World Bolding

View Original

Night Trap Is Better on PS4!

I spent another 15 dollars on Night Trap 25th Anniversary Edition to get it on PS4. As I'll explain, it turns out that's the better version of the game right now.

The problematic PC release did get a patch. It purports to fix some of the game-breaking bugs. It added a quit button to the main menu...sort of. You can now press Q to quit the game. It also seems to have gotten rid of controller support entirely? Or at least, I can't seem to figure out how to re-enable those controls.

I still have some issues with the sound playback. Sometimes it flies randomly all the way to the left or right stereo channel for no reason instead of staying centered, and it is a bit glitchy and distorted at times. And there's still some hitching when videos transition or when new clips are loaded...and I have a stupidly fast PC.

The original Sega CD didn't have problems with this, so that's concerning.

The developer, to his credit, has been very active on the Steam forums. While browsing around the topics there, I discovered that the PS4 version has over twice the file-size of the PC version (7 gigs vs 3). Better video compression perhaps? The developer said the framerate of the video was only 24 frames per second on PS4 due to hardware limitations, as opposed to 30 frames on PC, and that the filesize was just the result of different file format support.

Okay. Interesting. It was time for me to try the game on PS4.

Night Trap is infinitely less hitchy on PS4, and I feel like it was the lead development platform. The video framerate is indeed a little lower...but I didn't have a single hitch or glitch on transitions or when clips loaded. Not too shabby! Also the sound playback is better and doesn't jump around the stereo field at random. It also correctly doled out trophies when I earned them, something I've had an issue with on PC.

The PS4 version still has some design choices I don't love like the less- than- fullscreen video window. But if you want the best version of Night Trap 25th Anniversary Edition available right now, you should get it on PS4.

I'm sure the PC version will get there eventually. But it's not there yet.

Please click the like button if this helped you out! Thanks for reading!