Amazon Games vs. Amazon Luna

Towards the end of last week (actually being a few weeks ago), while adding to my ever-growing Amazon Save for Later Watchlist (it is currently sitting pretty at 384 items), I saw a banner ad showing that Blasphemous from The Game Kitchen was being offered for free as part of Amazon's Prime Gaming offerings for March.  I was a little confused because I knew that a few years back Amazon stopped offering their semi-regular 20% off of video game pre-orders and moved to putting up some free games each month and mainly, cosmetic and loot rewards for a number of online games which you could access (or at least the only way I knew how to find out about them) through Twitch (since Amazon owns Twitch, I guess it makes sense that they would push free items for online multiplayer games).

So when I saw that Blasphemous was being offered, since it is a game that I have wanted to play for a while, and played the demo on Amazon's Luna service (you can read about my experience here) as well as a demo on the Nintendo Switch a few months back I decided to look into this offering from Amazon Games.  If you are not going to click that link above to read an entire article so you can have some context, I will catch you up by saying that Blasphemous did not run well for me, partly because of whatever streaming issues were present, and none of the controllers I have (Switch, Wired 360, Steam) were supported on Luna.  Now, I am currently writing this before I have actively used the Amazon Game client and I will come back and catch you all up (don't worry, this will just be one article, at least for now) once I do that.  I am obviously hoping that Amazon's client will be happy with the 360 controller because that is the one that I feel would be the best for a platforming action game since I have not tried connecting the Switch Pro Controller to my computer (yet).

And I "claimed" a number of other games too besides Blasphemous, although that was the catalyst for me downloading their client and there are some games that I will probably give a couple of attempts to, and others I claimed because I have a problem and am a packrat for free video games.  Here's looking at you 156 games from Epic!  Not to get carried away, but some of the games are Samurai Showdown, King of Fighters 2002, Fatal Fury Special, SNK 40th Anniversary Collection, Sine Mora EX, and Hyper Light Drifter.  So let us get a game or two installed, connect the 360 controller, see if there is a dedicated screenshot button (that is not the PrtSc button) and I will be back sometime later.

And we are back!

To test out the Amazon Games client, I decided to download Fatal Fury Special, Pulstar, Art of Fighting 2, and Blasphemous.  So nothing as graphically intensive as Control or Crysis.  And just in case you cannot see the bottom of the article from here, the rest of this is going to be pretty short.

I can report back that thankfully both the Steam controller and the wired Xbox 360 controller worked with the Amazon Games client.  It was interesting though that since most of the games initially being released on Amazon Games are SNK and/or NeoGeo arcade ports, that when I clicked on controller settings, that the default screen you are given is for keyboard controls.  This initially worried me because using a keyboard to play what you might normally play with a joystick like a fighting game did not sound at all fun, but as I have already said, both controllers I tried out worked fine, so it was a little bit of guesswork to determine which button did what.  In all of the games though, I did have to use the Esc key to exit out of the games since the Start button, at least on the 360 controller did not bring up a menu screen.

And most importantly, the Amazon Games client seemed to operate like most of the other game clients like GOG and Epic.  There was no stuttering, no latency with any of the inputs.  Since most of the games are arcade ports, there is no scaling to widescreen (for those that do not have that functionality, but this does not apply to newer games like Blasphemous and The Escapists) Sadly though there was no option to take screenshots so once again I was relegated to using the PrtSc button (but on my computer, it is a combination of the Fn + PrtSc because my top row of keys are dual-purpose with the default function not being what the key is but what additional function is attached to it; like the F12 key by default is also the Scroll Lock button and to take pictures through Steam, I have to press Fn + F12, but that's another tangent.  But I did notice that the PrtSc button did not seem to work with Blasphemous, so that is either an issue with the game being fullscreen (I may have to try in windowed mode), or the game itself just being coy, and I will have to see with other non-arcade games.

So that is it really.  The negative experience I had with Amazon Luna did not carry over to Amazon Games, so I will now too be hoarding free games on another client.  Checking today, I claimed six more games, four of which I have never heard of and may end up never playing, but I like to look at it as an inheritance that Goblino might eventually roll their eyes at after they read my will.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

I'm Happy at Home