2020s Archives - Page 8 of 8 - Intensive Gaming Diary

How to Maximize Your Performance in Competitive Gaming

Posted on December 4, 2021January 11, 2022 by Viljami

When talking about how you perform in competitive gaming it first comes to mind that you have to practice a lot. You have to be young enough but also still old enough. You need your wits. You also have to be balanced in your life in overall. Make sure you get enough sleep. You might also figure that drinking is not good and you perform badly if you have a hangover.

But what I have to say is that one of the key things is concentration. You might remember how school was when you were a child. I remember that we had 45 minutes of class and then we took a break for 15 minutes and got some fresh air and then begun the next class. This seems to be somewhat optimal time for a person, a player, to concentrate. So keep this in mind. You can continue playing longer than 45 minutes but I think you should at least have a break after you have played for 2 hours.

Your age matters actually a lot when competing in gaming. It has been said that after the age of 27 years your nerve system starts to weaken a little by little. Well, I’m myself right now 37 years old so it seems I wouldn’t be able to compete against some younger players. This seems to be the case when considering especially first person shooter (FPS) games. But you have to also remember that while you play a game your nerve systems forms memory out of your actions and you might have a huge advantage if you have played some shooter game a lot. Like it is with athletes – very few of them are over the age of 30 and if they are they won’t be as good as they were younger.

While age matters and young players are more likely to succeed you have to remember that winning might not be the most important matter when it comes to gaming. I can say that I definitely enjoy playing games like an old soccer players enjoys playing. After all you are the one that sets your goal and the amount of effort you put in to playing games. Everyone doesn’t have to be a professional.

As it is important for competitive players to practice it is also important to have enough sleep. You also have to be in, so to say, good balance with your life. Gaming might not be your best shot as a career. It might not pay your rent. But it can be part of your successful life. It might be your dear hobby. It might be a way to spend some free time and get your thoughts out of your studies or work. For some people it might be a profession. Not for everyone.

The last thing I want to talk about in this blog post is that your equipment does matter also. Think about what genre you are going to compete in. For driving games you would like to have a steering wheel and paddles, fighting games require certain type of joystick, FPS’s can be played with keyboard and mouse and real-time strategies require these also. There are many tools for getting the best out of your performance.

Some Thoughts About Diablo II: Resurrected

Posted on September 25, 2021January 11, 2022 by Viljami

The newest Diablo game was released last Thursday. It is a debate about if these latest issues they’ve had in Blizzard concerning sexual harassment and bad working culture are affecting the actual sales of this game. What must be true is that this hasn’t affected on the quality and design of Diablo II: Resurrected. It is your own opinion if you decide to not to buy the game because of this. I also don’t have anything to say about if this is going to help the matter some way.

I actually bought this game in advance. I did it accidentally. The game was released at 6 PM and I made the payment maybe fifteen minutes before that. The price was the same so it didn’t matter so much. There would have been different versions of the release. I decided to go with the cheapest one.

This game is definitely a remake. It isn’t a new game. That doesn’t mean it is a bad game. I love to get into Diablo II again and even more so as there are some huge improvements. I am playing this game with Xbox Series S. Diablo II was originally designed for PC so you would naturally play with mouse and keyboard. Moving the player is a bit clumsy but you get used to it fast.

There are definitely a lot of differences to Diablo III when these two games are compared. I think this makes it interesting to see in the future what kind of a game is Diablo IV going to be. It definitely will be a completely new game. It is still not announced when it will be released. There is a sense also that there is something more to come since Resurrected is only a remake. Although Diablo IV might be released as late as 2024. We don’t know that yet. But you definitely get a picture that there is something more to come and Resurrected is only the beginning.

As my character I chose to create a Paladin. I played with this character class when I played original Diablo II back in the beginning of 2000s. That was 20 years ago. I can’t believe it has been so long of a time. This new remake is an addition to series of remakes of my favorite games that I played back in the days. We’ve had a remake of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Final Fantasy VII, Spyro The Dragon and also many others. So it is a nice addition.

I like this game. It reminds me of this great title. I have currently this Paladin character with a level of 15. You can connect and move your character online with Battle dot net but you have to have an Xbox Live subscription which I currently don’t have. Luckily you have also an option to only save your character locally in offline mode. You will like this game if you like Diablo II. Although it isn’t a new game. If you are expecting to see some new shiny things this isn’t for you. If Diablo II isn’t yet familiar to you I can recommend this game for you also but maybe with a small reservation.

Introduction to Halo

Posted on September 2, 2021January 11, 2022 by Viljami

Halo was first released for the original Xbox back in 2001. It was also some years later released for PC. First person shooter fans had already seen some games of this genre released for consoles. As you can easily figure FPS games were first designed to be played with a keyboard and a mouse. Nintendo 64 already had a game or two that can be categorized to be first person shooters. One of these games is Golden Eye 007.

So Halo brought a strong feel of FPS gaming to the Xbox. I think it worked really well and I have enjoyed this game for a long time. The game play is structured so that it is easier to play with a controller of that generation of gaming consoles. You had to move with left thumb stick while you had to aim with the right thumb stick. You could fire with the shoulder button on the right. This was, for me especially, a strong and a positive experience as I had played Half Life and Return to Castle Wolfenstein with a PC setup using keyboard and mouse.

I have to say that I didn’t play Halo until it was about 2006 or so. As I have told in some of my earlier posts on this blog I had some other things going on in 2001. So I got my original Xbox in 2006 and it was about four years ago, 2017, when I started moving towards original Xbox again as I got all my games back from my brother and bought the console again from flea market for a very low price. My Xbox broke just last year. After that I have utilized my Xbox 360’s backward compatibility and I gladly found out that Halo and Halo 2 also work with the 360.

This blog post is named “introduction” because I wanted to introduce the game because it has it’s own and original game play that is a bit different from the FPS’s of it’s time. Also I just some days ago started to play Halo 5. You can start from whatever Halo you have available. I know that there’s a package sold in online stores for Xbox and PC that contains Halo’s first four games. This four game compilation is called Master Chief Collection. There’s also the next Halo game soon to be released. I think it it’s release date is in December this year.

I have completed Halo 3. I am not sure if I have completed other Halo games totally but I do have tens or even hundreds of hours of experience from this great game series. It is possible to play Halo with your friends. The original Xbox enables up to four players to play with a shared screen and from the first game it was also possible to play online. This brought the hardware and design and features of the first Xbox to their maximum. That was basically how the game was designed.

Halo is a first person shooter. You have health level. If your health level drops to zero you die. After that you start from the last save point. The health increases back to maximum level when you stop receiving hits from shooting enemies for a long enough time. So there are no health packs at all. You have many different weapons. You have a limited amount of ammo. Some weapons are from enemies that are aliens so they also have a limitation that makes your can like burn in your hands if you fire too many rounds. When this happens you have to wait a while as your player regains the ability to shoot again. You have to change weapons often. Different weapons have different abilities. Some weapons have less ammo than others and some weapons shoot faster and some are more accurate to shoot with or have a way to zoom to the target that you are trying to shoot.

This is the basics. The weapons are very uniquely designed. I think you cannot find similar weapons in any other game released before the first Halo. Maybe the first Half Life is the most close to Halo if you want to think about games that are similar to it. I was very disappointed in the Half Life’s release for PS2. In my opinion the controls were horrible. This was corrected in Half Life 2 when it was released for Xbox later.

Halo has a certain science fiction feel to it. It has been for a long time one of the most popular games. It has been exclusive for Xbox for a number of game console generations. There is no end in sight. I am a big fan of Halo games. The controls made it easy and fun to play FPS games with Xbox. It helped to bring game pads to be used more and more in gaming in general. After Halo was released for consoles many other same kind of games followed it. I could name some titles that I liked but that list would maybe be too long for here. I know many PS3 and Xbox 360 games and also games for PS4 that have taken influence from Halo. The image you see as the featured image is a screenshot I took with my Xbox Series S from Halo 5.