Intensive Gaming Diary

Blog about different aspects of retro and new video games.

Category: 2020s

Playing Some Tony Hawks Pro Skater On Nintendo Switch

Posted on by Viljami

I have now played THPS 1+2 for a bit over seven hours. It really makes me to go back, with an amount of nostalgia, to this game series that so many of us still do love. I am playing this on Nintendo Switch. I have also this very neat controller that is actually Pro Controller. I think it is the best way to play sports games and many action games and also driving games. I do not have a driving game currently for Switch but it might be a fun to have one some day.

I first started playing the first THPS game on PS1 back in the 90s. It made a huge impact on me as a player of video games. Skateboarding has been popular but that hasn’t always been the case. Some other famous skateboarding games are Skate or Die for NES and Skate series. I also have to mention a game called OlliOlli right here. But if you think about THPS back in the end of 90s you have to consider that it made skateboarding a very popular field of extreme sports.

How it feels to play it once again remastered one might ask. I think that these developers have made a great job. The music is  a big part of the game. In the original game it at times felt like the music stopped too soon since the runs were only one or two minutes long. In this remake they have kind of corrected this issue and the music track continues to play more constantly.

All these tricks are present in this remake. You can grind and manual to get some points in your run. You can also do air tricks like grabs and also flip tricks. You get more points by combining tricks as creatively as possible. This guarantees a good score of points for you. You have different attributes that you can add points to also. So your skater is also developing all the time as is also the case of your actual skills in playing the game. There are many famous skaters for you to choose from. Of course Tony Hawk is included as well.

THPS has been released in many forms for many different consoles. One of my favorite games in this series is THPS 4 for GameCube. Switch offers you a decent an similar way of control that was utilized in the original game for the first PlayStation. I am talking mainly about the layout of buttons. Pro Controller doesn’t differ so mmuch from Dual Shock controller that is actually the game pad of PS1.

It is nice to play this skateboarding game once again. I feel so much of this nostalgia. At the same time I am glad that this remake turned out to be a good game in overall. While it does require good reflexes I can compensate a bit on my skills in playing this game. Who knows how many hours I did spend on this one. I mean especially the first game. I picked up also THPS 3 for PC back in the early 2000s. Today I have also a copy of that game for my PS2. I am also glad that my PS2 is currently working and that I can utilize it perfectly. Although I haven’t recently played any particularly excellent games on it. I am hoping to get some time to play Tenchu – Wrath of Heaven and also continue my campaign in Gran Turismo 4. I would like to complete it but it seems to take a long time and also a deep dedication if I wish to finish it.

I think this is all for now. Hope you are feeling nice. This game I think is available nicely and it doesn’t cost so much if you are buying it for Switch like I recently did. It is also available for any other modern gaming consoles including Series S/X and PS5 and PS4. It is available also now on Steam for PC so if you are more into some personal computer gaming I guess you can check that out.

Nintendo Switch Games Do Not Take A Lot of Shelf Space

Posted on by Viljami

I have 23 games, exactly, for my Nintendo Switch console. Well, actually I have also some games that came only as a “code-in-the-box”. So, they didn’t have a cartridge at all. You can also buy games for Switch digitally so you don’t need even the box of the game at all.

Today I got for myself three more games for Switch. These games were Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, G-Darius HD and Signalis. I also bought a new game cartridge case that gives me space for 24 more games. It also has space for some memory cards. A case like this cost me about 18 euros. I find it comfortable to store my games in a case like this. And it is official licensed as a Nintendo Switch product.

Switch is also in all ways very comfortable gaming system because you don’t need a whole lot of space for it. You can even use it in portable mode if your screen or television is used by some other member of your family or your room mate or someone else. You can even buy Switch Lite which is cheaper model of Nintendo Switch that however doesn’t provide a possibiltity to connect to an external screen. I think Switch Lite costs today about 200 euros while you can get the regular Switch for a bit undeer 300 euros.

What makes my mind inspired is the thing how little of my shelf space is used by these tiny game cartridges. Nintendo has always been original, so to say, in it’s decisions with the design of it’s gaming consoles. This has been the way for a long time already. I am kind of glad that they have this courage to try out different ways to provide players this unique experience.

There have already been some rumors around that there would be a new Switch console to be released soon. Actually I heard it was coming next year (2024). I am not going deeply to the details but it was said that it would be capable to producing 4K graphics quality. We are living in exciting times!

Nintendo Switch 2 would then be the newest gaming console that would be in the markets. There are of course many questions waiting to be answered. It might not be such a surprise if you would find some content even in this blog you are currently reading. I have touched this topic earlier. You can have a look in our archives if you are interested in what I have written previously about this subject. I have added some new elements to the user interface of this blog or website that should make it even a bit easier to find content here. Please use these means if you feel that you want to read more posts in this blog. Fell also free to drop a message to my guestbook.

It is truly amazing to find out that you can fit over 20 games to such a small space on your gaming book shelf. I have on the same shelf also some GameCube games and they take up way more space. This also is a feature that makes your NES games look like fools. They take so much space on the shelf while being also very small in tehcnical ways. Maybe the best way to store games would be to have an external SSD that would contain everything you have in your game collection. Maybe we are heading towards that, who knows?

Playing Some Spyro The Dragon (Spyro Reignited Trilogy)

Posted on by Viljami

During this weekend I had an opportunity to play Spyro The Dragon with my PS4. In this blog post I am going to introduce to you this awesome 3D platform game that made a serious impact on how we play video games today. It was first released for PS1 in 1998.

There is a great difference between a 2D platform game, like Super Mario Bros 3 or Sonic The Hedgehog, and a 3D platform game like Spyro The Dragon. The first thing that comes to my mind is how do you position the camera inside the game. In Spyro The Dragon you move your character and rotate the camera at the same time. In 2D games you don’t have to worry about moving your camera all the time. In Spyro the jumping feels also a bit like floating which emphasizes the sensitive and complex three dimensional positioning used in the game.

There are many things that Spyro can do. You can jump, float or fall after jumping, blow some flame out of your throat and run and rush against enemies. There are various enemies that our main character encounters. Some can be defeated by rushing on them while some are defeated by blowing out a flame. Some enemies need also something extra if you want to defeat them.

The main goal in Spyro The Dragon is to progress. You achieve this by freeing dragons and collecting gems, or as they are called in this game, treasures. Some gems are more valuable than others. They can have a value of one, two, five or even greater than that. Defeating enemies also gives you gems. If you have defeated an enemy earlier in the game you get a point. If you get enough points you get an extra life. There are also particular extra lives that can be collected.

The game play feels very nice in overall. There are lots of puzzles to be solved including how do you get to some area that has a dragon to be saved or some gems to be collected. I don’t even understand how this game was originally released for PlayStation 1 in such an early moment in video gaming.

Is Spyro a bit childish game? Maybe so, but I think that it offers problem solving and deep thought and challenge while also being a game that the whole family can enjoy and play. The trilogy, Spyro Reignited Trilogy, consists of three first games of this series. I am currently playing it with my PS4. It is also available for PC and the latest Xbox and also for Nintendo Switch. It was released already in 2018.

So, the original Spyro The Dragon was released in 1998 by Insomniac Games for Sony PlayStation. It is considered a very strong and well-known piece of gaming. It definitely stands out being a platform game designed to be played in a 3D environment. If you haven’t played Spyro The Dragon games earlier this trilogy release might be a good point to start your experimenting. It also isn’t a pricey choice as a game. I bought it some weeks ago for 20 euros as a used copy for PS4. There are also many Spyro games released for many consoles in the history of gaming. This trilogy introduces three first games of the series.

Xbox Series X Has a Nice Backwards Compatibility (But Far From Full)

Posted on by Viljami

My Xbox 360 has been suffering. It doesn’t read game discs anymore. Otherwise it is fully functional. I tried opening it a bit through the disc unit as was insturcted on an official guideline I found from internet. I read from the guide that you should first power the device off, remove all cables and then try to push the wheel of the disc unit so that it opens up a bit. This was instructed to do with paper clip that has been straightened. Then you should bloww some compressed air to it.

I did mangae to do this and it fixed the problem. I was able to start a game once again. Then some weeks went by. I wasn’t playing anything with my Xbox 360. I played my other game conmsoles. As you might know Xbox 360 has a backwards compatiblity with original Xbox games. 463 games out of all 996 published are backwards compatible. We can make a quick calculation and find out that this makes 46,5 % of all games that were published for original Xbox.

If you think about PS3 and PS4 and their backwards compatibility you can propably figure how differently Microsoft and Sony deal with this issue. PS4 wasn’t at any moment backwards compatible at all. This pissed off some people. You were able to play PS1 games on PS3. Some PS3 models you are able to play also PS2 games with. PS5 however has limited backwards compatibility for PS4 games.

Xbox Series X, the latest Xbox, is fully compatible with older Xbox consoles’s games. However every game is not supported. There are 63 original Xbox games out of 996 and 633 out of 2155 Xbox 360 games compatible with the latest Xbox console. Xbox Series S doesn’t even have a disc drive so apparently it doesn’t support older consoles’s game discs. All Xbox One games are compatible with Series X.

With this information available I decided to remove my oddly acting Xbox 360 from my current setup. This meant actually that I had to remove also tens of games from my lineup. I like to keep every game that I am able to play with any console in my setup in this huge shelf. I had to remove many Xbox and Xbox 360 games.

I have now only six original Xbox games left in that shelf. The picture related to this post shows my current games that I am able to play with my Xbox Series X. I didn’t count the games that I removed so carefully. I think I set aside maybe 70 games in total. I had to put games like Halo 1 and 2, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4 and many others to storage. These were games that I haven’t had time to get into thoroughly.

I would like to be able to play every game that has ever been released for any Xbox system. This is just the way that things go. You are updating your setup and getting into some new or retro consoles. You don’t actually play every game that you own. Some games and systems you just have to set aside at least for a while. Xbox 360 is an old gaming console. It was first released in 2005. I bought my Xbox 360 as a used copy. This was about six years ago. So maybe it was time for me to move on.

Games do get old. Systems do get old. There are many games that you just can’t play, buy or enjoy in any way no more. I think there should be something that could be done to this issue of great games just disappearing somewhere. We seem to be still moving so fast forward that we can easily completely forget a nice old game.

I don’t know the exact answer to this question. Will there be in the future some websites or collectins of old games. Are we going to be able to finally play these games with an emulator? Would it be nice to have a museum that could hold many old games? I know that there are already some websites that are dedicated to old Commodre 64 games. They have archived thousands of games which are also available as downloads.

There cetainly is some knowledge about gaming that also I as a gamer have been able to develop in myself. From the moment when I first gazed at a video game in some arcade I have been curious to find out more about games. I went as far as studying the field. I dreamed I would be able to make a game or something similar. And I think I am not alone with my knowledge and I think this is an interesting topic all in all.

Concentrating More To Modern and Recent Instead of Retro Video Games

Posted on by Viljami

I have lots of games already for my Xbox Series X. The backlog is getting a bit heavy. I have given a though to my habit and hobby of collecting games. I started getting into retro games back in 2016. Since then prices of games that can be categorized as retro games has risen seriously. I have witnessed these prices to go up with games ending up 3 times more expensive than what they used to be.

Why has this happened one might start to figure. One thing about this issue is the rising popularity of collecting and playing video games. Both types of games are popular if we think about modern and retro. Modern games can be produced and delivered to almost as many players as there is a demand for. While we have witnessed some cases of games being produced too many for consumers to buy, I mean for example the ET Atari 2600 game, that the manufacturers have been left with several unsold copies in their hands. I think today this isn’t a big problem as also many customers buy their games as digital editions.

The people that used to play video games in the 80s and 90s are coming to an age that they have a bit more currency to spend to their dear hobby. Did you notice how quickly classic and mini consoles were completely sold out. The demand was huge. These are same consumers that are buying today most of games that are sold through different forms of delivery. Some are sold in digital stores that are available for players of PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo or PC.

Also it seems to be a common way to think that retro games should be bought instead of just downloading them and playing them directly on a gamers personal computer. There are of course many ways to achieve the emulation for these systems. People are spending lots of money to get their hands on some retro consoles. Some games are also very expensive. I have collided in some very heavy prices when I have gone through a gaming web shop. It seems like every interesting game has now got a double or even triple of a price compared to what these prices were back when I started collecting games.

There should be more options. There should be more devices that support older games or retro games. There should be ways to play these games on recent systems. We are in an era in which people are becoming a bit more technically knowledgeable than these last generations that were more into to games than into technology. Especially I see the 90s, maybe my generation, as a time that more players wanted to just play games instead of programming their own applications. You can think about how consumers of electronics were like back in the 70s or 80s. Things have changed a lot and are still constantly changing.

So it isn’t a thing for a young person and a hobbyist to build up a gaming system. At first you might want to buy a PC. Then you will need an operating system for it. I would prefer Lakka OS but there are also more options. So, this is a Linux operating system. It isn’t, today, legal to just download games as ROM files. You have to own the game that you download. That seems to be the rule of thumb here. While there are ways to convert your existing games to rom files I think this has been made too hard for an average consumer.

One option would be to make some or even all old games available to digital game shops. This has been already accomplished. Some retro games are sold and some you can get to play if you have an account that you have registered and payed for. Is this enough for gamers? I think there are ways to keep playing the most important games that exist but there should be more discussion on this issue. We might some day face a problem that we cannot play every game that we would like to. I think some games are just too big, important and interesting to just be left out of our options about what game to play next.

My point here is, my dear reader, that I have thought about these matters and I have decided to play mainly recently released games. I don’t yet know how long I am going to keep this up. Maybe til the end of year or something like that. I just think I have spent lots of money in retro games that aren’t bringing me actually anything worth experiencing as a video game addict. Games that I do play, have been playing and will keep playing from now on are especially these recent titles. I do have also an interest towards Xbox One games since they are backward compatible with Series X. I have played NBA2K23, Diablo IV and Far Cry 6. NBA2K23 seems to take forever to be even near of a completion of the game. So, there is a lot to play for me.

I am also waiting and looking to get FFXVI for my Series X. It is, to my knowledge, appearing to the Xbox store in December of this year. I also have a Nintendo Switch that is also my second newest gaming console after Series X. I am not finding PS4 so interesting at the moment. I kind of skipped Hogwarts Legacy. The next game I am waiting to get to play is probably Forza Motorsport. I don’t know if I am ready to play some Starfield. It is an interesting new game from developers of Skyrim. It is going to be released 6th of September this year.

A Great Movie for a Total Fan of Resident Evil Series

Posted on by Viljami

In this blog post I am taking a view to the movie Resident Evil – Welcome to Raccoon City. This movie was released in 2021. I am seeing this movie for the first time. I really don’t know if it was here in Finland in film theaters at all. At least every theater would have been closed anyway. So, I watched this movie as a 4K Ultra HD copy on my 55 inch telly with my Xbox Series X. In many ways this is related to playing video games. I am likely justified to write this here.

I am watching a movie on my Xbox Series X and it is about the strange incidents that happened in 1998 in Raccoon City. There is a company called Umbrella Corporation that has something fishy going on in this small city in USA. The movie is based on at least the first two games. You will have a benefit in a way for seeing this content if you have played Resident Evil 1 and 2 or maybe even the recent remake of RE2.

This movie is rated 5,2 out of 10 in imdb. It has received some criticism. Of course hopes have been very high. We have had movies based on this survival horror video game series which isn’t such a surprise, but these movies have been of low quality. Even Milla Jovovich wasn’t able to save them. I don’t like these movies at all. I hate to even having to mention anything about them.

How did I like the movie? Were there anything I would have liked to work a bit  differently? Well, it’s a nice package. It is causing me anxiety in a similar way that the games used to when I picked them up back in the 90s and even recently I have this gloomy feeling if I start to play them. My only possession remaining from these games is a copy of the original RE2 which I think is the best out of the first three games. Now we must remember that there have been remakes and also some more recent RE games made, like for example Resident Evil Village.

This movie centers around happenings in Raccoon City when the zombie apocalypse starts. There are characters like Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield. There aren’t any superstar actors which can be also a good thing. The movie opens these strange incidents a lot and it has more going on than what can be achieved what it comes to the main plot of the whole story that is being told through first three games. At least that’s how I felt. Even my wife enjoyed the film although she said that it was scary and caused a bit of anxiety for her. The movie is actually forbidden for age under 16.

I think this was a good movie. Although it was nothing compared to the Last of Us story that was brought to us also some time ago. I watched that thing on HBO. This RE movie was one of my first films that I got as a 4K disc. These things are expensive, you know? I paid 30 euros for this movie. It has also the Bluray version and it came in a steel book. I can definitely recommend this movie to you especially if you like RE.

 

How Does The Business of Selling Used Video Games Work?

Posted on by Viljami

If you have been involved in gaming or playing or collecting video games for several years you might have faced the issue of not getting your money back from a game that you bought just some months ago. You are trying to trade the game and get a good price, right? Obviously this doesn’t work this way. Because the game shop you are dealing with has to make a living. You can get maybe 20 percentage of the money you paid for the game…if you buy a new game…with that money. Does this seem complicated or unfair? Let me explain this to you so we all can understand this issue better.

Of course if you are willing to sell the game yourself and directly to another collector or player you can get a decent amount of money out of the game. Game shops are facing the fact that they have to be profitable. There are lots of expenses. Shipping of products that are coming into the store, rent of the premise and or web services for a web shop and of course the subsistence of all of the workers. Now this is a business right here. You can make a living out of this. Easy it isn’t but possible it is (did that sound like Yoda from Star Wars?).

There are several companies here in my home land, Finland, that operate this type of business that I have described right here. They might have a shop, maybe even two or three shops, and of course a web shop. There are also many smaller shops that sell games here. You can also find some people that are interested in selling some of their game collections and we have platforms like Huuto dot net and Tori dot fi for someone who wants to sell any used stuff. And I must mention also re-use centers and flee markets whose prices are usually lower since they get the stuff they sell mainly for free. And this is where we get to people that take advantage of this and…it isn’t very nice as you can figure.

Where do you get games for a low price that you can sell to some collector? I know some people that have received an estate that has contained games. Usually there is a huge collection to be sold. And if you buy the whole stack you get it in a fair price, right? Now we are starting to figure this out. You can sell these games piece by piece. A game collector is someone that needs maybe one game or two or three games that he or she is missing from his/her collection. So you can sell a few game for a decent price and make a profit a bit by bit. This is the magic of selling used games. You buy a large batch and check the unique games prices and you will get a profit out of this.

What makes the used game’s price high or low? One important thing is the condition of the game. It can be a sealed copy. It can have a manual and all of the covers. Or maybe its a loose game with generic cover or no packaging at all. PC games can be packaged in so called “big boxes” that make them more valuable. And the condition of the box matters. It matters also how the labels look like and does the CD/DVD disc have scratches on it. Sometimes the condition of the game can be enhanced quite easily. I am not going into that so deeply.

Some games can also be rare ones. They might be so good that no one just wants to sell them. They can be rare in a way that they weren’t even so popular when they first got released. These types of games are just uncommon. Some games gained popularity and valuation only when some retro hobbyists noticed their true value. Some games are so amazing that they seem to define a whole gaming system. These types of games can be something like Super Mario for NES or Sonic for Mega Drive or something similar.

Should you sell your old games? This is a tough question. I regret selling my old PS1 back in the beginning of the 2000s. The system and all the games I had for it would have been so much more valuable for me today compared to the price that I got from them then. Like, I sold all of them for under 200 euros. If you consider only the money this is clearly a financial loss for me. And I would have liked to play these games still. I just didn’t seem to have such an interest for retro games back then. You have to consider how I got back into playing video games in 2006 when I got my original Xbox. And…it was 2017 when I started my plans for starting to collect older and retro gaming systems again.

For some years already I have been writing to this blog. It is very interesting. However this is only a way for me to express my thoughts. I am not currently getting anything financially from this. And so is the way also that game collectors necessarily don’t get anything from collecting games when it comes to money. Game shops do make profit. That is a good thing. Without them we wouldn’t have a place to trade and buy games.

What is it like to work in a game shop? Sometimes it is busy and sometimes there’s only a few customers. It can be a place to build your dreams and fantasies. It is definitely a technical job. I also got to write, of course, blog posts for the game shop that I worked in for six months. The biggest parts of my job were handling and shipping orders, responding to customer feedback and being a customers servant face-to-face and also in some other ways. It was a fun job. It was a busy job. And ultimately…it was barely profitable.

 

The Role of a Single Variable in an Application Source Code

Posted on by Viljami

What is the role of a variable? In case you don’t know about software design, or basics of programming, let me show to you what kind of a term it actually is. Variable has a type which defines what values it can have. It can be a number, a single character or combination of multiple characters. A variable can also be part of an array that has several variables that are of the same type. Objects have properties and every implementation of an object has a variable as a value to its properties. But we are not going to object oriented programming or modeling…at least not yet.

Together with other variables in a program variables form a state of the program. If you think about thing in any retro game console emulator there are so called “saved states”. This means actually what it exactly is. In Super Mario you have variable, which says in which world you are, which stage you are, were you are positioned in the actual level and, for example, how many lives you have left. So all these variables form the state. You with me?

One thing I wondered for several years especially when I wasn’t too deeply involved in actual programming and I was still trying to get my thoughts gathered was “how can you save the entire game when you are saving your game in any modern game?”. Of course you aren’t saving a full copy of the whole game. You are only saving these values of all these variables. You are saving the state in which the application currently is. And basically, this means text. How much would a text file consisting of, maybe, some hundreds of lines of variables and their values take space? Yeah, you figured it out…it wouldn’t take a lot of space. Not at all.

What does take space if any commercial modern game would be considered? Graphics, 3D models, the recorded sound effects and all of the dialogue of the game. They all take a lot of space. Especially when you think about today’s high quality screens with 4K pixels and high quality sound coming out of the selected audio device. Of course what takes also power is all this processing. The processing of code is done by processor of your computer. Graphics are processed with GPU (Grpahics Processing Unit). Today there is a need to maximize the use of a powerful GPU to process the data as efficiently as possible. The processor then works with the GPU and also the hard disk. We have already witnessed fast data processing of SSDs. SSD is short from Solid State Drive. Earlier we had hard disks called HDD (“Hard Disk Drive”). If you are really into computers and building setups you probably know that HDDs are a lot cheaper than SSDs. I mean, of course, the monetary expense of a unit of space. It is a lot more expensive to get a 256 GB of SSD space than it is to get this same space in a HDD.

Right now we are deep in the workings of a personal computer. All these facts I have already covered took me years to get into. It took me involvement. And mostly, it took a lot of time. I started getting in this, very deeply and by studying, back in 2008. That was the year I started studying first electronics and after two years I moved on to study computer science in an University of Applied Sciences. After I graduated back in 2016 I was having a hard time finding a job. After two years of looking for a job I found one as a customer servant. I have worked my way from there and now I work as an IT support person. And all this started from trying to figure out how the saved game system works in my favorite computer or video game. I think the game I was thinking about was Fallout Vegas.

The question made think deeply. How was the game able to save all this information to a small saved game file? I got the answer but it sure wasn’t an easy peace of a cake. I didn’t succeed very well in courses that dealt with a computer’s memory usage or how is magnetism, a physical phenomenon, handling all this data on a hard disk. But little by little…I got the whole picture. I finally got to combine all this information together. All this started by playing games.

Today, I find that there are several areas that are really interesting to me. If you want to learn some knowledge very deeply, like how computers actually work, you will have to use your past knowledge and experiences to guide your thoughts through it all as a process. Writing something “open” to yourself so that you understand what your mind is dealing and handling is one big key for understanding complex and theoretical matters. And teaching someone or having a conversation about the fact is very useful many times.

I don’t know a lot about actual electronics or how the architecture of a full computer work. Well, I actually know something about it. That isn’t however enough for me to solve every problem. This is also where search engines or even a tool like ChatGPT would come in handy. Of course you can look up information from books or your notes and study some more. Just try to remember to take it piece by piece. There is an old saying. It goes something like this: “nobody is a master as you are born”.

Nothing Special to See Here

Posted on by Viljami

This image here is a screenshot from Forza Horizon 5. I am playing it currently on my Xbox Series X. I bought it recently as a digital copy. It cost me about 40 euros. I was happy that I didn’t have to pay more for it. It isn’t the newest racing game after all.

I bought also some other games. I noticed that there are some Xbox 360 and original Xbox games available as digital copy and they were on a discount also. So, I picked up some more games. There were 9 games all in all. I picked up Red Faction II, The Darkness, Contra, Vampyr, Flashback, Call of Cthulhu, Crimson Skies – High Road to Revenge, FH5 and Gears of War 4. This cost me only about 75 euros. I saved over 100 euros. If you can call spending money saving money. Well, I think we can.

Some people are talking and even worrying about spending too much money buying gaming stuff. I don’t think gaming would be different from any other hobby that you have to spend money in. You need equipment in sports. You need money if you drive a car. How is gaming different? This talk about money makes me think about some of these big game releases. We can take the latest Zelda game for example. It is Tears of the Kingdom. I think they have a huge marketing budget. This is reality. It is so because I did saw a commercial on a bus stop just some weeks ago. I don’t remember seeing a game advertised on a bus stop here in a long period of time. If this has happened earlier, I don’t remember what the game might have been.

Forza Horizon 5 is already an old game. It isn’t actually old. Its just not the newest game providing racing and entertainment. I decided to start playing it because I hadn’t done it earlier. It has received some good ratings. It would take me at least 20 hours of time to finish it. Or so tells the well-known website named “How Long to Beat”. This is my preferred website if I want to seek information about how long does a game last. Some times, like in the case of Diablo II – Resurrected, I have noticed that it takes me some more time to complete a game than what is told on this website. If you want to see the website, just use your favorite search engine. As you might have noticed I don’t promote any special search engine.

I am hoping to enjoy some more Forza Horizon 5. I hope that I can finish it some day soon. I have spent already maybe 5 hours playing it. There is, as is usual today, many different areas of interest in this game. There’s a lot going on. We have definitely more than a racing game  here. I hope to continue playing it and to explore its content as thoroughly as is possible.

Web Page as a Medium

Posted on by Viljami

I have spent so much time learning to write and also express different ideas on a web page. There has always been this certain appeal for me to websites. It probably all began when I started getting into HTML in 1999 or 2000. So, that’s ages ago. But that is where it this interest started for me.

I was far from a professional. At first I didn’t even study anything related. At the time I was still a student in elementary school. This was even before I went to high school. It started as an interest and a hobby for me. I didn’t think that I would become some sort of professional in this exact field. But that actually happened a bit later. But lets just say that I was sort of free to do whatever I wanted at this time and I also found many interesting subjects in this time in my life. That was also a time when I got deeper into gaming.

So, there has always been an interest for me in designing and programming websites at least at some level. I am still not a seasoned professional. I am still taking those steps toward understanding this form of art and also a very strong medium. Because I think that’s what a web page really is – a medium. There are so many things you can express in a website. It might be a single page application but I myself started with static HTML. I soon got to CSS also.

I started building websites with simple HTML tables. I liked creating different types of interfaces and menus and also logos and headers. That was fun. I liked modifying images and changing how they were colored and represented in a web page. Soon it came to my understanding that tables weren’t a good way, anymore, to design a website. So I learned some newer techniques. I got far. I still stumbled as I encountered something like PHP, MySQL or JavaScript. I understood how powerful they could be but I wasn’t ready to move on to actual programming. I think that would have been too much for me to cope with as I was learning everything on my own with no teachers or other students or even a decent theory book.

I did learn more later. Today, I can create a static website. I still don’t know how to use React deeply and thoroughly. There is still lot to learn. Websites are now fully responsive and can be used with different kinds of tablets and phones and maybe even some other mobile devices. I think the medium is still there. You can write a book on a website. You can play a movie on it. There are several ways to draw content to the screen using your favorite web browser. You can create a game for others to play. And all this is achieved with a certain limit and you don’t have to actually install any other software than just your web browser.

There are many types of browsers available. Microsoft still has its own browser and it is currently called Microsoft Edge. Google has its own web browser. It’s called Chrome. You have also, the descendant of Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, which is very popular. Then there are browsers like Opera and Brave. Web browsers do gather information about you, the user, in form of cookies.

There are countless possibilities in what way you can deploy this medium. The content has to be in a form of HTML and it’s functionality is defined in JavaScript, be it as a framework or vanilla. You can also tune the look and view of your page with CSS. Together these, sort of, languages form a web page. This form is very different from what you have when you write a story. Then you are only using a tool like Word. You have a very limited way to control the content. Then you have complex ways to express your content with a pen or even a brush with a paper. This means actually drawing something. Creating a website is more technical and also more simple way to express some ideas you might have.

Websites keep interesting me a lot even today. I like fiddling around with digital photography and writing stuff. I like also the technical stuff. The programming side is very interesting. I think I have now a grasp of what can be achieved with a web page. I just have to grab myself and start working. There is lots to do and I have lots to achieve, still.

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