I admit, I originally had my doubts, but it looks like there are some very important improvements in the latest addition to the GS saga.

First, the blip-blip-blip sound effect when people speak has returned. The game felt very empty without it present.

Second, the game has been majorly revised is how it's packaged. Originally, once you downloaded all the cases, the game took up about 2 gigs. TWO GIGS! The game now sits comfortably at 354 megs. Why the sharp difference? Originally, when you downloaded the cases, they were self contained. Which means, in Rise from the Ashes, which has 14 parts, you might be downloading Phoenix, Ema, and Gumshoe 14 times over! And that's just that one case. Imagine that applied to the whole game and you've got a couple of gigs worth of downloads. Right now, there's only redundancy between the games. (IE, three copies of the Judge, one for each game) But that's significantly more manageable.

Third, and this is related to the latter, when you went to play a case for the first time, you'd have to download each part individually. For me personally that meant sitting idle for 6 minutes at a time, doing nothing because doing anything (Getting a phone call, system going to sleep, for instance) would cause the download to fail. All game resources are now built into the game, so there's no extra downloading. So another major headache has been removed.

Fourth, parts you've beaten now have checkmarks next to them.


And... that's all I've noticed. Everything else appears to be the same, including the sprite sheets, which means there are still graphical errors. But this is such a major major MAJOR step up, I can't complain. Lets hope they keep this up! If this game comes westward, we're going to have a much better time then the Japanese did on launch day.

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Just some mild FYI info: The sprites and backgrounds are no longer part of the .out files. They're now loose in the app itself. The .out files are also a part of the app and no longer downloaded to the caches folder.

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