Intensive Gaming Diary

Blog about different aspects of retro and new video games.

Category: Gaming Philosophy

Why Do I Find Games Attractive?

Posted on by Viljami

I have been recently playing Gran Turismo 4. I haven’t finished Resident Evil Village yet. I have played it for five hours. I also picked up Hollow Knight. This game has some very attractive two-dimensional graphics. I thought this would be a short game. I checked how long it takes to complete form HowLongToBeat dot com and I found out that it takes 25 and a half hours to complete. That’s a long time for this kind of a game.

As I begun playing Hollow Knight I started wondering what it really is in games that appeals to me? Is it the graphics? Is it the sound? Is it the way that you get to interact and really get involved in the story? The answer is propably the combination of all these things.

I don’t actually remember my early childhood. My parents have told me that I was excited about technology and different kinds of machines at an early age. I can believe that easily. It doesn’t come as a surprise to me that I am today deeply interested in technology. I also have studied and I am currently working in the field.

What is it in games that appeal to so many people around the world? This question might not have a clear answer. There has to be something special about it. Video games have always since their first appearance been extremely popular. Back in the 1960s when a video game called “Tennis for Two” was introduced to audience it blew many peoples minds.

Today the business of producing video games is huge. Games are more popular than ever. Video games aren’t anymore just for children. Gaming has become a hobby for everyone. It doesn’t matter what is your gender, where do you live, are you poor or rich. There seems to be absolutely no limit. This can be a good thing but it might also be a bad thing.

There are lots of games that are very good. But there has been some huge disappointments also. Maybe the consumer should think about where he or she puts the money. And also we should support independent developers even more than we do today. This way we can have gaming as a hobby. And everyone will be happy, right?

Not Enough Time For Every Good Game

Posted on by Viljami

Some months ago I bought Silent Hill 4 The Room for original Xbox. I haven’t had time to play it and really get into it. There are also some other good games in this featured image. On the top is Dungeon Siege for PC. This is a good Diablo clone that was developed by Microsoft. I have played it but I haven’t completed it. It’s a shame since it is definitely a nice role playing game.

There is also a game called Black. This is a first person shooter for Xbox. I played it for some hours last year. It is very good but also a difficult game. I just got stuck because and found myself going through the same situation over and over again. It was a struggle and I couldn’t beat the game or even proceed from the point I was stuck in.

Not all these games in this picture have received marvelous reviews. I know that Goldeneye – Rogue Agent and Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer aren’t so appreciated by game reviewers or even by common gamer people. I wanted to pick these games up. One reason was that they were so cheaply available. The other reason was that they are compatible with Xbox 360. I currently don’t have an original Xbox. I do have Nintendo GameCube and PlayStation 2. M;aybe some day I decide to move one of the other gaming consoles to side and add once again original Xbox to my forever evolving game console setup.

I remove, sometimes, a gaming console from my setup. Many times I also find some gaming device that can bring me multiple systems for one HDMI connection. I use mainly HDMI. PlayStation 2 is currently the only SCART connected device I have in my setup. Recently I bought a HDMI adapter for my GameCube. It cost me almost 80 euros but it enables connecting my console to a regular HDMI channel. I have thought about getting also a similar adapter for PS2. I found one for only 15 euros. I don’t know if its a one with good quality.

I also received some bonus credits from one game dealer. It was nice. I received 25 euros for buying ten times a purchase of 35 euros or over. I have been ordering already for years from this dealer. I used this sum of euros to buy six games. Four of them were for Xbox and the two other were for Xbox 360. It did cost me 50 euros after I used the 25 euros of bonus credits.

So I got these games for original Xbox: Batman Begins, Dead to Rights, Oddworld – Munch Oddysee and The Thing and these two games for Xbox 360: Devil May Cry 4 and Supreme Commander 2. I really enjoyed playing the first Devil May Cry although I didn’t complete it. I also played the fifth Devil May Cry but found it to be not so interesting. I think it has too many cut scenes in the beginning of the game and it seems to be too easy when it comes to playing the actual game. So I didn’t like it. I hope that the fourth game in the series would be better. I actually didn’t read a lot of reviews about this game.

You can figure that I buy a lot of games and usually I buy them for a cheap price. I have noticed that the price of some games is rising. You can take some GameCube games for example. I think that there’s always these high priced games that I won’t even look when I am skimming through gaming web stores.

I am going to have a holiday this year. It is yet too soon to talk about when it’s going to be and exactly how long will my vacation going to be. I might go to a trip. I will definitely play some games that I currently own. I hope I can spend some good times with games and writing this blog also. I do have the book project. I just haven’t once again had time to get deeply into writing more of it. Today I also designed a game with my pal that is currently doing some heavy programming with the second and even the first game that are under updating and also under development right now.

Where It All Begun (And Where Are We Now) With Gaming

Posted on by Viljami

I am a game hobbyist that started playing video games as soon as I was old enough to interact with a keyboard and a mouse. Some years later I was gaming on a Sega Mega Drive and some years after that I got my PlayStation. This was the beginning of my hobby.

Today video games are more popular than ever. There is a large amount of money involved. There are also many independent developers. There seems to be some people that really love video games. There seems to be a lot of games released mainly for making lots of money.

There was once a time when video games were a true form of art. You can take for example the game I am currently playing now. I also wrote a blog post about this game. The game is Remedy Entertainments Max Payne. You can see that this title was a success both artistically and financially.

I think I don’t have to point out any of these big companies that try to release very big games. It seems that when the stakes are too high there is a strong propability for the game to also fail completely. The failure will be financial and you definitely wouldn’t call it art in any way.

The involvement of money is one thing that is effecting the whole industry today. I kind of miss the artistic side of gaming. I have nice memories of playing all those PlayStation 1 titles. It is said that playing PS1 is kind of listening to rock music. And playing Sega Dreamcast is like listening to jazz music.

Why was Dreamcast a failure? To put it simple it didn’t sell that well. It did sell 9 million units. That wasn’t enough. We can compare this to how PS2 sold. That was way over 100 million. Even Xbox and GameCube sold over twice of what Dreamcast ended up selling. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are the leaders of todays game console markets as Sega has already made it clear that they aren’t going to release another new console.

Does it seem that you are getting fooled? This might not be the case afterall. If consumers keep buying those titles that they find the most satisfying there might be a brighter future for gamers and gaming. You just have to be aware of the situation. If you are a gaming hobbyist like I am you definitely want to keep up with this field. There is the mainstream. But there definitely does exist an opportunity to pick the games you really want to play. I think that there is a way to have good experiences in gaming. There is an alternative.

There are loads of games, old and new, for you to choose. Don’t have the latest console? Don’t worry about it. You can pick yourself a Xbox 360 or some other older console. It doesn’t cost you as much and you can have a really good time. There are many ways to get some good quality games for your personal computer.

There is always a way and also a place for art inside gaming. It might not be the deepest art you will ever see but it does have a value for gamers. Observe your possibilities. What you are buying is usually a way for also a gamer to influence what is going to be available in the future.

Who Is This Guy (Super Mario)?

Posted on by Viljami

What’s the game you start to play when you want a nice platform game and you don’t mind if it is a bit retro? Of course you play Super Mario Bros or Super Mario Land or Super Mario Bros 3 or the New Super Mario. Whatever your choice is one thing is certain – there are lots of options here. That’s basically because there seems to be no limit to how many and how varying game titles have been released in this video game characters lifetime.

The featured image of this blog post is the cover of a book about how Nintendo and Mario “conquered” USA. Of course this character made its way into the minds of all gamer’s across the whole wide world. Super Mario was chosen to be the main character that represented the whole Nintendo as a company. There are lots of games and also some other material in which Super Mario has been used.

But who is this guy actually? We get to understand that he’s a plumber. He has a brother named Luigi. I think he’s a plumber too. Mario has the tendency to try to be a hero and he is always trying to save the princess. Mario is a bit softer than Sega’s mascot Sonic. Basically Mario is a product of the beginning of 80s while Sonic seems to be from the end of 80s and also from the beginning of 90s.

Of course all the real hardcore retro gamers know that Crash Bandicoot took the title of the most fascinating video game mascot back in the 90s. But you have to realize that Mario was the first of them. Nintendo was the brand that made gaming great again after Atari had effed up the whole game with it’s foolish strategy on releasing poor quality video games. Basically, back then, Atari just got too greedy.

And only Nintendo is able to come up with this kind of material. At the same time it seems a bit naive and childish but do you know what kinds of mushrooms he actually is able to consume? A mushroom that looks like Amanita Muscaria and makes him to grow. Wow! How did that happen and how did it happen so fast. Maybe there is something more to it than we at first can observe. Maybe parents should look after their children despite the fact that Nintendo seems to be so settled with its in game content.

Super Mario remains as a character that is a bit mysterious. You don’t get to talk with him in deep conversations. You might remember him from your childhood. Is he the one that is responsible for luring all these people in to video gaming? There haven’t been so many interviews or story lines in games that would have described his personality. Yet you definitely recognize his voice as he says “It’s me…Mario!”.

Why are things this way? Maybe it has everything to do with how under developed video games were. We had two dimensional pixel graphics and the audio quality was poor. There just weren’t enough space for this character to form some kind of a more progressed image in our minds. I think this is also a strength for him. He is kind of abstract figure. He was made to be simple and easy to approach. So Mario is at the same time very simple and also very attractive in a mind of a determined retro gamer.

Still Trying to Beat This Game

Posted on by Viljami

I am still trying to beat Burnout 3 – Takedown. I have played it for about nine hours and I have completed 40 percentage of it. During the weekend I had some time to play this game. I played for about three hours. I had some other things that I just had to do. I spent some time making music and also seeing some friends also.

Today it seems that I don’t have so much time for playing video games. Working makes me a bit tired. I have to make a choice of how to spend these free hours. It can be a difficult choice sometimes. I also read a lot. I have been reading a book about a music band System of a Down. Just yesterday I read thirty pages.

The book is written in Finnish. I read also books that are written in English. It would be fun to some day read a book that would be in French or maybe Swedish. I have studied these languages just to get my knowledge to a higher level and also as a hobby of some sort. I studied French in high school. Swedish is compulsory in school in Finland.

I checked from the website that tells you how long it approximately takes to complete a game and it said that Burnout 3 takes 14 hours to be completed. If my calculations are correct it would take me way more time to beat Burnout 3 Takedown. It would be something like 20 hours. At least I think so.

There are some other games that I would like to play. I just haven’t got the time to thoroughly get into them and even beat and complete them. It’s easy to start a game. It’s also easy to get into a game. After some hours the game starts to be more challenging. I am noticing about my playing habits that I don’t complete most of these games I start to play. This is how the markets work. Today, gamers aren’t completing their games. They just move on to another game and it’s a bit sad to me.

This brings us once again to the sad conclusion that there are too many games available. You can think about this for a while. You have new games and then you have retro games. My gaming library consists of both new and retro games. That makes me think I have some older games that I would like to play and I also have these new  and even upcoming games that I woul like to play.

But what the heck! I am going to get these new games. Just thinking about releases like Diablo IV and the new Forza Motorsport makes my hearth beat a bit faster. What are some games you just have to play in your lifetime? I think there are too many to even mention. And I think you’ll have to find the ones that you want to play and even complete and you have to find them yourself.

Having a Break From a Game?

Posted on by Viljami

This week I have spent almost five hours playing only Darksiders Warmastered Edition. It’s not actually a new game anymore. It was released in 2019. It is a good game and there is no argument. And to back this up I can say that it has a score of 77/100 on metacritic at the moment. You must also take in consideration that it is a remaster of a game that was originally released in 2010.

Playing Darksiders is fun. But sometimes a gamer needs a break. Some of this games puzzles had me almost sweating. When I first started playing it was Thursday. I took a break and continued to play it again today for almost three hours. There are things like meeting other people and working so I cannot play every day. So I have to take breaks. But how long of a break can you have from a game and still come back to it to finish it eventually?

I don’t have any data to back up my opinions and thoughts. As with almost any of my experiments the greatest source that I have is my experience. So I have had long breaks while playing a game. I think the longest break was maybe two years. It happened when I played Silent Hill Homecoming. Well, I didn’t finish this game. Finishing a game has become for me a rare occasion today. I have a big backlog and the time I can spend on a game is decreasing all the time. I didn’t have that problem when I was younger.

Sometimes it really helps if you are honest with yourself and just give up and start playing a game all over again. There must be some sort of recommendation for how long you can play one game, right? If we think about concentration I guess you can keep yourself concentrated for from 45 minutes to about three hours. That comes from my experience. It actually comes from playing games but you can also think about how long can you concentrate for a lesson while you are studying.

So, there’s a limited time that you can spend playing a video game. Why are games so long then after all? This has everything to do with the medium in which games are released. The amount of disk space that games take is increasing all the time and this has happened for a long time already. First there were CDs, then DVDs. Today we are seeing games that take over 30 hours to beat common.

There are things you can consider when thinking about how long of a break you can have and do you actually have time for playing. One important thing is how long does it take for a game to be beaten. You can find this out as there are websites that can tell you how long a certain game takes to beat. You can choose the kinds of games that you like and that you do have time to play and also finish. Driving games don’t take so much time while some RPGs can take hundreds of hours. I hope you have enjoyed these thoughts. Just remember that there is lots of information that you can find online.

The Importance of a Plot

Posted on by Viljami

If you think about games and gaming and what it comes to games having a strong inner story, a plot, you can have many opinions. There are two extremes. Some might think that there should be sort of interactivity and action in games and that a plot is just something that doesn’t have such an importance.

This of course depends a lot about what kind of a game you are experiencing. If you have a shooter, maybe a first person shooter, you don’t necessarily want to follow something that is comparable to a story or line that walks you throuhg the game. You are happy to just shoot everything that moves, right?

What about adventure games? Here the plot has more meaning. Also in advneture games the dialogue and conversations bring a lot to the content. You also have some puzzles to solve. You have objects to pick up and use in some situations. That’s how adventure games work.

Can you think about a role playing game wihtout a plot? I hardly can. But of course in a role playing game you are also very interested how your main character or characters develop. Usually there are also choices made inside the game that vary how the story keeps moving on. Some games have a solid story line while others might have various events launched by a decision that the player has made.

If you want an example of a storydriven role playing game I would have to bring up Fallout and Fallout 2. These games had a deep and interesting story that also formed based on the desicions that the player makes.

So is strory or a plot important to you as a player? If we compare games to other mediums like books and movies we can think that games differ from them in that that they have this interactivity in them. Player can move a character or characters and make decisions that make an impact. You could hardly think of a movie that has no plot at all. But if you think about a classic game like Doom you could do fine wihtout understanding it’s story line.

Some games give a plot a lot of importance. Some games give us a slight idea of what is going on and deliver some action instead. Some games, maybe some simple games, might not have a plot at all. There are as many games as there are types of players. And we can say that that is many indeed.

How Games Used to Be

Posted on by Viljami

I can remember it clearly. Games were different. I am talking about how games were at the time when original Xbox was released. Thinking about this brings me, again, some very nostalgic feelings and thoughts.

So what excactly has changed? We have today more powerful gaming consoles, screens  and televisions. Even things like controllers and consumption of electricity have improved. It seems although that we are seeing very different kinds of games today compared to what we saw about twenty years ago.

Back in the day game publishers took more financial risks. There was also less money  involved all in all. This has led to a situation in which we are seeing huge releases that try to appeal to as huge of an audience as possible. Just think about Elden Ring or Cyberpunk 2077.

Old or retro games can give you a different approach to how a game should feel like. Some games are not even trying to reach to the sky. They might use only 2D scenery or they might concentrate to bringing you something that can be classified very easily. Just think about racing games. Everyone knows how  a typical racing game feels like.

Seems like games today try to be everything for everyone. We haven’t seen many new genres formed in last past ten years. We are seeing lots of remakes of old games that were very popular at the time they were originally released. We seem to see fewer definitely distinctive new games. Have game developers lost their creativity? How is this going to affect to new games we are already waiting to be released?

The times are changing and that change is constant. Because of delivery problems of electronical components we are seeing some other difficulties also. Has the gaming industry reached already its peak? Are we going to be still playing games and going to find more new games that attract us and bring us deeper and closer to the core of this hobby?

There is something very definitive in video games that attracts people. More and more people are starting this hobby. Age isn’t in any way anymore a limitation. And who tells you that you cannot play also some older games instead of these newer huge releases?

Collecting, Buying but not Playing

Posted on by Viljami

I am happy that I am currently employed. I work and I also have some freetime. Although I don’t have the amount of time I had as a teenager. I propably wouldn’t even want it to be that way anymore. I guess I have less time for playing today.

As I have less time for gaming I do have more income. That gets me to buy more collectable items, games, that I couldn’t afford some time ago. I am finding myself buying interesting, nostalgic and exciting games. Some of them, the retro ones, I have owned or played during my childhood. Some games just are plain intersting. I think I cannot fully explain this.

There seems be a lot of items for me to get to my hands. I might buy an interesting game and just leave it for a month or two and then get into playing it. I can picture myself buying even things like CRT television, light gun or another retro game console. Those are very interesting things inside my mind.

There are of course limitations. I don’t have so much room in my house. So, what’s next? Moving to a bigger house to collect more games, systems, televisions and what more? There gots to be a limit somewhere.

Instead of just spending all my time playing every retro title I have for two to three hours a day I am actually also finding myself in improving my personal skills. This is somewhat the fact even when I am playing something but I also am spending my free time for learning something new in programming, technology, making my own games and writing texts and making music. So there are lots of things going on and this is just one way that reflects me as an individual.

Everything depends on everything. As I keep spending more time alone or with my wife I find myself quite content in my current situation. I am a developing individual but of course I am not a software developer…at least not at this moment. But who knows what future just might bring!

Characteristics of Sega Mega Drive Games

Posted on by Viljami

I was playing Shinobi III – Return of the Ninja Master as I started to focus on how the game is actually developed. I am sometimes, maybe subconsciously, starting to think how the game that I am playing is programmed or how the graphics are put together. I am not a professional game developer but I still find thinking about this very interesting. I started to realize that there are some characteristics of games that are developed for Sega Mega Drive.

Mega Drive, or Genesis, was released in the late 80s. It aimed to be a serious competitor for Nintendo Entertainment System. It also made it’s best to bring the experience of arcade to consumers living rooms. At this point the hardware performance of game consoles was beginning to be a lot closer to the level of arcade game machines. It was clear that Sega wanted Mega Drive to be more powerful than NES. Sega made this message clear by printing the text “16-Bit” to the surface of Mega Drive game console.

What kinds of games there were back in the day? Are they still worth playing ? We can start from the visual perspective. As Mega Drive had power, it produced very nice graphics if they were compared to the graphics that NES provided. I think SNES has a bit better graphics if you compare them to Mega Drive’s. But SNES was released way later than Mega Drive. The graphics are of course two dimensional as 3D modeled games weren’t yet available.

Mega Drive games are said to be repetitive. I think this is somewhat true. Many times you have to play the same part of the game over and over again until you finally succeed and get to progress. Mega Drive games can be a bit more violent than Nintendo games. You can understand this by thinking about hockey games that have or do not have fights. If you also compare Mortal Kombat games released for these systems there are some clear differences. Sega’s version has more blood on it.

Let’s talk about the gamepad a bit. As you think about how the controller looks you realize that it definitely was designed to be an improvement of NES controller. I mean, just look at it! It’s completely round. NES controller is so edgy and simple compared to Sega’s. There are three buttons, a start button and an axis button – nothing else. This makes this controller simple and easy to use. Although in some games it would be nice to have some more buttons. There are of course some more advanced gamepads available and this is only the one that originally came with the console.

Mega Drive games are addictive. You can play it’s games for hours. That’s just about how long you can spend playing Mega Drive. I think PlayStation later made it possible and even preferable to play the same game for tens of hours and it’s sequel, PS2, took it even further to this direction. Playing Mega Drive can cause you some serious raging. I think this has to do with the repetitiveness. Mega Drive was in late 80s and early 90s very affordable if you compare it to for example PC. In those days you had to spend a fortune if you wanted to buy a personal computer.

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