Intensive Gaming Diary

Blog about different aspects of retro and new video games.

Author: Viljami

NBA 2K24 Is a Disappointment

Posted on by Viljami

I bought NBA 2K24 as it was in discount. I paid 22 euros for the Switch edition. I already knew that the Switch version has some limitations. So, the graphics could be better. There were also some other issues. I know that it also takes some time to develop your player so that it is comfortable to play with the character you have just created.

NBA 2K24 is the latest in the series of good quality basketball games. There is lots of expectations. I think this game is very much a disappointment. The main reason I am actually saying this is that it just doesn’t feel like a fun and enjoyable game to play. It pretty much offers the same as earlier games in this series. I really think that the developers of this game should have made a better game.

I really don’t know if the game offers something more in a long run. I mean that I spend a bit over five hours playing this. What I experienced was not satisfying. My player is awkward. He doesn’t know how to score. He takes some rebounds but that’s all he does well. How many hours of this miserable playing do I have to go through to really at some point enjoy this game?

So, my player is weird. His shot release is awful. He feels a bit clunky. The movement is slow. I don’t even want to talk about trying to make the freethrows not to mention three-point-shots. I know that you can enjoy and keep playing this game, or a quite similar one from the past, for several hundreds of hours. But…this isn’t a game that I am willing to play for such a long time.

So, I think I am going to quit playing this game. I think I paid too much for this one. I don’t know if there is going to be some sort of an update or not. I am very glad that I didn’t pay any more of this kind of junk.

I also got another game from discount with this same delivery. This game is Assassins Creed Mirage for Xbox Series X. I paid 25 euros for this game. I hope I find it more enjoyable than NBA 2K24. Assassins Creed Mirage has received better reviews than NBA 2K24. Somehow my hopes aren’t that high.

I have also some games that I haven’t had time to get into. I just have to find some more time for these. The games are Dead Space (Remake), Hogwarts Legacy and Sonic Frontiers. I also haven’t touched Alan Wake II yet. I am waiting also for the new System Shock. These games that I have mentioned here in this paragraph are all Xbox Series X games.

So, some games can be sort of a disappointment and this sadly is the case for NBA 2K24. Some of these big releases seem to fail at times. That is of course natural. I can imagine how much money is envolved. This surely is a disappointment financially also. We are looking forward for more gaming experiences. I hope we get to see some more good quality games this year and also int he near future. Stay tuned…

The Relationship of Technology and Games

Posted on by Viljami

In this blog post I am trying to answer the question: what is the relationship of technology and games? There are several successful game companies based here in Finland. How did they get to that position? We are going to have to go back to the beginnings of the history of home computers. Commodore 64 was the computer back in the 80s. That was the tool for many programmers.

Commodore 64 provided means so that you could program games and other applications. You could start with Basic and keep going to some graphics and music to turning the whole device to parts and figure out how it ultimately worked. This was something that many persons drawn into technology and games did. This computer opened a path for them into the depths of technology and games.

There was a sort of a scene that formed around capable programmers in Finland. It was called “demo skene” which is a Finnish term meaning “demo scene”. This know-how made among these young individuals was something that positively impacted in the rise of know-how also in a more professional way. Things were looking good as Nokia also needed persons that were able to program applications to cellphones. There were many game companies here. Some of them are still functioning. You might know companies like Remedy, Rovio and Supercell. These companies were driven by some of the people that started their progressing from the era of Commodore 64.

I was thinking about this subject and how would I approach it. Programming is one thing. If you are hoping to make a game you have to know also very much of the functioning of the graphical system and also how the computer uses long term and temporary memory and also how you react and with which device (keyboard or maybe controller) to actions of the player. How does the experience of a video game take its final form. There’s lots of things going on while the game is running. Part of it is purely technical. The technology forms the experience.

It is somewhat true that games give you a similar reaction as does any modern form of art. Technology enables you to use techniques like programming and 3D modeling along with the design of the whole aural experience. There are these skills and if you are capable of using them in a strong way you can be successful in creating digital art that can be called a game. The player can enjoy this game even without a deep knowledge of the technology that lies under the hood of the device that the game is running on. There is something very magical in all of this. Games can be enjoyed and even studied by anyone that feels even a slight interest in them.

This is one of my dreams that I have had for now maybe tens of years. This was the reason I chose to study programming. I dreamed that I would be able to create some kind of a game. It might not be as powerful as a game like EA WRC is but there is this motivation inside my mind that I still have. I would like to some day be able to create games. This is a powerful dream that drives me forward and motivates me. Sometimes you don’t learn so fast and sometimes you have to learn details instead of the most fundamental concepts.

So, my path to learning more about computers does continue. I am not so sure if I am ever going to be able to be a part of some unit that would create something very beautiful in the form of a computer or video game. I do hope that these thoughts of mine were inspiring this time. Basically, I got tired since I already had played EA WRC for many hours today and this topic formed this time this kind of an output that formed this blog post. I hope you enjoyed it and see you next time, soon!

The Role of Technology Has Changed

Posted on by Viljami

I really think that the role of technology has changed. I am talking about the last, maybe, thirty years. We can go back to the 1990s to see how things were back then. I am old enough to remember these matters today. All this time has passed. What has changed and how things were.

I had some experience already with a personal computer. During 90s I was first introduced to Sega Mega Drive and later to Sony PlayStation. I had a moment in my personal history in which, can you imagine, I didn’t really play video games. This was when I started high school in the beginning of 2000s. I got back to gaming again during the 2000s. So I do have a relevant personal history to write about this.

I can also clearly remember how things were with smart phones and how they started to conquer our free time. One important technology is internet. It has brought us connectivity and ability to play multiplayer games on-line. Also memory cards aren’t used anymore. The games evolved from lasting maybe three to five hours. Suddenly you couldn’t complete the game in a day. Games became longer and a possibility to save was becoming more and more important. This has everything to do with hard drives and the advancement that made more and more space available to use.

Video game consoles technology advanced very quickly. We can go from the beginning of the 1990s to 2000s and have a comparison. Mega Drive might have been the most popular gaming console along with NES and later SNES. Basically you couldn’t save a game. There were batteries included in the game cartridges that enabled this. Game had to be fit in a space of only some megabytes. This changed when CD drives came available. Also at some point disk drives became a norm in gaming consoles.

So, the technology advanced fast. We went from getting a benefit from technology to today when we are being somewhat even controlled by technology. Do you get what I am saying? The role of technology is what I wanted to talk about in the first place. How is it with this matter, today?

While I was growing up we didn’t have internet. We didn’t have smart phones. There was no GPS. If you wanted to search for information you probably went to a library or tried to find a book about the subject. Things have changed a lot.

When I was young there was this kind of positive thinking that was common that technology would improve our lives if we just kept studying it and building and developing it. So, many young people were introduced to mathematics, physics and computers. I was among those that were very interested in technolgy and wanted to study it and also have it as a hobby.

Technology has made huge leaps. We are today in a society that uses internet and smart phones to several functions. We handle paying and buying with these tools. We use them daily. How has this made our lives easier? It seems to me that today everyone can use a smart phone to perform any functionality that is needed. These huge technology companies have formed a business about us and our normal lives. This is basically how the role of technology has changed.

I could go on and on about these changes. This is still just a one blog post. I didn’t even go to how big data affects and has already affected on the situation. We are here right now. We understand where we are. Technology has become part of our lives. And everything can be changed tomorrow. Our choices are what matters. Companies like Facebook and Google have made the technology avaialble to us. How can we make it so that it gives even some benefit to our functioning?

Back Again to Play Some EA WRC

Posted on by Viljami

I have been recently playing some EA WRC (again). I first got into this game when it was first released in the end of last year. It is a very good rally and racing game. Last year also a new Forza Motorsport game was released. There was a sort of a competition going on with these two on which one would be the greatest racing game of the year 2023.

I am playing EA WRC with a game controller. This is the way I have been playing racing and rally games since I first stumbled on Gran Turismo and Colin McRae Rally 1 and 2.0 back in the dominant era of the first Sony PlayStation. I got a wheel and pedals for PS3 in the 2010s but I never truly played racing games with them. Although I did purchase a converter to adapt my PS3 wheel and pedals to PS4. I also got a stand for these. I never had a racing seat. That would have been expensive and I didn’t really get into this so much after all.

I did play recently some Dirt Rally 2.0. That game was released a bit earlier. It was released in 2019. I first got the game for PS4 but I have also it for PC and Xbox Series S/X as a digital copy. If you know anything about the history of Codemasters it is not needed to say that it basically was the rally game company of the 90s and even 2000s . It has brought us some very memorable classics.

There is however another good rally game series that has to be mentioned here. It is the WRC series. It has had the official license of WRC. It has brought us many very good rally games and especially in the recent, say, five or ten years. So there has been a healthy competition. Codemasters hasn’t earlier had the opportunity to make a rally game with a license but now it was the time for that since EA WRC was finally released last year.

We can have some sort of a comparison between Dirt Rally 2.0 and EA WRC. I think these both games have a similar price so this is a good way to think about which one should you get. Which one has the most value out of these two games? The price is actually about 30 euros. I can only tell you how it feels to play these with a controller. Graphics are awesome in both. Music in the background and defnitely while in menus is great also in both. What makes me go to the direction of EA WRC is how the controlling of the car feels.

I find myself constantly spinning or flipping my car around while I play Dirt Rally 2.0. The driving feels realistic and I don’t know if a wheel would actually make the steering more comfortable. So I think this is an issue  with playing with a controller. So, EA WRC feels better in this sense. Of course also in the last mentioned some cars like RWD and Group B feel also more difficult to handle.

I have put about 20 hours in these games solely on Xbox Series X. I am more familiar with the older game that is Dirt Rally 2.0. I would think that playing one game more would make it a bit easier in the end but I guess that the experience with game pad only makes the sense in this one. So my conclusion to the question at hand is that I would be rather playing EA WRC if I have to use a controller and not a wheel and pedals.

Okay. I hope that this post once again gave you something. I am trying to write to the blog more often. It has been a while since the latest post. It was nice to write you about my experiences with gaming lately. Have a nice day and I hope to see you again soon.

The Use of Memory in Game Consoles

Posted on by Viljami

Today’s topic for this blog is the use of memory. I decided to write about the use of memory in game consoles. We are dealing with things like memory cards, hard disks and random access memory. I also tell you a bit about processors and how computers deal with the actual ways in which the player interacts with the game.

This is not a science writing but more like something that I wanted to briefly write to you since I happen to have some experience in playing these video games and I also have this background in studying and working with computers. I have been playing games a lot. I have read a book or two about the use of memory and also studied a lot about this subject.

What really made a difference in the use of memory for video game consoles was the introduction of the optical drive. You did have a space for couple, maybe four, megabytes for your game. Well, like you might know, a CD-ROM disc has somewhat a space of 650 MB. So the amount of space was more than 100 times larger.

What about saved games? A supported disk drive was introduced with the release of the original Xbox. It might be the first game console to have a hard drive. Before this we had to use memory cards for storing and also organizing our saved games. Hard disks also allowed many other things. It also made installing games to the hard drive a norm.

I am trying to explain the difference between temporary memory (like RAM in the world of computers) and staying memory (HDD and/or SSD drives). So basically RAM, or Random Access Memory is something that the system uses while it is powered. After the power is cut off the memory disappears. In programming you use different variables to store the data temporarily.

Hard drives can save data that is included in these variables so that it can be accessed also later on. Earlier there were typically HDD drives used which offer a lot of space but they are much slower in processing the data than newer and more expensive SSD hard disks. The data in a SSD or HDD can be saved in different forms. Sometimes the programmers can use text files and sometimes forms like JSON. Data can also be serialized in a way. There are many possibilities. Basically you are saving something to some file or files. Sometimes there is also some sort of database used.

The data moves between the components of your gaming device through different kinds of busses. You can probably read more about electronics from your favorite search engine or maybe you can create a prompt for AI. I am not going to try to expain this so thoroughly at the moment. But if you are interested you can find more about this.

How does the gaming console work basically? There is a loop in the program code that keeps refreshing the screen. The frequency is blondly called FPS. It stands for Frames Per Second. This can be for example 60. The system reads all values of variables that are in the code and updates everything regarding to the values that the variables hold.

The game system detects any interactions using the code. The game detecs what controllers buttons are pressed and for how long. Then the screen keeps updating. There’s a lot of things happening. The main source for the things that are happenig is the actual source code of the game. You might think that it is easy to read a source code but it actually is pretty. It is way harder than reading something that a blogger has written to a blog post. And only the person that has written the code might fully understand it. Sometimes even this is not possible. The code can and is actually preferred to have comments in it also.

So to summarize this blog post we can conclude that memory is used in many ways in game consoles. Data is saved and handled. We have come a long way from game consoles like Sega Mega Drive in which you aren’t able to save at all (you do if you have a battery inside the game cartridge) to modern consoles in which you have huge SSD drives of several tera bytes of space for lot more content than just your saved game data. I encourage you to find more information if you are deeply motivated in learning more about this very interesting topic.

Black Future 88

Posted on by Viljami

Black Future 88 is a 2D shoot-em-up game for Nintendo Switch. I picked it up as I bought eight more games to my game collection of Switch games. I bought these games as they were on sale. I paid about 22 or 23 euros per game. These games were on sale so I decided to get a bunch of them. Black Future 88 was the first game that I started to play from these games that I recently bought.

This shoot-em-up has nice looking graphics, animation and visual effects, although the graphics are two-dimensional, and also some nice background music. The content is styled to be sci-fi or cyberpunk. The game offers some nice action. Basically you try to avoid getting hit by enemies ammunition and try to kill them before they get you. As you go on shooting everything that moves you collect items from dead enemies. When you die you start the run over and also your weapons get reset.

You can handle two weapons at a time. So, there are some elements of strategy also. As you die and your run ends you get points which unlock new items to be available in the game. You can also unlock new characters this way.

While this is a fun 2D shoot-em-up the game does get a bit repetitive. Also the story is nonexistent. You get the items completely randomly. The game seems to be looping through as you try to collect more points and level-ups run by run. This is a small game and not your typical triple A game. The price of the game was somewhat low and I also got some discount. So I didn’t pay a whole lot for this one. I actually paid only fourteen euros for this one. I think that is a fair price as I have already spent many hours playing this one.

I am not even near to complete the game. I could find information that Black Future 88 takes about five and a half hours to complete. I think that is very accurate information. As the art in this game is very comfortable the game lacks a deeper insight that would make you more than just superficially addicted to playing it. It’s repetitiveness reminds me of an old MS-DOS game. You could compare it to a shooting game like Space Commanders that is a Space Invaders clone. The only interesting way to try to complete that game is to try to beat the high score which also gets deleted when you actually quit the game. This comparison can tell you how it actually feels to play Black Future 88.

I could recommend this peace of gaming if you like small indie games. If you like to go deep and explore and feel the game and want an interesting story this might not be a game for you. The cheap price feels comfortable. This game is a small one and doesn’t even try compete with games like Breath of the Wild or something like that. So, it is an enjoyable game that has its flaws. I think there are some reasons that make me like this game.

NBA 2K23 – What Determines If Your Three-Point-Shot Goes In or Not?

Posted on by Viljami

In this blog post I am going to break it down with the three-point-shot. What does determine if it goes in or not? First of all I have to say that I am not a programmer of this game. I don’t have a direct access to the source code of this game. My conclusions are relied on purely observing the software while I have been playing NBA 2K23. I have to mention that I do know a lot about programming as you might already know. I also have some knowledge of playing real basketball which helps me to draw these points.

Release of the shot

You get to set a release for the shot while you start to shoot the three-pointer. Now every release seems to be different. I can see that this mechanism that detects your shots release is very precise. It counts every millisecond. It is hard to make the release a perfect one for every shot. Sometimes also a perfect release has to be achieved in a random period of time. So, the best release can be and sometimes is different and it can also be somewhat random, also.

Your players shooting skill

Your player has the ability to shoot a three-pointer. This makes your player a better shooter. So, there are more shots going in. Your player has a very unique ability to shoot. You are getting customed to setting a good timing and rythm for your shot. Although you can maximize your skill of shooting but every shot never goes in. You have to miss one way or another.

Your defender

You can get yourself some space before you start to shoot. This makes it easier for the shot to be a successful one. I have some idea that some defending players have a skill that makes their opponent to miss more likely while they are defending a player.

Who is making the assist

I am playing currently NBA 2K23 with Philadelphia 76ers. I have noticed that when James Harden passes me the ball the success is more likely. There might be some kind of a variable that adjusts the propability more closer when Harden is making the assist.

Every shot won’t go in. Every shot also is unique. If we would gather a table of some sort of the different variables we could see how these values affect the propability of the shot being a successful one. This information is, of course, very valuable for the developers of this game. I can deeply understand why they aren’t sharing this information just for everyone. Also, this information is only my own conclusions that I have made playing the game. It also does have something to do with that I am somewhat a technically capable person in a way.

This conclusion was very short. It might help you to realize how the game actually works. It is also an answer to some of my thoughts about why am I not succeeding more better in shooting the three-pointer in NBA 2K23. So, without further reverse-engineering we can continue to play some more NBA 2K23. And maybe study a bit more about programming and game development.

Itchy, Tasty – The Book About Resident Evil

Posted on by Viljami

Itchy, Tasty is a book written by Alex Aniel. It tells the story of Resident Evil video game series that was developed by this huge game developer Capcom that became famous by releasing Street Fighter II for arcades and Super Nintendo. Street Fighter wasn’t their first game but it might have been the game that took Capcom to the top. The book has been published in 2021. It holds well over 250 pages and is focusing on the games that were released in the series before Resident Evil 5.

Resident Evil begun with a game titled Sweet Home that was a NES game. There were debates about releasing a horror game for such an childish and powerless gaming console. While there do exist many great games on Nintendo Entertainment System the developers at Capcom thought that it would be difficult to release a good horror game for this system because of its limitations. The music and graphics would have been too unimpressive to satisfy the vision they initially had about the new horror game that was about to be developed.

Itchy, Tasty describes how Resident Evil managed to create something completely original and new in video games. It can be held responsible for creating a new genre of survival horror. It took some elements, the weird and stationary camera angles, just to name one, from first games of Alone In The Dark series that was released some years before the first Resident Evil. You can probably figure how Resident Evil impacted on games like Silent Hill and any other survival horror game that has ever been released.

For me Resident Evil 2 was the first game in the series that I actually played. It wasn’t the first PlayStation 1 game I played. That honor goes to Gran Turismo. But that piece of survival horror really impressed me. Well, it made me also feel agony but in a somewhat desirable in a way. It is hard to describe this game to a person that hasn’t played it. I think about RE2 as a retro game. It was something impressive back in 1998.

Soon after, maybe some moths or something like that, I had beaten RE2 and wanted something more to play. So, I picked up the first Resident Evil. I soon found that it was also a very good game. I also completed the third game. As there were several spin offs that I haven’t got into I cannot say that I would have played every game in the series. I do have completed Resident Evil 5 but that is just out of the scope of Itchy, Tasty.

The author of Itchy, Tasty, Alex Aniel, is very much involved in the gaming scene. He writes firmly about the history and development of this series. Every game that was released before Resident Evil 5 is covered. Even a game for Game Boy Color has been mentioned. What I found as a very interesting piece of knowledge was the part of describing how the first game was ported to Nintendo 64. You know, it was originally developed for PS1. What is the main difference between these systems? Well, N64 used 64 MB game cartridges while PS1 had an optical disk drive that used CD-ROMS that had 650 MB of space.

This wasn’t the only difference between these systems. N64 was faster when it came to loading the data that game used. It is miraculous how it was actually possible to fit RE2 to a N64 cartridge. Later the series moved on to GameCube. For a while there was a decision in place that RE games would be developed only for Nintendo GameCube. As you might know already this wasn’t a long lasting decision as you can today find RE4 for PS2 also from your favorite gaming shop.

I can recommend this book especially for someone that is a fan of survival horror games. There are many interviews and a lot of background information that makes clear how the writer of the book has come to the writing of this material. Mainly persons that worked closely on the series have been included in these descriptions.

 

Double Life – Music for PlayStation

Posted on by Viljami

Double Life – Music for PlayStation is a music compilation CD featuring various artists. There is also a demo CD for PS1 included. It has demos of games: Ape Escape, Wip3out, Ridge Racer Type 4, Omega Boost, Anna Kournikova’s Smash Court Tennnis, Tomb Raider 3, Um Jammer Lammy and Crash Team Racing. So it has eight game demos.

This might not be the most meaningful find I have ever bought. Just something I got interested in while I was in the local flee market. It didn’t cost a lot. I think I got this for two euros. The CD plus PS1 demo disc have been released in 1999.

I do have a memory of seeing this compilation back in the days while visiting a record store. It might have been a super market. I really don’t remember so clearly.

The music featured on Double Life is the type of music you might hear while playing PS1. I didn’t like everyt track. Obviously I didn’t buy this thing for the music. I just thought it would be something I would like to own.

If you aren’t so familiar with PS1 demo discs like the one included in Double Life let me reminisce and also explain what they actually are. So, back in the 90s it wasn’t even possible to buy digital games. As PS1 was the most popular, maybe the best, gaming console out in the market there had to be some way for gamers to know what games were going to be released in the near future.

The promotion of new games was very much a responsibility of video game magazines. Well, there might have been some gaming websites already but my point here is that web wasn’t in the end  of the 90s what it is today. Today you can definitely download a game demo easily and watch the trailer online also.

PS1 demo discs were released to promote new and upcoming games. They had several demos of games. I remember clearly playing a demo of Resident Evil 2 before buying the game. You could test the game and play one demo for maybe 15 minutes or something. Just so much that you could make an opinion on if the game would be interesting and something that you would actually buy. There are several tens maybe even hundreds of these demo discs released.

So, just wanted to write a blog post once again. There haven’t been anything special happening in my life. I have played my video games and I have been, lately, reading a book about Resident Evil series’s history. I might write something about that book next in this blog. So, stay tuned for some more content.

My PS1 Games Collection (Currently)

Posted on by Viljami

I recently wrote a blog post about the first PlayStation. This gaming console was first released in 1995. That makes it almost thirty years old. I had to make a decision and move my PS2 away to storge from my gaming setup. I replaced it with my PSOne console. That made me to take a look at my current PS1 games collection for this retro gaming system.

I have well over sixty games in my collection of PS1 games. Some games are definite classics. I have to mention the Final Fantasy series. I have four games in this series. They are FFVI, FFVII, FFVIII and FFIX. I would like to own some day FF Anthology and/or FF Origins. There is also a pixel remaster collection of FF games from I to VI for Nintendo Switch out there and I have a feel that I might some day buy it, also.

PS1 was actually my second gaming console that I owned. My first console was Sega Mega Drive. PS1 turned to a more mature way in a sense. It also introduced real 3D graphics to gamers all over the world. I sold my PS1 and all games and other accessories in the beginning of 2000s. This is something that I greatly regret.

Some other games that are of good quality are the first three Resident Evil games, Vagrant Story, Colin McRae series of two games, Tenchu 1 and 2 and also Tony Hawks Pro Skater 1 to 4 and the first two Grand Theft Auto games. These are just few good titles that come to mind when I look at this collection.

Some PS1 games are cheap and some are expensive. You can get a sense about this as you browse through your favorite gaming web shops. The library for PlayStation 1 is enormous. There are almost eight thousand games in it. You have to understand that some of these games haven’t been sold in every region so there might be some games that are only available in some areas of world. PS1 was in production all the way to 2006 and it received new games through all these years. I believe there are no limitations for a new game to be released for it even today.

I am keen to find some new games for my collection. I think I do have almost every most important game that I used to play back in the days. I also have some titles that I somehow didn’t have some way an opportunity to get into and that I just recently had a chance to get into. I think there is lots of games still out there waiting to get discovered.

Visually PS1 graphics are appealing but you definitely cannot expect so much from this retro console. If you desire I can also recommend to getting into some DreamCast or GameCube  games if you want some more powerful graphical experiences. There definitely are limitations in these retro games. You have to remember that these games are retro and you yourself have to like retro games if you wish to play PS1 games in 2024. And this is why we are using the term “retro” all the time.

PS1 was there among one of these 3D capable gaming consoles. It introduced gaming to many of us. I remember hearing for the first time that some over or almost 30-year-olds were also getting into playing video games. PS1 was the most powerful of Sony all the way to when PS2 was released. There were over 100 million units sold. PS2 sold over 150 million units.

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