to be overpowered if you’d like. This is where the dungeons come into the picture. Barring a few story locations that are smaller dungeon-style areas, you have access to two main dungeons in the game. These are optional (outside of a story moment that takes you into the early areas) locations where you can get amazing crafting materials, weapons, and a lot of experience. There are checkpoints that let you save as well, so it isn’t something you need to complete in one go. I usually used to stock up on healing and stamina restoring items before doing a dungeon run as a break from the story or a mini-game.

    One new feature in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth that makes dungeons much less boring than the sewer in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, is the music player. You can play a few songs from the start, but unlock a plethora of Sega and Atlus songs through exploration and mini-games. I don’t want to spoil the surprise songs they’ve included but I didn’t expect Sega to even remember two of the games featured here. I’d also like to note that some dungeons also feature traps and hazards with the usual hidden collectibles, mimic chests, and special enemies that reward more experience. A lot of the additions and improvements in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth make it feel more like a JRPG while still maintaining everything I love about the Yakuza series.

    Dungeons, exploration, bosses, and more all revolve around Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s combat system. This time, you can move around in a fixed radius to plan your attacks with the interface highlighting when you’re near an object you can pick up, given a proximity bonus, and even see the direction an enemy will be knocked into letting you strategize on the go. The game is still turn-based, but this level of movement and the interface prompts give you quite a bit of freedom to strategize in your directional attacks, area of effect skills (with their own highlights), and also in environmental interactions. Selecting skills usually has short quick time events like mashing Y/Square or perfectly timing your X/Triangle button press to get a damage increase. Guarding against attacks by timing a press of A/O lets you lessen the impact of attacks.

    This movable area for the character you’re controlling now removes the randomness of the prior main entry. You also don’t need to worry about enemies blocking your path while you try and do a basic attack against an enemy further away. My only complaint with the combat system is in how the camera sometimes does not reposition quickly enough on an enemy attacking. This means you don’t get a chance to try and do a perfect guard in time. I’m not sure if this will be fixed for launch, but I hope it is addressed at some point.

    One aspect that really elevates the whole combat experience is the new party members and also the party structure across the game. Having Seonhee playable is amazing, and I’m glad it happened, but finding your own synergies with the job system and parties to eventually get to a point where you wipe out high level enemies in a few turns before they can even act never gets old. I enjoyed Seonhee’s whip attack that uses a powerline to do area of effect damage, and followed that up with another area of effect attack doing fire damage basically melting enemy health bars.

    The demo gave the impression that Kiryu can just use brawler style combat as his ultimate ability at any time, but keep in mind that you don’t just get access to it immediately, and you can’t just spam it and play with Kiryu as a brawler. This is a turn-based experience through and through, but Kiryu can get into brawler mode after a specific point in the game, only once his special bar fills up. The way you unlock it is also one of the best surprises in the game.

    While you can fast travel to taxi points across the map once you’ve unlocked them by walking by, the real joy of the experience is running around and discovering a random powerful item in a briefcase just lying in the curb or picking up a useful item from the bin. You can of course use the new segway-like device to speed around town. I love that you can even customize the color and particle effects for this and it requires its own charges and upgrades. By about the middle of the game, I worried how I’d even keep track of all of this with the many upgrade and crafting systems included, but it all comes together really well. You just need to remember to upgrade your gear and buy healing items often.

    Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s combat also features poundmates which are this game’s summons, and they are even more over the top than the prior game. I ended up unlocking so many optional ones through substories and mini-games that I forgot to use many of them by the end, and only remembered this during the final area of the game where I let loose and just enjoyed the spectacle of the poundmate animations for some encounters.

    I mentioned Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s Dondoko Island mini-game already being very in-depth, but I was surprised at how much time I was willing to put into it. For mini-games like Sicko Snap, I stopped playing after doing it enough times to unlock the gear I wanted, but here I was just using Dondoko Island like I do karaoke in Yakuza games, as a way to take a break from the main story. It helps that Dondoko Island was great to earn money and something special at the end as well.

    If you played Like a Dragon Gaiden, you’d know that Sega added VTuber Kson to the game as a hostess in the mini-game, and I was glad to see that. In Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, she’s a bartender, but the VTuber presence doesn’t stop there, and I found it very interesting how the developers and writers handled that aspect in the story. Who knew adding VTubers and more coffee shops would help this much? But jokes aside, I definitely enjoyed that aspect of the game.

    Despite playing the game a lot daily for a while now, I still didn’t end up seeing everything it had to offer, and will be dipping into it slowly aiming for 100% completion over the coming weeks. It really is a monster of a game in just about every way, and I was surprised at how it never felt like it had padding. You even get a wealth of save points and items in the late game locations that throw enemies at you constantly.

    Visually, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth looks mostly gorgeous. There are some elements that feel a bit unpolished, but it is a nice step above past games in its scope and visuals in Hawaii. The dynamic weather system is also very well done. Character models are fantastic, and the team definitely stepped up with the production for story scenes. Performance will vary in parts depending on what you’re playing on though.

    I played Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth on both PS5 and Steam Deck for this review, but will focus on the Steam Deck portion for the technical details. On PS5, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth targets 60fps and I only noticed the frame rate drop considerably in one in-game location with a ton of NPCs and also in two late-game boss fights during attack cut-scene animations or during attack animations only.

    Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is Steam Deck Verified already which is always a good sign, but Valve sometimes marks games that don’t run well as Verified. Thankfully, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is actually really good on Steam Deck, and you will likely already know what to expect if you played the demo or played Yakuza: Like a Dragon on the handheld. On Steam Deck, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth lets you adjust display mode (borderless, fullscreen, windowed), resolution (with 16:10 and 800p support), refresh rate, toggle v-sync, use graphics presets, adjust FOV, frame rate target (30, 60, 120, unlimited), and adjust advanced settings.

    The Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth advanced graphics settings on Steam Deck let you adjust texture filtering mode, shadow quality (which I set to low as usual), geometry quality (Medium for me), realtime reflections, motion blur, SSAO, render scale, depth of field, reflection quality, and a few upscaling techniques. This includes AMD FSR 1.0, FSR 2, FSR 3, Intel XeSS, and also the game’s default anti-aliasing. I ended up using either FSR 2 or FSR 3 during my time with it on Steam Deck. While I obviously couldn’t test this on Steam Deck, if you were wondering about DLSS, Nvidia announced that it will be supporting it.

    After testing the final game’s most recent build as of this writing, a locked 60fps isn’t really doable on Steam Deck without the game looking a bit too blurry for my liking. I’d recommend aiming for 40hz or 30fps if you’re ok with that with much better visuals. Turning shadows to low, leaving geometry on medium, and using motion blur if you like it, while playing around with render scale and FSR 3 are your best bet for a smooth experience right now. You could get much better performance by lowering the render scale below 100 to say 80, but I’m not a fan of how it looks. I’d rather stick to a 40hz target with some compromises given this is a turn-based game after all, or 30fps with better visuals. Keep in mind that while the opening of the game might seem to run at 60fps for you, Hawaii is more demanding in many parts with how dense the locations are with many NPCs walking around. Also be warned that one more crowded mall area and two boss fights seem to be quite a bit heavier than the rest of the game.

    On the audio side, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth has amazing music throughout its upbeat battle themes, catchy themes played during mini-games, excellent new and old karaoke songs, and memorable boss themes. Two of the later boss themes are amazing, and I can’t wait to see the reaction to them when my friends play Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth also happens to use a nice arrangement of some older songs from the series, but I won’t say where that happens. I know some previews have shown this, but look forward to some nice surprises in the game’s soundtrack.

    While I expected Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth to have excellent Japanese voice acting, I want to highlight Kazuhiro Nakaya, the Japanese voice of Ichiban Kasuga for his performance here. It is probably my favorite protagonist performance in any RPG alongside Ben Starr’s Clive in Final Fantasy XVI and Harry McEntire’s Noah in Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Kazuhiro Nakaya delivered something beyond special here. Not to say the other cast members didn’t do a great job, but his delivery really stuck with me throughout even days after I hit certain story beats.

    If you, like me, were considering getting Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth on PS5 or wondering what that version offers over the Steam Deck barring the visual and performance upgrades, the DualSense features are very nice. The developers added proper haptic feedback for many small things like ukulele strum attacks or for the segway while exploring. I expected some basic adaptive trigger support, but I’m very happy with the DualSense implementation here. It is a shame that this seemingly isn’t available on the PC version.

    Barring some performance improvements in parts I had issues in, the only thing I’d like to see improved is the camera in some encounters. The game shouldn’t have enemies attack while the camera hasn’t adjusted yet. I also would like Sega to add an option to the PC port to force the display of specific controller button prompts rather than have it auto detect. The Persona ports let you select or force Nintendo and PlayStation prompts regardless of your input method. This is a minor issue, but since the PC port is so good in just about every other way, it would be a nice addition.

    Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio at its peak. It feels fresh while still bringing together the best aspects of my favorite games from the studio. Not only does it manage to deliver a compelling story with twists and turns throughout the massively long main story run time, but the sheer quality of its optional content and mini-games puts some of the best entries in the series to shame. We finally have a modern Yakuza game that matches not only the quality, but also the quantity of Yakuza 0’s awesomeness. It gets my highest possible recommendation. I can’t wait to see what the studio does for the next game.

    Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth Steam Deck Review Score: 5/5

    You can read all our past and future Steam Deck coverage here on our main page for all things Steam Deck. If you have any feedback for this or what else you’d like to see us do around the Steam Deck, let us know in the comments below. Thanks for reading.

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    Mikhail Madnani

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  • The NFL is eating TV as its ratings soar 7% to the second-highest ever, averaging 17.9 million homes

    The NFL is eating TV as its ratings soar 7% to the second-highest ever, averaging 17.9 million homes

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    NFL regular-season games averaged 17.9 million viewers, tied for the second highest since averages were first tracked in 1995.

    Buoyed by increases of at least 24% in two of the five packages, the first year of the league’s new television contracts saw a total increase of 7% from last season.

    The highest average on record is 18.1 million from 2015.

    And football is dominant within the wider TV landscape, as well, remaining a cultural force able to capture linear audiences that have largely abandoned other programming in the cord-cutting and streaming eras. In 2023, NFL games made up 93 of the top 100 rated broadcasts, according to Nielsen ratings, with all top 20 spots going to NFL games. The Oscars, once a live TV ratings bonanza, clocked in at number 60.

    Sports have always been critical to both the linear and cable and TV businesses. But rarely has one single product so clearly buoyed an entire industry. Many of the last holdouts of cable television self-identify as “sports viewers,” according to research firm MoffettNathanson, and cord cutters come overwhelmingly from cable subscribers who don’t regularly watch sports. And this season, the NFL expanded its roster of broadcast partners to include a streaming partner, after signing an 11-year deal with Amazon Prime worth an estimated $1 billion a season.  

    Hans Schroeder, the league’s executive vice president of media distribution, pointed to the number of teams still alive for postseason spots going into the final two weeks along with close games throughout the 18-week regular season. Of the 272 games, 113 were decided by six or fewer points, the second most in league history.

    Over the past two seasons, 55.8% of games have been within one score (eight points).

    “It starts on the field. You look at the number of close games as well as the number of young stars like (Houston’s) C.J. Stroud and old stars like (Los Angeles’) Matthew Stafford that probably didn’t get enough coverage,” Schroeder said. “If you look at that as well as combine with the first year of these new TV packages and some of the flexibility they had, I think that is why the numbers are where they are this year.”

    Four of the five broadcast and streaming networks saw increases in their overall packages.

    HUGE GAINS ON THURSDAY NIGHT

    According to Nielsen figures, the 16-game “Thursday Night Football” package on Prime Video averaged 11.86 million viewers, a 24% increase over last year’s inaugural season. All but three of the weeks saw double-digit increases over last year.

    Showing the power of streaming, the median age of Prime Video’s audience was 48.5 years old, 6.9 years younger than the average median age of viewers watching the NFL on Sunday (55.4).

    Two games saw more than 15 million viewers — the Nov. 30 matchup between the Seattle Seahawks and Dallas Cowboys (15.3 million) and the Sept. 14 opener when the Philadelphia Eagles hosted the Minnesota Vikings (15.1 million). The most-watched game in 2022 was the opener between the Los Angeles Chargers and Kansas City Chiefs (13.0 million).

    Overall, 12 games averaged more than 10 million, doubling 2022.

    MONDAY NIGHT MIRACLE

    Amazon Prime looked like it would run away with the biggest gains, until the “Monday Night Football” numbers came in. The league’s seminal prime-time package had its best season since 2000, averaging 17.36 million viewers across ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC, a whopping 29% increase.

    Most of that increase, though, can be attributed to the Hollywood writers and actors strikes. With no new original fall programming, ABC was able to broadcast games all 18 weeks of the regular season — or 11 more compared with last year — instead of just nine over eight weeks as originally set when the schedule was announced in early May.

    Next season, ABC is expected to go back to at least two Monday night simulcasts with ESPN, three exclusive MNF games when there are doubleheaders and the two Saturday Week 18 contests.

    Overall, it was the best season since the package moved to ESPN in 2006.

    The four most-watched games since 2000 all happened this season. The Nov. 22 game between Philadelphia and Kansas City, a Super Bowl 57 rematch, averaged 29.03 million.

    MOMENTUM FOR CBS

    CBS averaged 19.35 million, its most-watched regular season since it returned to the network in 1998, and an increase of 5% over 2022.

    The 10 Sunday national game windows at 3:25 p.m. Eastern averaged 24.64 million, an increase of 4.7% from the 23.50 million of last year.

    The Thanksgiving Day game between the Washington Commanders and Dallas Cowboys was the most-watched regular-season game on any network, averaging 41.76 million.

    CBS will have Super Bowl 58 in Las Vegas on Feb. 11.

    SUNDAY NIGHT LIGHTS

    NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” package had a 21.4 million average, its best viewership since 2015, and an 8% increase over last year.

    The package had six games average at least 25 million, tying the mark set in 2013.

    The top game was the Sept. 7 opener between the Detroit Lions and Kansas City Chiefs, which drew 27.5 million.

    FOX’S 30TH SEASON

    Fox saw a 2% gains drop in its overall number (19.42 million) but the late window was up 2% (24.62 million). That is the best performance in the 4:25 p.m. Eastern late games since 2015 despite blowouts on seven of the 10 dates.

    The Thanksgiving Day contest between the Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions was its most watched, averaging 33.7 million.

    The NFL on FOX caps off its 30th regular season with its best national window since 2015.

    Subscribe to the new Fortune CEO Weekly Europe newsletter to get corner office insights on the biggest business stories in Europe. Sign up for free.

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    Joe Reedy, Paolo Confino, The Associated Press

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  • Brokerages Set Yum China Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:YUMC) Price Target at $69.50

    Brokerages Set Yum China Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:YUMC) Price Target at $69.50

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    Shares of Yum China Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:YUMC – Get Free Report) have been given an average recommendation of “Buy” by the four ratings firms that are presently covering the firm, Marketbeat.com reports. Four analysts have rated the stock with a buy rating. The average 1 year price objective among brokers that have issued ratings on the stock in the last year is $69.50.

    A number of analysts have weighed in on YUMC shares. StockNews.com cut Yum China from a “buy” rating to a “hold” rating in a research report on Wednesday, November 1st. Jefferies Financial Group upgraded Yum China from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating and increased their price objective for the company from $65.78 to $71.30 in a research report on Thursday, September 21st. TheStreet lowered Yum China from a “b-” rating to a “c+” rating in a research report on Monday, November 20th. HSBC raised their price target on Yum China from $77.90 to $79.20 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a research report on Tuesday, September 19th. Finally, Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft initiated coverage on Yum China in a research report on Tuesday, December 19th. They issued a “buy” rating and a $58.00 price target on the stock.

    View Our Latest Research Report on YUMC

    Yum China Stock Performance

    Shares of NYSE YUMC opened at $42.43 on Thursday. The company has a quick ratio of 1.42, a current ratio of 1.59 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.25. The stock has a market capitalization of $17.55 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 22.81, a PEG ratio of 1.16 and a beta of 0.45. The stock’s fifty day simple moving average is $44.13 and its 200 day simple moving average is $51.62. Yum China has a 52-week low of $38.99 and a 52-week high of $64.70.

    Yum China (NYSE:YUMC – Get Free Report) last issued its earnings results on Tuesday, October 31st. The company reported $0.59 EPS for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $0.68 by ($0.09). The business had revenue of $2.91 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $3.12 billion. Yum China had a return on equity of 10.91% and a net margin of 7.41%. The business’s quarterly revenue was up 8.5% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period last year, the business earned $0.49 EPS. As a group, sell-side analysts forecast that Yum China will post 1.9 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

    Yum China Announces Dividend

    The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Tuesday, December 19th. Shareholders of record on Tuesday, November 28th were given a dividend of $0.13 per share. The ex-dividend date was Monday, November 27th. This represents a $0.52 annualized dividend and a yield of 1.23%. Yum China’s dividend payout ratio is currently 27.96%.

    Insider Transactions at Yum China

    In related news, insider Warton Wang sold 3,975 shares of the business’s stock in a transaction on Tuesday, November 21st. The shares were sold at an average price of $46.78, for a total value of $185,950.50. Following the sale, the insider now owns 5,108 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $238,952.24. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through the SEC website. In other news, insider Warton Wang sold 3,975 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, November 21st. The shares were sold at an average price of $46.78, for a total transaction of $185,950.50. Following the transaction, the insider now owns 5,108 shares in the company, valued at $238,952.24. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. Also, CEO Joey Wat acquired 14,000 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, November 22nd. The shares were bought at an average price of $46.26 per share, for a total transaction of $647,640.00. Following the acquisition, the chief executive officer now directly owns 269,144 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $12,450,601.44. The disclosure for this purchase can be found here. Company insiders own 0.33% of the company’s stock.

    Institutional Investors Weigh In On Yum China

    Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. E Fund Management Hong Kong Co. Ltd. boosted its holdings in Yum China by 140.0% in the 1st quarter. E Fund Management Hong Kong Co. Ltd. now owns 250,975 shares of the company’s stock worth $10,187,000 after buying an additional 146,410 shares during the period. Cambridge Investment Research Advisors Inc. boosted its holdings in Yum China by 2.5% in the 1st quarter. Cambridge Investment Research Advisors Inc. now owns 21,843 shares of the company’s stock worth $907,000 after buying an additional 528 shares during the period. Cetera Advisor Networks LLC boosted its holdings in Yum China by 7.5% in the 1st quarter. Cetera Advisor Networks LLC now owns 12,533 shares of the company’s stock worth $521,000 after buying an additional 871 shares during the period. MetLife Investment Management LLC bought a new position in Yum China in the 1st quarter worth approximately $418,000. Finally, Rhumbline Advisers boosted its holdings in Yum China by 5.3% in the 1st quarter. Rhumbline Advisers now owns 407,659 shares of the company’s stock worth $16,934,000 after buying an additional 20,676 shares during the period. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 73.91% of the company’s stock.

    About Yum China

    (Get Free Report

    Yum China Holdings, Inc owns, operates, and franchises restaurants in the People’s Republic of China. The company operates through KFC, Pizza Hut, and All Other segments. It operates restaurants under the KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Lavazza, Little Sheep, and Huang Ji Huang concepts. The company also operates V-Gold Mall, a mobile e-commerce platform, which sells electronics, home and kitchen accessories, and other general merchandise, as well as fried rice, steak, and pasta; and offers online food deliver services.

    Further Reading

    Receive News & Ratings for Yum China Daily – Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts’ ratings for Yum China and related companies with MarketBeat.com’s FREE daily email newsletter.

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  • ‘River City Girls’ Mobile Review – A Good Port, but Needs Updates – TouchArcade

    ‘River City Girls’ Mobile Review – A Good Port, but Needs Updates – TouchArcade

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    After Apple Arcade and Netflix, Crunchyroll entered the game subscription service party (?) with its Crunchyroll Game Vault for mobile bringing premium games to mobile as value adds for subscribers. The launch games included some older titles now a part of the Crunchyroll Game Vault, and also WayForward’s River City Girls (Free) which saw its mobile debut through this service. Shaun already reviewed the game on Switch here, and I agree with basically all of that. For this review, I wanted to cover how the game has aged with the sequel out on other platforms, and how the port is through the Crunchyroll Game Vault.

    If you’ve never heard of River City Girls, it is actually a new entry in the Kunio-kun/River City franchise from Arc System Works, but one that has you playing as Misako and Kyoko instead of Kunio and Riki. It excelled for its style, music, voice acting, and most of the gameplay when I played it on Xbox a few years ago. The Switch version was plagued with some performance issues, but is in a better place right now. It did have co-op, and I always felt like the game was balanced around that rather than being accessible to solo players.

    There’s quite a bit of freedom in River City Girls through its open-esque locations with shops, enemies, and more. As a beat ’em up, it isn’t as polished as something like Streets of Rage 4 if you’ve played that, but I still think fondly of how much I enjoyed River City Girls and still love its characters. Moving from location to location and eventually getting to memorable boss fights (some sadly aren’t fun), and upgrading and unlocking more for your characters. This is one area I wish the team went back to balance better. If you play solo like I did both originally and now, the game feels too tedious with enemies having what feels like inflated health pools. After unlocking and upgrading a bit, things become a lot more fun, but it is still challenging even on normal difficulty. I couldn’t test the online on the mobile version, but the game itself only supported local co-op. I hope if WayForward does bring River City Girls 2 to mobile, it includes the online multiplayer as well with cross platform matchmaking.

    Now, River City Girls on iOS on my iPhone 15 Pro and iPad Pro (2020) has performance issues. It also looks excellent in most parts. The few issues I ran into have to do with how the aspect ratio of certain things has been handled causing cropping or elements hidden behind the home bar in parts. Some of the touch targets are also too small with tiny text in menus. These usually are the tabs you’d swap between in the menu using the shoulder buttons on the controller, but they need to be tweaked for iPhone and iPad. One more thing I’d like to see is proper cloud save support. I logged into my account on both iPhone and iPad and my progress did not sync across for the game.

    Speaking of controls, River City Girls has controller support, and it works great. It does only show Xbox button prompts in my testing at least. When using touchscreen controls, you sadly cannot adjust the positions or size of these touchscreen buttons unless I missed something. They work well on iPad, but feel a bit cramped on the phone. I hope a future update can add options to adjust these like we’ve seen in the Hitman: Blood Money – Reprisal release.

    Barring the few control and interface issues, River City Girls still has the flaws of the original game with regards to balance for solo play and some bosses not being as much fun. This version is updated though, so you don’t mistakenly end up changing location when you’re attacking enemies near a door or something. I did enjoy revisiting it a few years later though, and still prefer it to the sequel in many ways.

    Whenever I review a game that’s only in a subscription service, it is worth looking at whether the game offers enough value to warrant subscribing to said service. River City Girls is priced at $29.99 on Nintendo Switch, and while it being “Free” for subscribers is fantastic, it isn’t enough to justify subscribing. Maybe when there are more games, but right now this is a good value add for existing subscribers. If you don’t have a Crunchyroll membership, details about subscription pricing are here on the official website. You need the Mega Fan tier ($9.99 per month) or the Ultimate Fan tier ($14.99 per month) to also access the games in the Crunchyroll Game Fault.

    If you already have River City Girls on another platform, there isn’t anything of note with this release to warrant replaying it. If you don’t, and have a Crunchyroll subscription that includes the Game Vault, it is absolutely worth playing. I always liked River City Girls despite its flaws, and while I hope the iOS version gets patched to improve controls and its interface, it is a good port. River City Girls itself is gorgeous with an amazing soundtrack, and I still prefer it to the sequel.

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    Mikhail Madnani

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  • Vice City – The Definitive Edition’ Mobile Review – The Best GTA Game Returns, Again – TouchArcade

    Vice City – The Definitive Edition’ Mobile Review – The Best GTA Game Returns, Again – TouchArcade

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    I almost gave up hope on Rockstar Games’ remake/remaster of the classic GTA trilogy ever making it to mobile after multiple delays. When it was confirmed for mobile through Netflix Games, I thought Netflix would finally have its killer app despite the release’s issues on PC and consoles. Fast forward to a few days ago, and Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition hit mobile as three individual games available through Netflix and also as premium standalone releases priced at $19.99 each. I’ve been playing them on iPhone 15 Pro, iPad Pro (2020), and I also redownloaded the games on Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series X to see how this new release compares. I’m surprised by how much better Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition is on mobile despite a few annoyances. I’m going to be covering all three games, and this review will focus on GTA: Vice City – Definitive ($19.99) and GTA: Vice City – NETFLIX (Free).

    The original GTA: Vice City is one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve played it on everything, and own almost every version of it including multiple regional variants like the PS2 Japanese release I got a few months ago. I adored it when I played it years ago, and loved revisiting it on iPhone through its 10th anniversary edition. I still get chills with that trailer. I love the game so much that I even bought that awful PS2 on PS4 version they released when Sony was trying to get developers to bring PS2 classics to PS4 with trophy support. So when the trilogy was announced to get a remake, I was excited but nervous.

    The collection hit PC and consoles including Nintendo Switch back in 2021, and it wasn’t great. Read my review of the trilogy on Switch here. Since then, the games have improved, but many issues still remain. For the mobile release, I didn’t expect much, but this release surprised me. When I launched GTA: Vice City – Definitive on Netflix and finished the 1.27GB download in-game, I thought I was imagining things, but the actual game looked different. I played a bit more and wondered why it looked better than I remembered from my time with the Definitive version on Xbox and Switch. I booted up those versions and forgot the lighting was different there. Then I noticed GTA: Vice City – Definitive has a new Classic Lighting option which looks so much nicer. GTA: Vice City – Definitive now felt like GTA: Vice City. I was ecstatic to have the vibe back, but there were some issues I noticed.

    Without looking into the game’s settings, I was surprised at how blurry it looked on iPhone 15 Pro. I checked the options and found a setting for the resolution. I turned it up to max, and it looked a lot nicer. For some reason, this doesn’t save and you need to turn it up manually each time you boot up the game. Barring that, the game seems capped to 30fps which is disappointing. I hope both of these can be fixed in future updates. The graphics tab is where you can enable or disable Classic Lighting. I recommend trying both options if you’re familiar with GTA: Vice City. Once you manually fix the resolution, GTA: Vice City – Definitive looks excellent with fullscreen support on all iOS devices I tested it on.

    On the control side, GTA: Vice City – Definitive includes the new modern control options, and I tested it with both touch and controller. I used my DualSense controller, but the game seems to only have Xbox button prompts. The touchscreen controls work well, and the game is responsive enough. There are camera sensitivity options, movement options to play with modern or classic controls, and more here. I was glad to see a haptic feedback option here.

    Since these are a huge part of the experience for me after I finish the story, I wanted to highlight how GTA: Vice City – Definitive includes cheat codes. You can either use a controller and input the controller cheats with button combinations, or go into accessibility and input the PC cheat codes. Both work.

    Yes, I know I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the port and features, but GTA: Vice City itself is incredible. I don’t care what you use to play it, but it is one of the all-time greats, and right up there with GTA V and Red Dead Redemption II as Rockstar Games’ best. The story is amazing, dialogue memorable, radio stations despite cuts are still excellent, and it has gameplay that remains fun even today thanks to control enhancements.

    I don’t own GTA: Vice City – Definitive on Steam to test on Steam Deck, but GTA: Vice City – Definitive on Netflix and iOS is massively better than the Switch version. Not only does the Classic Lighting option drastically help, but the game loads much quicker on iOS compared to Switch while looking a lot better. The Xbox Series X version runs at a higher resolution with 60fps support though, but I still don’t see myself going back to that until we get the mobile improvements. Speaking of improvements, I’ve been noticing little things like some models being better on mobile, animation improvements, and more.

    The only real issues GTA: Vice City – Definitive has on mobile now are the frame rate cap, resolution not saving for some reason on iPhone 15 Pro or iPad Pro on the Netflix version, and the few issues I have with the game like the one super annoying mission that remains the only annoyance in GTA: Vice City itself. While this game (and the trilogy in general) deserved better, I think we are finally at the stage where the Definitive part of the name is actually applicable. This mobile version of GTA: Vice City – Definitive is great, and can be even better with a few updates. The screenshot below shows the Classic Lighting (right) versus the PC and console lighting (left):

    While I’d say the original mobile release on modern iPhones and iPads is the best version of GTA: Vice City even now, GTA: Vice City – Definitive complements it nicely and is something I see myself dipping into for years to come, just like the original. GTA: Vice City – Definitive is worth buying, but I think this is the first actual killer app Netflix has to get people onboard its games initiative. Having the original GTA: Vice City would have been enough, but this release is actually better than the PC and console versions in almost every way. I don’t even think I’ll go back to those versions without the Classic Lighting option. The original game is a timeless classic, and my favorite GTA game, so I’m glad we now have a great version of the remake on mobile alongside the original which is still available.

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    Mikhail Madnani

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  • Computer Modelling Group Ltd. (TSE:CMG) Receives C$9.58 Average PT from Brokerages

    Computer Modelling Group Ltd. (TSE:CMG) Receives C$9.58 Average PT from Brokerages

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    Shares of Computer Modelling Group Ltd. (TSE:CMG – Get Free Report) have received a consensus rating of “Hold” from the six brokerages that are currently covering the firm, MarketBeat Ratings reports. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell recommendation, two have issued a hold recommendation and three have issued a buy recommendation on the company. The average twelve-month target price among analysts that have issued ratings on the stock in the last year is C$9.75.

    A number of equities research analysts have weighed in on the stock. Canaccord Genuity Group boosted their target price on shares of Computer Modelling Group from C$10.00 to C$10.50 and gave the company a “hold” rating in a research note on Tuesday, November 14th. Barclays reduced their price objective on Computer Modelling Group from C$9.00 to C$8.00 and set an “underweight” rating for the company in a research report on Monday. Acumen Capital raised their target price on Computer Modelling Group from C$11.00 to C$11.50 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a research report on Tuesday, September 26th. Echelon Wealth Partners reaffirmed a “buy” rating on shares of Computer Modelling Group in a research report on Tuesday, November 14th. Finally, Industrial Alliance Securities set a C$9.50 price objective on shares of Computer Modelling Group and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a research note on Thursday, August 31st.

    Check Out Our Latest Stock Analysis on CMG

    Insider Buying and Selling at Computer Modelling Group

    In related news, Senior Officer Robert David Hicks sold 10,000 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction on Thursday, November 16th. The shares were sold at an average price of C$10.20, for a total transaction of C$102,000.00. In other Computer Modelling Group news, Senior Officer Long X. Nghiem sold 16,200 shares of Computer Modelling Group stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, November 21st. The stock was sold at an average price of C$10.06, for a total value of C$162,972.00. Also, Senior Officer Robert David Hicks sold 10,000 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Thursday, November 16th. The shares were sold at an average price of C$10.20, for a total value of C$102,000.00. Insiders own 1.64% of the company’s stock.

    Computer Modelling Group Stock Up 0.2 %

    Shares of Computer Modelling Group stock opened at C$10.00 on Monday. Computer Modelling Group has a twelve month low of C$5.24 and a twelve month high of C$10.76. The company has a quick ratio of 2.25, a current ratio of 1.51 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 64.85. The company’s 50 day moving average is C$9.24 and its 200 day moving average is C$7.99. The company has a market cap of C$808.10 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of 33.33, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.97 and a beta of 1.18.

    Computer Modelling Group Announces Dividend

    The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, December 15th. Investors of record on Thursday, December 7th will be paid a dividend of $0.05 per share. This represents a $0.20 annualized dividend and a yield of 2.00%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Wednesday, December 6th. Computer Modelling Group’s dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently 66.67%.

    Computer Modelling Group Company Profile

    (Get Free Report

    Computer Modelling Group Ltd., a computer software technology company, engages in the development and licensing of reservoir simulation software and related services in Canada and internationally. The company offers CMOST-AI, an intelligent optimization and analysis tool that offers solution for reservoir by combining advanced statistical analysis, machine learning, and non-biased data interpretation; IMEX, a black oil simulator that is used to model primary and secondary oil recovery processes in conventional and unconventional reservoirs; and GEM, an equation-of-state reservoir simulator for compositional, chemical, and unconventional reservoir modelling.

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    Analyst Recommendations for Computer Modelling Group (TSE:CMG)

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  • ‘Kingdom Eighties’ Mobile Review – iOS, Switch, and Steam Deck Tested – TouchArcade

    ‘Kingdom Eighties’ Mobile Review – iOS, Switch, and Steam Deck Tested – TouchArcade

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    Well it happened again. I’m reviewing a game that Jared picked as our Game of the Week. I’d like to believe this is because we see the quality in specific games, but it is also because we both enjoy writing about great games on mobile. That’s where Kingdom Eighties ($4.99), the newest standalone entry in the Kingdom series from Raw Fury comes into the picture. It debuted on PC a few months ago, and finally made its way to mobile and consoles last week. While I’ve enjoyed prior games, the Kingdom Eighties setting had me very interested. Having now played it across iPhone, iPad, Switch, and Steam Deck for this iOS review, I love most aspects of Kingdom Eighties, but it might leave some longtime fans a bit disappointed for one aspect.

    Unlike prior games in the series, Kingdom Eighties is a standalone singleplayer expansion that actually has a notable story. When Jared mentioned Stranger Things, he hit the nail on the head. In a lot of ways, Kingdom Eighties feels like a Stranger Things game, but it isn’t, and it is still excellent if you’re after a polished tower defense and building hybrid like the prior games in the series. If you never clicked with those, this isn’t going to change your mind, as it builds on the base (no pun intended) of prior games and plays very similarly.

    In Kingdom Eighties, you basically move on a 2D plane, collect coins, explore, interact with NPCs, and build by investing said coins at specific locations or points of interest. You eventually unlock all sorts of wild things to help you against the greed in the different chapters and locations of the campaign. While I feel like these games are very much “learn from experience”, the tutorial does a good job of getting you up to speed with the basics of the game flow.

    The narrative or campaign in Kingdom Eighties has you playing a camp counselor recruiting people to build or defend as you face off against the Greed. As this is a Kingdom game, you cannot afford to lose your crown or it is game over. The story here isn’t just some dialogue like a visual novel, but there are actual retro-style animated cut-scenes. Depending on the difficulty you choose, expect to get through Kingdom Eighties in about 6 or 7 hours with the survival mode unlocking after the campaign.

    Kingdom Eighties nails its aesthetic and music for the 80s setting, and I love both aspects of the game a lot. The only thing I’d have changed is maybe adding some music from The Midnight, but that’s more of a want than a need for me. I love the reflections in the water, the subtle animations while riding the bike, and the VHS effect on the cut-scenes. I’m all for developers pulling out of left field things like the 80s setting here in their games. This obviously isn’t meant to be the next full Kingdom game, but as a standalone expansion, it is so good.

    The lack of co-op might be a dealbreaker for many given the focus it had in Kingdom Two Crowns. I know many folks who loved that aspect of Kingdom Two Crowns, and keep playing that even today. Kingdom Eighties isn’t going to replace that, but it does do things a bit differently with its story and setting. The lower asking price compared to the main games definitely helps as well.

    On mobile, I played Kingdom Eighties on my iPhone 11, iPhone 14 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPad Pro (2020). I tested progress syncing between the iPhone 11, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPad Pro with no issues. The game runs mostly fine, but I noticed some of the similar scrolling issues the Kingdom games have also present here to varying degrees depending on the device. Barring that, they have controller support or touchscreen controls that both are implemented well. On iPhone 15 Pro, performance was great, but that scrolling issue was still present to some degree, though not as bad as on Switch and older iOS devices.

    Since I had access to the Switch version and bought Kingdom Eighties on Steam to play on Steam Deck as well, I was curious how it scaled. The Steam version is Steam Deck Verified, and it had the least amount of performance issues across the platforms I played it on barring iPhone 15 Pro. The Switch version while decent, has quite a bit of frame pacing issues in some parts, but it isn’t game breaking. I see no reason to recommend Kingdom Eighties on any platform other than iOS from the ones I own, since you get the full experience here at less than half the asking price of consoles and PC and with a conversion that runs much better than the Switch version. The Switch version also lacks touchscreen support.

    Having now played Kingdom Eighties with its latest updates on iOS, Switch, and Steam Deck, it absolutely delivered in its promise of being a story-based expansion to the world of Kingdom. I was interested thanks to the setting, but the team nailed almost everything about this across its aesthetic, music, and story. The lack of co-op will no doubt be disappointing for some though, and I wish it ran without the few scrolling issues I encountered. Barring that, I have no issues recommending Kingdom Eighties at its current asking price. I hope the team builds on this setting for a future mainline game though.

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    Mikhail Madnani

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  • ‘Storyteller’ Mobile Review – Perfect for Netflix Games – TouchArcade

    ‘Storyteller’ Mobile Review – Perfect for Netflix Games – TouchArcade

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    I first played Daniel Benmergui’s Storyteller (Free) through its Nintendo Switch and Steam releases. Read my original review of it here. Since then, a lot of friends who played the game enjoyed it, but thought it was overpriced given the short runtime. On Netflix, you don’t need to worry about that, but does Storyteller warrant a replay or is it worth revisiting with its first major update since launch? I think it is, and I’ve had a lot of fun revisiting it on iPhone and iPad over the last few days. If you’ve never played Storyteller, I’ll also compare the different versions to help you find which one you should get.

    In the case of a lot of mobile ports, I’m curious to see how console and PC games transition over with their controls, but Storyteller is a puzzle game about putting together stories with already amazing touch controls on Switch.that already had great touch controls in its original Switch version. I knew it would feel good to play on mobile, but the Netflix release on iOS and Android arrives with the major first content update included from the get go, making it a more interesting release. The Switch and Steam versions were updated alongside the Netflix release so if you already own Storyteller, you can just update your game and play the new content there. If you are interested in the Netflix version and if it is worth your time, this is the right place.

    In a lot of ways, Storyteller reminds me of Scribblenauts with its mechanics. Your aim is to put together stories in this puzzle game by completing panels in a book with objects, scenes, and people available for a specific solution. Some puzzles included have alternate paths or challenges, but there isn’t much replay value beyond that. This is where Storyteller might let some people down. The new update, which is what the iOS version ships with, has seen additions to prior chapters, new content, an interesting new character added, and more. I didn’t think Storyteller was too short or incomplete, so this new version feels like an enhanced version. The narrator is a lovely addition (that you can turn off) that elevates the experience, and the changes to some levels are very good. A lot of care has gone into this update, and I’m glad to see the game finally go above its potential thanks to this new version.

    Storyteller’s actual narrative and writing are both very good. There’s humor, sorrow, and just a lot of fun as you mess around with possible outcomes here. I spent a lot of time trying to play it wrong or do the opposite just to see how things played out. In my original review, I mentioned how an expansion or update down the road would help Storyteller’s a lot. That’s exactly what happened here. Not only is it easier to recommend to those buying it on Steam or Switch, the game itself on mobile in its debut is really great now.

    On mobile, Storyteller has no controller support that I could see, but you don’t need it. If it is included, I’ll update this, but I couldn’t get my DualSense detected on iPad, and the Kishi V2 didn’t work in-game on my iPhone 11. Visually, it seems to use the low quality preset on my iPhone 11 and is crisper on iPad Pro. The Steam version runs without issues at the high quality preset on Steam Deck. The Switch version handheld is similar to iPad, but not as crisp. None of these versions look bad because the aesthetic scales well, but it is worth mentioning for comparison. Load times are fine, and the game is responsive throughout. If I had to pick, I’d go with Netflix followed by Switch in handheld for the best experience. The PC version on Steam Deck does not have touch support and this game very much is best with touch controls.

    With the Netflix release, the only caveat for recommending Storyteller is that you need an active Netflix subscription to play it, and can’t buy it outright. That isn’t an issue for most people with a subscription, but it is worth keeping in mind. If you do want to own it, it is discounted right now on Steam for a few days more. As someone with Xbox Game Pass, Apple Arcade, Netflix, and PlayStation Plus, I know a lot of games release on subscription services with time being the limiter these days, but if you do have a Netflix subscription, this is worth downloading to try.

    Storyteller remains a short (well not as short as before this update), but great experience that I recommend to anyone looking to experience something only possible through the medium of games. The puzzles or trial and error in some situations may not be for everyone, but this is a great addition to Netflix’s growing games catalog on mobile. If you do own Storyteller on Switch or Steam, this update elevates it quite a bit, and you need to revisit it.

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    Mikhail Madnani

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  • ‘NBA 2K24’ Steam Deck Review – How Does the PC Version on Deck Compare to Xbox Series X? – TouchArcade

    ‘NBA 2K24’ Steam Deck Review – How Does the PC Version on Deck Compare to Xbox Series X? – TouchArcade

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    Back when NBA 2K16 released, I ended up having a ton of fun with it even as someone who didn’t really watch basketball much. After constantly hearing about mediocre sports games back then, NBA 2K16 felt great to play, and more-importantly was fun. Since then, I’ve been trying to play 2K’s NBA games each year. NBA 2K21 on PS5 was a highlight for me, but I was curious to see how the game scaled on other platforms. I started playing it on Switch and whatever newest console version was available. I had never actually played one of these games on PC before. With NBA 2K24, I wanted to cover it on both Steam Deck and on any current console for the “next-gen” experience. Since around launch, I’ve been playing NBA 2K24 on Steam Deck and Xbox Series X. This review will focus on the former, but it has been interesting and disappointing to see how different the game is across PC and Xbox Series X.

    I rarely find a yearly sports game that justifies a full-priced purchase each year. NBA 2K24 is pretty similar in that regard, so you might be wondering why I am reviewing it? I wanted to see how it feels on Steam Deck since I never played these games on Valve’s handheld, and also wanted to see how that version compares to the Xbox Series X (and PS5 version. I also wanted to highlight who should buy it right now, and who should wait on a sale. In this NBA 2K24 Steam Deck review, I’m going to focus on the game on Valve’s handheld gaming system, but also cover the game and how I found it in the time I’ve played across platforms.

    Since NBA 2K18, every game in the series has been Steam Deck Verified. Knowing that, I expected NBA 2K24 to work well, and it plays without issues on Steam Deck out of the box. I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten verified yet, and my only real complaint with this release barring it being based on the last-gen version (which I will get to), is the install size. NBA 2K24 currently occupies 146.33GB on Steam Deck. This is smaller than the 170 or so GB on Xbox Series X, but still massive. I wouldn’t even be able to fit this into the internal SSD on my 256GB Steam Deck because of shaders and other data installed on it.

    I installed NBA 2K24 on my SD card, and it ran perfectly. I didn’t change any settings initially, but settled on tweaking most things to medium or high and I turned shadows down to see if I could make it look crisper on the Deck’s display by sacrificing shadows. You won’t need to bother with any of this, but the game scales very well. It even has shader preload options and 16:10 support for many parts. I don’t know if NBA 2K23 offered all this, but NBA 2K24 feels and looks great on Steam Deck. I also tried it with my DualSense controller.

    When it comes to game modes outside the default play modes, the Mamba Moments challenge mode here is quite nice, but I’d have liked to see more of a focus on Kobe Bryant’s legendary career in this game. The content in this mode is very good, but I was hoping for more basically. One area where NBA 2K24 does feel like a step back, is its MyCareer mode. On PS5 and Xbox Series X, there’s a whole set of WNBA content that isn’t available on prior platforms including MyCareer content and more. Barring that, the missing feature I’m disappointed by the most is the Eras quick play options that replicate the TV viewing experience with filters on Xbox Series X. These optional filters add a lot to the experience and this seems to be absent on PC. Check out the screenshot from Xbox Series X below:

    Comparing NBA 2K24 on Steam Deck (or PC) with the Xbox Series X version, outside of visuals, the big differences are with game modes, movement, and overall content. The highlight is definitely cross play, which is possible with the NBA 2K24 PS5 and Xbox Series X|S native versions. The others don’t have cross play which is a huge deal in a game like this. NBA 2K24 is the first time cross play has been added as well to an NBA 2K game as far as I’m aware. Other differences include the lack of ProPLAY on PC. ProPLAY uses NBA footage translated in-game. More information on that is here. Even the game menus feel just fine on PC while the Xbox Series X version is a lot nicer.

    While menus aren’t a huge deal for the gameplay, it basically feels like a representation of the overall product available on both platforms. NBA 2K24 on PC is a very good basketball game that has issues and is lacking compared to the new consoles, but NBA 2K24 itself also has too much of a push towards virtual currency in its various modes. If you ignore all that and just want a game to play casually or with friends, NBA 2K24 on PC is great on Steam Deck, but that’s a big caveat.

    Thinking about the possibilities of NBA 2K25 bringing the new features and visuals to PC also might end up being problematic on Steam Deck. If said potential version is based on new consoles, it might not run and look as well on Steam Deck. This is all speculation of course, but the potential of NBA 2K25 doing more on PC has me excited. If it is the same last-gen version though, I likely won’t be bothering playing it on Steam Deck and stick to just PS5 or Xbox Series X. Having not played an NBA 2K game on PC before, I enjoyed my time with NBA 2K24 on Steam Deck. This is definitely getting Steam Deck Verified soon with how good it looks and plays.

    While NBA 2K24 does have online play, I wanted to see if it was playable via Steam’s Remote Play Together. I invited a friend who doesn’t own the game to play on my Steam Deck with me. It worked really well despite the distance between us. One thing to note is that I’d recommend sticking to 800p on Steam Deck because 1080p with high and medium seems to be a bit too much for Steam Deck to maintain a locked 60fps. If you want to play on a 1080p display through the dock or something, consider turning more effects down.

    Right now, I’d only recommend NBA 2K24 on Steam Deck if you skipped the last year or two of games. If you haven’t played these games in a while, NBA 2K24 runs and looks great on Steam Deck, and is a fun basketball game to play. The push to virtual currency in specific game modes definitely holds this back, alongside the lack of new modes and features on PC. Hopefully NBA 2K25 on PC will see it finally get the full feature set. Right now, I’d recommend NBA 2K24 more on Xbox Series X (or PS5) than PC, but the PC version plays great on Steam Deck if you’re after a great portable experience.

    NBA 2K24 Steam Deck review score: 3.5/5

    Want more Steam Deck coverage? Check out our Steam Deck category for reviews, news, interviews, features, and more here. Want us to cover something specific on Steam Deck? Let us know in the comments.

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    Mikhail Madnani

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  • Prosus (OTCMKTS:PROSY) Receives Average Rating of “Moderate Buy” from Analysts

    Prosus (OTCMKTS:PROSY) Receives Average Rating of “Moderate Buy” from Analysts

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    Prosus (OTCMKTS:PROSY – Get Free Report) has received a consensus recommendation of “Moderate Buy” from the six analysts that are covering the stock, Marketbeat Ratings reports. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a hold recommendation and five have given a buy recommendation to the company.

    A number of equities research analysts have recently commented on PROSY shares. Barclays raised Prosus from an “equal weight” rating to an “overweight” rating in a research note on Thursday, August 17th. HSBC raised Prosus from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating in a research note on Wednesday, June 28th.

    View Our Latest Stock Report on PROSY

    Prosus Trading Down 1.4 %

    PROSY opened at $13.66 on Monday. The stock has a fifty day simple moving average of $14.45 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $14.53. Prosus has a 12-month low of $7.91 and a 12-month high of $17.13.

    Prosus’s stock is going to split on Tuesday, September 26th. The 2.17960000 split was announced on Tuesday, September 26th. The newly minted shares will be issued to shareholders after the closing bell on Tuesday, September 26th.

    Prosus Company Profile

    (Get Free Report

    Prosus N.V. engages in the e-commerce and internet businesses. The company operates internet platforms, such as classifieds, payments and fintech, food delivery, education technology, etail, health, ventures, social, and other internet platforms. It has operations in Latin and North America, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Asia, and internationally.

    Further Reading

    Analyst Recommendations for Prosus (OTCMKTS:PROSY)

    Receive News & Ratings for Prosus Daily – Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts’ ratings for Prosus and related companies with MarketBeat.com’s FREE daily email newsletter.

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    ABMN Staff

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  • ‘Samurai Shodown’ (2019) Mobile Review – A Good Port With One Surprising Omission – TouchArcade

    ‘Samurai Shodown’ (2019) Mobile Review – A Good Port With One Surprising Omission – TouchArcade

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    Last week, SNK released its 2019-released reboot of the Samurai Shodown series on iOS and Android through Netflix Games. Samurai Shodown (Free) is a game I’ve enjoyed through its releases on PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Steam quite a bit. I did buy it on Nintendo Switch, but don’t really play that version much because of its tech issues. The fighting game was the first one in the series I spent a lot of time with, and I’m glad I did. I love the focus on weapons, duels, high risk gameplay, and more it brings to the table. Samurai Shodown also excels in its aesthetic and sound design. I was obviously excited to see how the mobile conversion was. In my Samurai Shodown (2019) mobile review, I’m going to cover the game itself, how it compares to other platforms, and what needs to be fixed for it to be worth playing.

    If you’ve not played Samurai Shodown, it plays quite differently compared to mainstream fighting games. Having seen the series history through the Samurai Shodown NeoGeo Collection, I’m glad this Samurai Shodown reboot stuck to its guns and didn’t try and change things up to lose its own character. The weapons, footsies, unique characters, striking aesthetic, and more come together brilliantly, but this Samurai Shodown game has always been lacking in its online and story mode. The core gameplay is great, and I was hoping to see at least that translated to mobile well alongside all the in-game content.

    Samurai Shodown on mobile initially feels like the complete game with touch controls, but it has some cutbacks. The first one is visuals. I expected it to look and run better on modern iOS devices given my experience with it on consoles. Visuals aren’t as bad as the Switch version though, and Samurai Shodown on newer iOS devices doesn’t feel sluggish like the Switch version. I also feel like some characters will feel very different here given the on-screen buttons being the only way to play including specials. This just is a very weird decision in what should’ve been a slam dunk port with how much effort went into translating the visuals and everything else over.

    The major issues are with the cuts to DLC. Not only are the DLC characters not included in the game right now, but the collaboration characters are completely cut out. As an example, Baiken from Guilty Gear or Warden from For Honor are completely absent here. Not having DLC right from the start isn’t the biggest problem, but the current character selection screen mentions some of the DLC characters arriving as late as July 2024. I get that you want people to remain subscribed to Netflix so you don’t want to release everything in one go, but this is a bit much.

    If you’ve never played Samurai Shodown on other platforms or don’t even care about those versions, Samurai Shodown on Netflix isn’t a complete waste. The touch controls aren’t as good as traditional controls on a controller or stick, but the developers did a good job with them here. I just don’t understand why it didn’t include controller support as an option for those who prefer using traditional controls in a fighting game.

    For the online, I tested against someone locally over wifi and with Shaun who is in Japan. The netcode held up alright, but it isn’t as good as playing something like Street Fighter 6 or Guilty Gear Strive. For casual matches, it is worth trying, and also has a decent custom lobby implementation. There are also leaderboards for some modes included in the Netflix version of Samurai Shodown.

    When it comes to platform differences, the best versions of Samurai Shodown right now for me are the Xbox Series X version for playing on TV and the Steam Deck version for playing on the go. The Xbox Series X version supports 120hz which even the PC version doesn’t have. The PS4 version never got any PS5 enhancements so I stopped playing that version to move to the Xbox version for offline play. On the portable side, I would only recommend the Switch version if you have no other way to play Samurai Shodown and don’t care about online play.

    So where does the Netflix version fit into this picture? It isn’t really the same experience with forced touch controls, but it does a better job than the Switch port for sure. I would absolutely recommend downloading it to see how you find the touch controls, but I really hope SNK can add controller support and improve the DLC situation. I don’t expect online to work too well considering the console and PC versions still don’t have decent online netcode. That is coming this month. But in the testing I did, it is serviceable. I played a few games against Shaun who is in Japan and it wasn’t unplayable like certain Switch fighting games we’ve played.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAt5-FvweEc

    Samurai Shodown, even as the base game with touch controls only, is a great addition to Netflix’s gaming catalog, but it should’ve been better. The lack of controller support and baffling DLC release schedule hold it back in its current state. I’m going to keep it installed in the hope we get updates to address those issues, but right now Samurai Shodown is a great fighting game that deserved better for its mobile release. This is a competent and commendable conversion in many ways, but a very disappointing one in others. Hopefully we won’t need to wait too long to embrace controller support.

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    Mikhail Madnani

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  • ‘Remnant 2’ Steam Deck Review – Verified by Valve but Still Needs Some Work – TouchArcade

    ‘Remnant 2’ Steam Deck Review – Verified by Valve but Still Needs Some Work – TouchArcade

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    When Remnant 2 from Gunfire Games was announced, a friend of mine kept trying to get me to play the first game. I ended up liking Remnant: From the Ashes quite a bit when I finally played it on Nintendo Switch for review. Read my review of the port here. Having experienced the first game in handheld mode on Nintendo Switch, I was hoping Remnant 2 would be fine on Steam Deck from the get go. I’ve been playing it for review on both Steam Deck and Xbox Series X, and while the latter is massively better, I’m impressed with Remnant 2 on Steam Deck right now after a few patches. Remnant 2 on Steam Deck has improved a lot post-launch, but it has also got me to question Valve’s Steam Deck Verified program. I’ll get to that in a bit, but Remnant 2 on Steam Deck despite its issues, has been a joy to play solo and with friends after some compromises.

    While this review will focus on Remnant 2 on Steam Deck and the PC port, I wanted to also cover why I love Remnant 2 so far. It feels like a huge improvement over the first game and I hope more games take inspiration from its co-op setup. Playing with friends is super simple in Remnant 2, and it is something I hope other developers take inspiration from for their own co-op systems. Remnant 2 itself is a big upgrade visually, in its music, and variety. The post-launch updates are changing up things already, but I can safely recommend Remnant 2 if you enjoyed the first game or if you just want to try a polished blend of third-person shooters and soulslikes. It also keeps things fresh making multiple playthroughs fun with how much changes, and how much customization is available.

    I’ve included a screenshot of the Remnant 2 Steam graphics options, but I set everything to low on Steam Deck and opted for Intel XeSS upscaling set to performance. AMD’s FSR in Remnant 2 is not good at all. With everything set to low, 720p (or lower while testing), and Intel XeSS, I could get the game to run at 30fps with some drops. This varies a lot based on the location you’re in. Dense areas aren’t terrible, but things become hard to see. Around launch day, these settings resulted in multiple drops into the low 20s or even below regardless of the location, so the current state is an improvement, albeit a small one. For a Steam Deck Verified game around launch, Remnant 2 needs more optimization. Given how it runs on consoles with a low internal resolution, I’m not surprised though.

    While discussing Remnant 2 Steam Deck performance, I want to emphasize how much better the overall experience is right now versus day one. Not only does Steam Cloud work now, the game is actually playable online with friends. I couldn’t get online co-op to work at all until a recent patch. One thing to note about patches is that it takes a while to actually patch the game once said patch downloads. I wanted to see how Remnant 2 on Steam Deck would feel on the SD card, and I installed it to my Sandisk Extreme card. Patches still take an hour or so to install. Keep that in mind.

    The more I played Remnant 2, the more I enjoyed it even on Steam Deck. This is a game I see myself replaying for a while thanks to the different builds possible even from the start. It did make me wonder about recommending Remnant 2 specifically to someone on Steam Deck and not something else. When I do Steam Deck reviews, I aim to try and help many potential buyers figure out if something is worth it or not on Steam Deck. In this case, I absolutely recommend Remnant 2 on Steam Deck with the big caveat about its visual cutbacks to get a decent frame rate. As an addition to your main PC where it likely runs better, Remnant 2 will be great to quickly dip in and out for sessions where you do a small area or just play with friends for a bit.

    Remnant 2 on Steam Deck offers the ability to use gyro controls thanks to Steam Input. This is not available on either console as far as I’m aware, which is a big advantage for the game on Steam in general. It made going back to the Xbox Series X version harder since aiming is worse there without gyro. Steam Input continues to impress, and after some tweaking and getting used to the visual cutbacks, Remnant 2 feels right at home on Steam Deck. The ability to play on the go is also a bonus for the Steam Deck since there is no Switch port, and I don’t see Remnant 2 hitting the current Switch. It might be a good game for the next Switch though.

    Over the last few months games like Sony’s The Last of Us Part I being a mess on PC and not great on Steam Deck even today made me question Valve’s Steam Deck Verified program. When Remnant 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 got Verified, you’d assume they run fine and don’t have issues. Remnant 2 right now runs a lot better than it did when it was branded Verified by Valve. I think it still shouldn’t be marked as Verified though. Valve should make developers implement a good default graphics preset for Steam Deck for something to be Verified.

    A lot of this review talking about compromises reminds me of when I write about demanding games getting Switch ports. I feel like we are getting close to that stage for games that only release on current generation consoles with their own visual cutbacks to run at a good frame rate on those more powerful systems. Remnant 2 definitely got me to think about how certain upcoming games might be on Steam Deck.

    Right now, I’d recommend Remnant 2 itself for sure. I love the gameplay, co-op, soundtrack, and improvements over the first game. I do not love the visual downgrade to get it running decently on Steam Deck though. Since it is Steam Deck Verified, Valve likely wants people to buy it to play on Steam Deck, but just be prepared for some tinkering to get it running at an acceptable frame rate. I featured Remnant 2 as one of the best new games to play on Steam Deck in 2023, and I’m expecting it to be on my end of year list as well. While I’ll stick to the Xbox Series X version for my main playthrough, I’m looking forward to checking out the DLC and playing more with friends on Steam Deck in the coming weeks. Hopefully Gunfire Games can optimize it further for Steam Deck soon.

    Remnant 2 Steam Deck Score: 4/5

    Interested in more Steam Deck coverage? Check out our Steam Deck recommendations!

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    Mikhail Madnani

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  • CNN Majorly Shakes Up Its Lineup With First Overhaul Since Chris Licht’s Departure

    CNN Majorly Shakes Up Its Lineup With First Overhaul Since Chris Licht’s Departure

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    CNN rolled out significant new programming Monday for primetime, morning, dayside, and weekend, marking the first major changes to the schedule since CEO Chris Licht’s abrupt departure from the network earlier this year. Abby Phillip will be taking over the 10 PM hour with a new show out of New York, while Laura Coates will be anchoring the 11 PM hour with a new show out of DC. Notably, CNN’s primetime lineup will be nearly all women, as Kaitlan Collins debuted in the 9 PM time slot this summer. Anderson Cooper maintains his 8 PM seat.

    Other changes include new weekend shows for CNN veteran Christiane Amanpour and Chris Wallace, and a shakeup in the morning, with Phil Mattingly joining Poppy Harlow as a co-anchor on *CNN This Morning—*until now, Harlow has been holding down the show on her own ever since Collins was moved to primetime and Don Lemon was fired—and Kasie Hunt anchoring Early Start. Gayle King and Charles Barkley‘s limited series, King Charles, which was previously announced under Licht, is still set to debut later this fall. “One of CNN’s key differentiators is our deep roster of experienced journalists, reporters and storytellers. Many joined CNN early in their careers and have grown with the network throughout the years,” CNN Worldwide’s interim leadership team, Amy Entelis, David Leavy, Virginia Moseley, and Eric Sherling said in a statement. “By expanding the range and depth of our programming lineup across multiple dayparts, we are strengthening our reporting excellence throughout the schedule, elevating our ability to tell great stories across platforms, and doubling down on CNN’s position as the most trusted name in news.”

    Elevating Phillip, who has emerged as a top talent since joining the network in 2017, is something of a no-brainer. After distinguishing herself as a 2020 election commentator, Phillip took the reins of Inside Politics Sunday in 2021; at 31, she is, as the New York Times put it, “Next-Gen CNN.” Her continued elevation makes sense as CNN fights for better ratings and looks to appeal to a broader audience. There’d been previous talk of Coates anchoring the 11 PM hour, though the move seemed to be on hold as of this spring, with Insider reporting that “Coates was told the network couldn’t staff a separate hour and that Alisyn Camerota, who anchors at 10 pm, would be extended for a second hour.” (Coates had been filling in for Camerota, who will now “focus on reporting for CNN’s long-form unit, specifically on forthcoming episodes for The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper,” CNN said in its press release.)

    The moves show an empowered interim leadership team taking action— in contrast to Licht’s operation. The former CEO, who left the network this spring following the network’s disastrous Donald Trump town hall and a brutal Atlantic profile, struggled to figure out his prime-time headache. Licht announced the biggest move of his short-lived tenure at CNN—that Collins would fill the seat left vacant after Chris Cuomo‘s firing—just a few weeks before he stepped down from the organization. Collins, a star reporter, is apparently still trying to find an audience in the anchor chair. It’s still early days, but, per a Mediaite report, the show drew 564,000 viewers and 110,000 in the key 25-54 demo for the week of July 25—losing out to Fox News’ Hannity, which brought in more than quadruple that number (2,375,000 total and 206,000 in the demo), and to MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tonight, which brought in 1,360,000 and 132,000 in the demo.

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • ‘Peglin’ Mobile Early Access Review – Nearly Perfect on iOS – TouchArcade

    ‘Peglin’ Mobile Early Access Review – Nearly Perfect on iOS – TouchArcade

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    Just like when Jared wrote about it for Game of the Week, I was in two minds about reviewing Red Nexus Games’ pachinko roguelike Peglin (Free). On PC, Peglin is available as an early access game, which means it will keep getting new content or fixes as it heads to its full release. On PC, that happens quite a bit with indies, in fact even Baldur’s Gate 3 which I’ve been obsessed with for over a week, was an early access launch in 2020 before it hit 1.0 recently. Peglin is in early access on mobile and it has already seen a few notable updates bringing in new characters and more. I was planning on waiting for Peglin to hit 1.0 on PC and mobile before reviewing it, but I’ve been playing it daily again, so why not write about how it is in its current state? This Peglin early access review will be updated when the game hits 1.0.

    Peglin is a “pachinko roguelike” and it involves a lot of elements from both kinds of games. There are a lot of balls, pegs, luck, charming designs, catchy music, and more as you try to aim to get as much damage by hitting pegs as one of many orbs while trying to survive. These orbs and pegs have their own interactions, and there’s a lot of RNG or luck involved depending on how you aim and what’s on the board. This affects your attack to damage enemies. Your aim is to progress to the end of the area you’re in. Even selecting the next path on your map is done by launching yourself as an orb into one of many paths on the bottom of the screen.

    These paths range from events to treasure chests and even mini bosses in addition to general battles. In addition to your starting orbs, you collect loads throughout your run while also gaining relics and more. Everything changes up how you will approach the next encounter because you could have something damaging enemies further away, something that gives you more critical attacks, or something that heals you. The first many runs will be a learning experience as you try and find your bearings in Peglin. This is another reason I recommend finishing the opening area which is free to try on mobile. That will tell you everything you need to know about whether Peglin is for you or not.

    Peglin could do with more variety in its unlocks, but said variety isn’t as accessible early on. These kinds of games benefit from throwing unlocks at you to keep you invested, and Peglin’s structure and difficulty don’t help. Neither does the reliance on luck, but that isn’t something I knock it for. Peglin 1.0 would be a lot more accessible with some quality of life improvements and accessibility options for newcomers. In a lot of ways, Peglin reminds me of the early game of The Binding of Isaac where you see tons of weapons or modifiers, but struggle to make much progress making you feel like you are wasting your time. The difference is that the gameplay in Peglin hasn’t even remotely stopped being fun while I did tire of Isaac before its DLC at one point.

    Having played Peglin on my iPhone (with touch and a Razer Kishi V2), iPad (with a controller and with touch), and Steam Deck, Peglin right now is great on all of them, but I’d try it out on every platform if I were you before investing time into them since there is no cross platform syncing. If you do play on Steam, you can play at a higher frame rate as well and sync to your Steam Deck if you have one through Steam Cloud. The Steam Deck version even supports 120fps while docked over DisplayPort, which is how I’ve been playing it when at home.

    In its current state, Peglin on iOS has almost every feature I want. The major miss is the lack of iCloud save support. As with all my reviews mentioning iCloud save support missing, I need to specify that sometimes the developer does implement it, but iCloud itself isn’t too reliable. The only times it has worked flawlessly for me are with Apple Arcade games or Feral Interactive releases. Cross platform syncing seems to be out of the question though. Barring that, a feature I’d like, but one that isn’t essential, is the ability to play in portrait mode on iPhone. Peglin is the perfect portrait game, but I understand that it would require a lot of work for the interface and to make things readable.

    On modern iOS devices, Peglin is a 16:9 game so there will be black bars depending on your device. It runs very smoothly on my iPhone 11 and iPad Pro (2020). You can enable a battery saver option if you’d prefer to conserve power while running at a lower frame rate. Barring that, Peglin does have controller support on iOS. I used my Razer Kishi V2 on iPhone and DualSense controller on iPad without any issues. The button prompts changed immediately depending on my input.

    Peglin has a few quality of life features like being able to speed up movement and gameplay, but I hope we eventually get one that lets you skip the animations and do things even quicker. The speed up option also wasn’t implemented fully at launch on iOS, but now it offers the same 3x option as the PC version.

    One of the advantages to Peglin on mobile, is that it has a very generous free trial available. Peglin is a free to start game with a one time unlock in app purchase. If you aren’t sold on it, I urge you to try the game and see how you feel in the first area. If you do like it, the unlock price is about half of what the PC version costs making the mobile version an even better option with how the pick up and play nature of the game suits portable play. It also helps that the iOS version is superb, and only really is missing iCloud save syncing.

    Having never played Peggle before, Peglin has been a ton of fun even with all the luck and RNG involved. It may not be for everyone, but even in its current state, I recommend trying Peglin on iOS. The free to start model means you can try it out for yourself and see how you like it. I was sold after a few runs, and have not grown tired of it even months after launch. I’ve even started playing it on Steam Deck as a break from other games like I do with Vampire Survivors there. I can’t wait to see where Peglin goes when it hits 1.0.

    Early Access review score: 4.5/5*

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    Mikhail Madnani

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  • Analysts Set Lockheed Martin Co. (NYSE:LMT) Price Target at $499.43

    Analysts Set Lockheed Martin Co. (NYSE:LMT) Price Target at $499.43

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    Shares of Lockheed Martin Co. (NYSE:LMT – Get Free Report) have earned a consensus recommendation of “Hold” from the fifteen brokerages that are currently covering the company, Marketbeat reports. Two investment analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, eight have issued a hold rating and five have assigned a buy rating to the company. The average 12 month target price among brokers that have updated their coverage on the stock in the last year is $499.43.

    A number of equities analysts recently commented on LMT shares. Sanford C. Bernstein lifted their price objective on Lockheed Martin from $478.00 to $496.00 and gave the stock a “market perform” rating in a research note on Thursday, April 20th. Wells Fargo & Company lifted their target price on shares of Lockheed Martin from $433.00 to $440.00 in a research note on Wednesday, July 19th. Robert W. Baird cut shares of Lockheed Martin from an “outperform” rating to a “neutral” rating and set a $513.00 price target on the stock. in a research report on Wednesday, April 12th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. lifted their price objective on Lockheed Martin from $480.00 to $500.00 and gave the stock a “neutral” rating in a research report on Wednesday, April 19th. Finally, Credit Suisse Group upped their target price on Lockheed Martin from $510.00 to $550.00 and gave the company an “outperform” rating in a research report on Wednesday, April 19th.

    Lockheed Martin Trading Down 0.5 %

    LMT opened at $445.72 on Thursday. The company has a market cap of $112.25 billion, a P/E ratio of 16.30, a PEG ratio of 2.55 and a beta of 0.65. The company has a current ratio of 1.36, a quick ratio of 1.16 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.87. The company’s 50 day moving average is $456.47 and its 200-day moving average is $465.01. Lockheed Martin has a 1-year low of $381.55 and a 1-year high of $508.10.

    Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT – Get Free Report) last posted its earnings results on Tuesday, July 18th. The aerospace company reported $6.73 EPS for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $6.45 by $0.28. The firm had revenue of $16.69 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $15.92 billion. Lockheed Martin had a return on equity of 71.67% and a net margin of 10.48%. The business’s quarterly revenue was up 8.1% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period last year, the company earned $6.32 earnings per share. Equities research analysts predict that Lockheed Martin will post 27.08 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

    Lockheed Martin Dividend Announcement

    The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, September 22nd. Investors of record on Friday, September 1st will be issued a $3.00 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, August 31st. This represents a $12.00 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 2.69%. Lockheed Martin’s dividend payout ratio is presently 43.88%.

    Insider Activity

    In other news, Director John Donovan bought 548 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, July 19th. The stock was bought at an average price of $457.07 per share, for a total transaction of $250,474.36. Following the completion of the acquisition, the director now directly owns 3,378 shares in the company, valued at approximately $1,543,982.46. The purchase was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this hyperlink. Corporate insiders own 0.17% of the company’s stock.

    Institutional Inflows and Outflows

    A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in LMT. Grey Fox Wealth Advisors LLC purchased a new stake in Lockheed Martin during the fourth quarter valued at about $27,000. Okabena Investment Services Inc. purchased a new stake in shares of Lockheed Martin during the 4th quarter valued at approximately $28,000. Edmond DE Rothschild Holding S.A. boosted its holdings in Lockheed Martin by 100.0% in the 1st quarter. Edmond DE Rothschild Holding S.A. now owns 60 shares of the aerospace company’s stock worth $28,000 after buying an additional 30 shares during the period. Mendota Financial Group LLC purchased a new position in Lockheed Martin in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $29,000. Finally, Coppell Advisory Solutions Corp. purchased a new position in Lockheed Martin in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $31,000. 75.28% of the stock is currently owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

    Lockheed Martin Company Profile

    (Get Free Report

    Lockheed Martin Corporation, a security and aerospace company, engages in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration, and sustainment of technology systems, products, and services worldwide. It operates through four segments: Aeronautics, Missiles and Fire Control, Rotary and Mission Systems, and Space.

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  • ‘Roto Force’ Mobile Review – Rotating Run ‘n Gun Perfection – TouchArcade

    ‘Roto Force’ Mobile Review – Rotating Run ‘n Gun Perfection – TouchArcade

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    Roto Force (Free) from developer Anton Klinger aka Accidentally Awesome Games and PID Games is a game I’ve had installed since it launched, but I didn’t actually play it until about a week later. I was impressed with it right from the get go, but I ended up forgetting about it until a friend of mine mentioned EDGE magazine saying it was the kind of game Vlambeer would still be making if the developer was still around. That stuck with me, and it became very evident after about 15 minutes of playing. This rotating blend of run ‘n gun twin stick shooting action is a shockingly good and polished experience that will likely be high up on our iOS Game of the Year list in December.

    Roto Force not only has slick controls, excellent haptics, and amazing gameplay, but it also has memorable writing when you have to do things for your boss. The level biomes are varied as well, and Roto Force does a good job of introducing new mechanics, testing you, and giving you unlocks at a steady pace. Roto Force has you moving left or right, but also dashing across to any side of the level you’re in barring the one you’re on. You also have the ability to shoot (of course) and avoid enemies and hazards while you work your way through different levels, mini-bosses, and proper bosses. The checkpointing system is quite lenient, but Roto Force has you on your toes at all times with its fast-paced gameplay.

    After a nice interactive tutorial, you start to see the real magic in Roto Force as you make your way through the various sets of stages in each level. It feels very carefully crafted to deliver a quality arcade twin stick shooter experience. Depending on your skill level and the accessibility options, Roto Force might feel a bit short, but I have no regrets recommending it at full price right now on iOS. If you watch the gameplay video above, it might look like a game that wouldn’t work on a touchscreen, but the developers of the mobile version have nailed the controls. I love how it feels with touch controls.

    While I thought Roto Force looked excellent in its screenshots that absolutely don’t do the slick gameplay justice, it has a surprisingly well done interface not only in its controls for a touchscreen, but also the actual menus. Basically Roto Force screams polish and I was surprised to find the full game unlock price only $4.99. I expected it to be more expensive even on PC given the game quality.

    I haven’t played Roto Force on Steam Deck yet, but it feels so perfect on iOS that I don’t think I’ll even bother getting it on PC. I had no performance issues on my iPhone 11 or iPad Pro, and the game looks excellent on both devices. The touch controls have options to tweak the experience to your liking, but you can also use a controller. I tested Roto Force with my Razer Kishi V2 on iPhone 11 and DualSense on iPad Pro. The game detects controllers immediately and works perfectly with them.

    I mentioned accessibility and not only does Roto Force let you adjust the colors, but you can also disable screen shake like I did. You can also opt for a fixed camera perspective. When I first played Roto Force, I was afraid of getting motion sickness, but that wasn’t a problem after disabling the screen shake. The option to lock the camera is welcome as well. There’ also an accessibility assist menu under your profile that lets you adjust the game speed, damage multiplier, and toggle immortality if you’re having trouble with a stage or boss.

    My only complaint with Roto Force on iOS right now is the lack of iCloud save syncing. I tested this on multiple devices across two iCloud accounts and had no success with syncing. I really wish more developers implemented this more reliably or at all.

    Roto Force not only feels amazing on iOS regardless of if you use a controller or touch, but it also managed to surprise me with its writing and boss designs. I’m very impressed with the accessibility options and the haptic feedback included on iOS as well. This is one of the most-polished games I’ve played on iOS all year, and one I see myself jumping into regularly with its awesome gameplay and aesthetic. I urge you to try the game for free and see how you feel because this might be your next favorite pick up and play twin-stick shooter on mobile.

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    Mikhail Madnani

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  • Lost Signals’ Mobile Review – One of Netflix Games’ Best Yet – TouchArcade

    Lost Signals’ Mobile Review – One of Netflix Games’ Best Yet – TouchArcade

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    The original Oxenfree was a brilliant experience. Whenever an indie game I love has a sequel announced, I’ve become skeptical thanks to the massive disappointment of Hotline Miami 2. Despite there being amazing sequels like Rogue Legacy 2 and even Risk of Rain 2 or Spelunky 2, there’s a part of my brain that thinks a Hotline Miami 2 might happen. Thankfully, Night School and Netflix delivered in spades with Oxenfree II: Lost Signals (Free). I’ve been playing it for review on iOS, Steam Deck, and Nintendo Switch over the last week or so, and definitely think it was worth the wait, despite not actually thinking we needed a sequel before.

    Oxenfree II: Lost Signals, is a standalone sequel to Oxenfree: Netflix Edition, but given both games are now included in Netflix Games, I’d still recommend playing the original first. Having context and expectations from the first game definitely shaped my experience in Oxenfree II: Lost Signals, and I ended up appreciating it a lot more. Even if you aren’t a fan of paying for a subscription to play games, the original Oxenfree is often dirt cheap on PC and consoles, and is absolutely worth checking out.

    Oxenfree II: Lost Signals is set half a decade after the first game. The opening hour felt very weird in a good way as I played more as Riley, the protagonist of this game. It kind of felt like coming back to an old vacation home that somehow is creepier and bigger than before. That holds true for most of Oxenfree II: Lost Signals. Everything here is bigger than the original, and things feel more polished overall. The voice acting is superb, visuals amazing, and music everything I wanted. There are some downsides though, and they involve backtracking. Oxenfree II: Lost Signals‘s vibe is immaculate, and while the puzzles were simpler than I expected even coming from the first game, I loved seeing the characters over the course of the six or so hours I spent to see it through to the end. There is some replay value, but the slow-paced gameplay made replaying it a bit annoying.

    I ended up liking Oxenfree II: Lost Signals more than the original in many ways thanks to its cast. Just like the studio, Oxenfree II: Lost Signals feels like a more mature story despite the supernatural and thriller elements. This also applies to the visuals and scope that feel bigger and better. The flashbacks, interactions with other NPCs, and narrative all come together very well. I mentioned the opening hour feeling weird in a good way, but the opening bits should’ve been paced better. The later parts of Oxenfree II: Lost Signals ended up carrying the narrative where I wanted. Night School definitely needs to do another game, and I’m glad to wait half a decade more to see how a potential Oxenthree would end up being. While I didn’t get on with Night School’s Afterparty, Oxenfree II: Lost Signals feels like a return to form for the studio.

    Playing Oxenfree II: Lost Signals across multiple devices has also been interesting. It runs and looks amazing on Steam Deck and newer iOS devices. On Nintendo Switch and also on iPhone, some of the larger portions of the games with a zoomed-out camera can cause some visual issues, but this isn’t a problem on Steam Deck or iPad. On the visual side, Oxenfree II: Lost Signals looks excellent on Steam Deck and iOS, but is a bit blurry on Nintendo Switch. The performance on Switch is also not as nice as modern iOS devices or Steam Deck, but it gets the job done for the game. The load times are my main complaint with the Switch version right now.

    On the controls side, Oxenfree II: Lost Signals on iOS supports full touch or controllers. I played with my DualSense on iPad and touch controls on iPhone. Both worked as they should. Oxenfree II: Lost Signals even showed me PlayStation button prompts on my iPad when I used my DualSense controller. The Switch version also includes touchscreen support which is how I spent most of my time with it in handheld mode. On Steam Deck, you can use touch controls to simulate mouse input. Speaking of Steam Deck, despite not being Steam Deck Verified, Oxenfree II: Lost Signals runs perfectly. If you want the best portable experience and don’t want to play it through a subscription service, I’d recommend playing it on Steam Deck.

    Barring the backtracking and some issues with the camera, my only problems with Oxenfree II: Lost Signals have to do with how I ran into a few bugs with the dialogue boxes or some tutorial tooltips glitching out and remaining on screen longer than they should. Everything else was polished and great. If you didn’t like Oxenfree, I don’t think Oxenfree II: Lost Signals will click with you, but it is worth trying out in Netflix for sure.

    I did end up using the larger font option while playing. The default size feels built for playing on a monitor while the larger one worked better for portable play. Since I’ve now played Oxenfree II: Lost Signals on Steam Deck, iPad Pro, iPhone, and Nintendo Switch, I’m going to replay it in a few months on PS5 to see if Night School did anything interesting with the DualSense controller there.

    Oxenfree II: Lost Signals on mobile is my favorite way to play it. Not only did Night School do a great port that feels perfect on iPad, but it also looks and runs nicer than the Switch version. Having now played Oxenfree II: Lost Signals on Steam Deck, iPhone, iPad Pro, and Nintendo Switch, Night School and Netflix exceeded my expectations, and I hope it gets a physical release so I can add it to my Nintendo Switch collection alongside the physical release of the first game. This is Netflix’s best original addition to its games subscription since Poinpy, and one of my favorite mobile games of 2023.

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    Mikhail Madnani

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  • Brokerages Set Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY) Target Price at $78.44

    Brokerages Set Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY) Target Price at $78.44

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    Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY – Get Rating) has been assigned an average recommendation of “Hold” from the twenty-one brokerages that are covering the firm, MarketBeat Ratings reports. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, seven have assigned a hold rating and nine have given a buy rating to the company. The average 1-year price objective among brokers that have issued a report on the stock in the last year is $78.44.

    Several equities analysts have recently commented on the stock. TheStreet downgraded shares of Best Buy from a “b-” rating to a “c” rating in a report on Thursday, May 25th. StockNews.com assumed coverage on shares of Best Buy in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They set a “hold” rating on the stock. SpectralCast reaffirmed a “maintains” rating on shares of Best Buy in a research note on Friday, May 26th. Citigroup reduced their target price on shares of Best Buy from $72.00 to $62.00 and set a “buy” rating on the stock in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. Finally, Wells Fargo & Company reduced their target price on shares of Best Buy from $80.00 to $75.00 and set a “buy” rating on the stock in a research note on Friday, May 26th.

    Best Buy Stock Performance

    Shares of NYSE BBY opened at $72.83 on Friday. The firm has a 50 day moving average of $73.29 and a 200 day moving average of $79.19. The company has a current ratio of 0.98, a quick ratio of 0.32 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.41. The firm has a market capitalization of $15.93 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 12.32, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.50 and a beta of 1.51. Best Buy has a 12-month low of $60.78 and a 12-month high of $93.32.

    Best Buy (NYSE:BBY – Get Rating) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, May 25th. The technology retailer reported $1.15 earnings per share for the quarter, topping analysts’ consensus estimates of $1.12 by $0.03. The business had revenue of $9.47 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $9.53 billion. Best Buy had a net margin of 2.93% and a return on equity of 51.95%. The company’s revenue was down 11.1% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period in the prior year, the business posted $1.57 earnings per share. On average, research analysts anticipate that Best Buy will post 6.02 earnings per share for the current year.

    Best Buy Announces Dividend

    The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, July 6th. Investors of record on Thursday, June 15th will be issued a $0.92 dividend. This represents a $3.68 annualized dividend and a yield of 5.05%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Wednesday, June 14th. Best Buy’s payout ratio is presently 62.27%.

    Insider Buying and Selling

    In other news, CEO Corie S. Barry sold 25,511 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction on Tuesday, March 21st. The shares were sold at an average price of $77.95, for a total transaction of $1,988,582.45. Following the completion of the sale, the chief executive officer now owns 364,041 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $28,376,995.95. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through this link. In other Best Buy news, CAO Mathew Watson sold 578 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction dated Thursday, June 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $71.82, for a total value of $41,511.96. Following the transaction, the chief accounting officer now owns 22,974 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $1,649,992.68. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this link. Also, CEO Corie S. Barry sold 25,511 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, March 21st. The shares were sold at an average price of $77.95, for a total transaction of $1,988,582.45. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief executive officer now directly owns 364,041 shares in the company, valued at approximately $28,376,995.95. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. In the last quarter, insiders sold 81,617 shares of company stock valued at $6,189,818. 0.56% of the stock is owned by corporate insiders.

    Institutional Trading of Best Buy

    Several hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the business. International Assets Investment Management LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Best Buy during the fourth quarter worth approximately $26,000. Arlington Partners LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Best Buy during the first quarter worth approximately $28,000. Exos TFP Holdings LLC purchased a new position in Best Buy in the third quarter valued at approximately $29,000. Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co. Ltd. purchased a new position in Best Buy in the fourth quarter valued at approximately $30,000. Finally, Clear Street Markets LLC increased its stake in Best Buy by 90.6% in the first quarter. Clear Street Markets LLC now owns 385 shares of the technology retailer’s stock valued at $30,000 after purchasing an additional 183 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 78.48% of the company’s stock.

    About Best Buy

    (Get Rating)

    Best Buy Co, Inc engages in the provision of consumer technology products and services. It operates through two business segments: Domestic and International. The Domestic segment includes operations in all states, districts, and territories of the U.S., operating under various brand names, including Best Buy, Best Buy Mobile, Geek Squad, Magnolia Audio Video, Napster, and Pacific Sales.

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    Analyst Recommendations for Best Buy (NYSE:BBY)

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  • Analysts Set Aurora Cannabis Inc. (NYSE:ACB) PT at $1.40

    Analysts Set Aurora Cannabis Inc. (NYSE:ACB) PT at $1.40

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    Shares of Aurora Cannabis Inc. (NYSE:ACB – Get Rating) have earned a consensus recommendation of “Hold” from the seven analysts that are covering the company, Marketbeat.com reports. Three equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold recommendation and one has issued a buy recommendation on the company. The average 12-month price objective among brokerages that have issued a report on the stock in the last year is $1.40.

    ACB has been the topic of a number of research analyst reports. CIBC decreased their price objective on shares of Aurora Cannabis from C$2.25 to C$1.75 in a report on Monday, February 13th. Stifel Nicolaus dropped their target price on shares of Aurora Cannabis from C$1.75 to C$1.45 in a report on Friday, January 27th.

    Institutional Inflows and Outflows

    A number of institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in ACB. Commonwealth Equity Services LLC boosted its position in Aurora Cannabis by 18.8% during the 4th quarter. Commonwealth Equity Services LLC now owns 177,313 shares of the company’s stock worth $163,000 after acquiring an additional 28,074 shares during the last quarter. Swiss National Bank lifted its holdings in Aurora Cannabis by 6.5% during the 4th quarter. Swiss National Bank now owns 728,972 shares of the company’s stock valued at $673,000 after purchasing an additional 44,300 shares during the last quarter. K2 Principal Fund L.P. acquired a new stake in Aurora Cannabis during the 4th quarter valued at $506,000. TD Asset Management Inc lifted its holdings in shares of Aurora Cannabis by 34.6% during the fourth quarter. TD Asset Management Inc now owns 241,318 shares of the company’s stock worth $223,000 after buying an additional 62,036 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Foundations Investment Advisors LLC increased its position in shares of Aurora Cannabis by 66.6% in the fourth quarter. Foundations Investment Advisors LLC now owns 125,003 shares of the company’s stock worth $115,000 after purchasing an additional 49,985 shares during the period. 13.97% of the stock is owned by institutional investors.

    Aurora Cannabis Stock Down 4.4 %

    ACB stock opened at $0.56 on Monday. The firm has a 50-day moving average of $0.67 and a two-hundred day moving average of $0.94. Aurora Cannabis has a 12 month low of $0.55 and a 12 month high of $3.15. The company has a current ratio of 4.08, a quick ratio of 3.16 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.33. The company has a market cap of $196.91 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -0.09 and a beta of 2.57.

    Aurora Cannabis (NYSE:ACB – Get Rating) last issued its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, February 9th. The company reported ($0.14) EPS for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of ($0.07) by ($0.07). Aurora Cannabis had a negative net margin of 817.07% and a negative return on equity of 62.73%. The business had revenue of $50.95 million during the quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $42.60 million. As a group, analysts forecast that Aurora Cannabis will post -0.35 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

    About Aurora Cannabis

    (Get Rating)

    Aurora Cannabis, Inc engages in the production, distribution, and sale of cannabis products. It also produces and sells indoor cultivation systems and hemp related food products. The firm operates through the Canadian Cannabis and International Cannabis segments. Aurora Cannabis was founded by Terry Booth and Steve Dobler on December 21, 2006 and is headquartered in Edmonton, Canada.

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  • A Shijima Story’ iOS Review – The Best Portable Version of an FMV Masterpiece – TouchArcade

    A Shijima Story’ iOS Review – The Best Portable Version of an FMV Masterpiece – TouchArcade

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    Square Enix’s The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story () was a shockingly good time, but also one of the biggest surprises from the publisher in a long time. From its showing in the Japanese Nintendo Direct to getting confirmed for global release and finally hitting consoles and PC, The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story has been quite a journey. Since launching, the FMV mystery-adventure game has gotten a few notable updates improving the overall interface and controls, but I always wondered how long it would take to hit mobile. Less than a year after debuting for $49.99, The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story hit mobile a week ago for $19.99 bringing the complete experience to iOS and Android devices worldwide. Having played The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story on PS5, Nintendo Switch, Switch Lite, PC, and Steam Deck before, I’m very impressed with most things about the iOS version.

    For my review of The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story, I’m going to cover why this is my favorite FMV game of all time, how it plays on both iPad and iPhone, compare the different versions briefly to help you find what to buy, and also what needs fixing in potential updates. I’ve said this before, but The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story feels like the closest experience to an interactive version of a big budget Netflix drama.

    The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story has you tackle multiple murders taking place over the span of a century in an FMV game, and its production values are superlative. It is unlike anything I had played before, and I still think about how the developers pulled this off during a pandemic as well. As an FMV game, you will spend most of the 14 or so hours runtime watching scenes play out, but the way the cast takes on different roles across different time periods across the story is fantastic.

    As the name suggests, The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story focuses on the Shijimas, and begins with you taking on the role of mystery novelist Haruka Kagami meeting them. The story deals with murders, betrayal, family heirlooms, curses, and more. On paper, I thought I’d get tired of the same cast throughout, but this is the best showcase of the actors’ talent with how they managed pulling off multiple roles and how it all fit perfectly into the overarching narrative and reason for this playing out. As a story-focused release, I’d recommend buying or trying this through the demo if you have a remote interest.

    Barring watching the story progress through a video and making some decisions, The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story has you putting together clues and mysteries to form your hypothesis as Haruka Kagami. This involves scrolling through a timeline grid and placing hexagonal pieces correctly. It isn’t very simple, but sometimes going through the motions of various options to find the solution you’ve already figured out might get tiring. This section plays out like a blend of a basic matching game as you find the correct patterns on the pieces. The solution phase comes after this where you use your hypothesis to try and get to the bottom of the problem.

    As a smaller cast than I expected, The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story does a lot with its talent. FMV games live and die by their acting and production for the videos, and I’m yet to see one deliver on immersion like The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story did since I played it last year. Barring Nanami Sakuraba who plays the protagonist Haruka, Mansaku Ikeuchi is easily my favorite of the cast. The original actors spoke in Japanese, but there is an optional English voice track. I was pleased to see the option, but the English dub here should’ve been better. I stuck to Japanese for my playthroughs across all platforms after testing out the English option for a few hours.

    Hayashi Yuuki’s score for The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story is amazing. The different versions of specific songs that play based on the era in-game are excellent. The entire soundtrack is great, and I’m glad Square Enix finally added it to streaming services worldwide when the mobile version of the game was released. The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story was a highlight of 2022 not just for its story and actors, but also its music which I continue listening to outside the game.

    Visually, The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story looks gorgeous. The encoding done for the videos isn’t perfect, but it looks great on my iPad Pro (2020) model almost all the time. There are some instances where I’d have preferred higher resolution videos though. As a game designed for 16:9 displays, The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story does have black bars with artwork to fill up the screen depending on your device. There is seemingly no way to zoom in or change the artwork used in these parts. There is an option to change the quality of the 3D gameplay portions which apply to the hypotheses.

    When it debuted on PC and consoles last year, I wasn’t a fan of the controls. The cursor movement was too slow even on PS5, and it just felt sluggish on Switch in parts. It was also a bit annoying to go through the Reasoning Phase with picking up hexagons and placing them on the grid. A post-launch patch dramatically improved how I felt about the controls, and I still hoped to see touch support added on Switch. It never arrived. On iPad and iPhone, The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story plays great, but I wish it ran at a higher frame rate in these parts. Granted, I don’t have the newest devices, but I would’ve liked a performance mode for the Reasoning Phase at least. The controls during the actual FMV sequences are perfect on a touchscreen.

    I was curious about how The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story would handle the install size on mobile given it is over 15GB even on Switch. On iOS, you need to download an additional 1.53GB in-game just to start the prologue after the initial App Store version is installed. Beyond that, the remaining chapters can be downloaded on demand when you reach them in-game or from the title screen. The total remaining download size is 13.68GB for the full game.

    My issues with The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story on iOS specifically are the lack of iCloud save syncing, no controller support (minor issue), and some interface elements not being high resolution. Having 4K video support for the in-game FMV sequences is not feasible given the file size of those videos on PC and PS5, but Square Enix should’ve made sure the game’s interface looks crisp on all devices. Controller support isn’t needed, but I don’t get why they didn’t leave it in since this game is available on consoles with controller support already. The lack of iCloud sync is annoying. It would’ve been great to play this like watching something on Netflix by resuming across devices. I am pleased that The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story does not have online DRM for launching the game like Square Enix’s Voice of Cards trilogy on mobile.

    The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story – PS5, Switch, Steam Deck, PC, and iOS compared

    The best way to experience The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story right now is on a 4K display on PS5. it has the best visuals, DualSense features, and more. The PC version with the 4K DLC pack is a close second, but the PC version has no Steam Cloud support in its current state. Following those two, I’d go with a newer iPad as the best way to experience The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story on the go. It has great visuals and plays brilliantly. It isn’t as intuitive on a smaller screen so I would go iPad over iPhone unless you have an iPhone 14 Plus or similar sized screen. The Switch version has the slowest loading, some performance issues, and the lowest quality for the videos compared to other platforms. Steam Deck can offer a better experience thanks to 1080p videos downsampled on the system, but the screen isn’t as good as an OLED Switch or any recent iOS device I have access to.

    My recommendations, assuming you have access to the systems, are PS5 if you don’t care about portability and iPad if you want the best portable experience. You can try out the free demo for The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story on PS5, PS4, Switch, or a Windows PC right now to get an idea of how it looks and controls on your platform of choice.

    While I hope it gets a demo at some point on mobile like on other platforms, The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story is a gem of an FMV game, and one of my favorite Square Enix games in over a decade. The story is fantastic and the actors were amazing across the board. All of this was elevated by its magnificent soundtrack. Having hit mobile with all updates included and controls well, The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story on iOS is the best portable version of the game. My favorite version is still the PS5 release, but I’m very pleased with how The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story turned out in its mobile debut. Hopefully the few issues I have can be sorted in updates.

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    Mikhail Madnani

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