Gaming Technology Archives - Intensive Gaming Diary

Switch Is Now The Most Sold Nintendo Console

Posted on February 13, 2026 by Viljami

Nintendo Switch passed Nintendo DS as the most sold Nintendo console of all time just recently. There have been over 155 million Switch video game consoles sold worldwide. This console was released already in 2017. Only Sony PlayStation 2 has sold more than Nintendo Switch. We saw earlier last year how Nintendo got to release the sequel and it was named Switch 2.

Current situation of Nintendo tells us a lot about how popular gaming really is today. Many people do still have the first Switch. It is also available for a game consumer to purchase. There haven’t yet been any decisions about how long will the first Switch stay in production and available for purchase. I don’t know if it will ever succeed like PS2 did. PS2 was for many people something even more than a device to play your latest video games. It was also for many a very working and first DVD player for watching also the latest movies. Currently PS2 holds the record of most selling gaming console with over 160 million units sold.

PS5 has also sold well. It holds the eight place in the list of most sold gaming consoles of all time with over 92 million units delivered. In this discussion we can also add Xbox Series S/X that have to this day sold almost 30 million units. PlayStation 4 has sold over 117 million units and Switch 2 a bit over 17 million units already. Switch 2 hasn’t been in the markets for even a year. It was released in June last year (2025).

As I am a hobbyist in this field I do have a Nintendo DS gaming console. I also do own Nintendo Switch Lite and Switch 2. I barely use a Switch console in the handheld mode. I keep my Switch 2 docked and connected to my television. As Switch 2 is fully backwards compatible with the first Switch it made a perfect sense to actually remove Switch from the setup when I first got my Switch 2 last year.

Nintendo DS is a funny and retro style of a gaming console. It offers a portable option for playing video games while being in the move. I got it just out of curiosity. It was first introduced in 2004. This was way before the modern smart phone as a gaming format was introduced. There were cellular phones but the first iPhone we did saw in 2007. With this in mind during the 2000s it would have been reasonable to buy a Nintendo DS and actually many people eventually did buy it.

I got my Switch two or three years ago. I wanted to purchase it for my somewhat intensely growing gaming setup. It offered some interesting games that weren’t available on any other system. I’m talking about games like Super Mario Wonder and Link’s Awakening and every other Mario, Donkey Kong and Zelda game out there. Nintendo just seems to have this certain ability to entertain every one from children to senior. If we really go back to the 1990s we can see how first Sega and later Sony tried to destabilize Nintendo. Sega and Sony tried to offer things like blood and violence while SNES for example had their own modified and not-so-bloody version of a game like the first Mortal Kombat. Also, with SNES, the NHL hockey game didn’t include fighting at all.

Nintendo has always been for the whole family. They have been and still are a very successful gaming company. It has to be stated that Nintendo was the company that gave a console called NES or “Nintendo Entertainment System”. They were the company that made video gaming popular again back in the 1980s. Nintendo had games that were of a very high quality. The quality of the games seems to be the key to success they’ve managed to hold even today.

If you want to read more about different video game consoles and how they have sold (the website keeps updating) you can head to:

This Wikipedia page right here

Finding The Right Difficulty Level

Posted on December 13, 2025 by Viljami

At times it can be hard to find the right difficulty level. Especially when you are trying to find an interesting new game to play. Some games are basically harder than others. Some offer many types of difficulty level. Some are just way easier to play than some others. Also the matter that you have actually played a type of a certain game can make it harder or easier for you to get into a game.

Basically most games are trying to get you hooked. They are easy to get into but hard to master. This does apply to most video games but maybe not every one of them since there are many ways to approach this matter of difficulty level and adjusting it just so that it fits your playing skills. Of course you will learn a lot especially when you are starting to play a game.

If we consider a game like Dark Souls you are constantly trying to beat a part of the game. It is a hard game. And it takes many times and a lot of repeating to try to master the game. Some games approach this difficulty issue in a somewhat different way. We can actually talk about something like a learning curve. If a game has a steep learning curve it takes a lot of time to get into. Some games have a gentle learning curve so that it is easier to start getting into this kind of a game.

You can talk about learning curves while having a conversation about any type of a thing you are trying to learn. I think I first discovered it while I was still studying my computer science degree. We were dealing with some PHP programming frameworks and you could say that one framework would have a steep learning curve while some other might have a more gentle learning curve. There were options, we were discussing about what framework we should use for a project, like Laravel, Symfony and CodeIgniter. We actually went with Symfony after all and that was the tool we were using in that project back in 2015.

Actually programming and writing have many things in common. I find writing to be a lot easier. I guess it really is a matter of how much time you do spend practicing your actual skills. I have always enjoyed thinking about design issues while developing software of any sort. Of course are talking right now about hobby projects in programming or maybe some projects that a student of this field would come across while studying. I am not a person that really actually enjoys writing software. As you might have figured, already, I do enjoy writing and I do enjoy it a lot. You can say that it is easy and it comes naturally for me.

If you check the featured image of this blog post you can see my new keyboard. This keyboard is “Ducky One 3 TKL RGB”. It didn’t cost so much as I bought from a “black friday” sale deal. I like this keyboard and it looks cool also. I usually do play with a game pad while I play on my Windows 11 PC. I use my new keyboard mainly for writing blog posts or any social media content. I am also active in some discussion forums. This is currently not so popular but I somewhat enjoy staying active on that front also.

Lets get back to where we started. We were talking about how to choose a difficulty level. Many games are designed in a way that you first start with some difficulty level and then you advance and eventually you get to a state in which you are trying to beat the game and try to finish it so you can move on to the next game that you have in your gaming backlog. It can add a great value to a game if it is possible to play it over again with a tougher difficulty level. This actually makes you want to spend some more time with playing this certain game.

It can be at times tough to try to find a game that you can really spend tens, or maybe even hundreds, of hours playing. You go from actually trying to learn the basics of some game to just concentrating on it. Then one day you check the timer of that game and you might be a bit surprised to find actually how much time you have spent. This is actually a state that I like to call something like a “flow” state. You just forget everything else and keep playing for some hours forgetting all the matters that do sometimes bother your mind.

I myself have been trying to find something nice to play this week. I started with these games I mentioned in the last blog post and the game that I chose to play was God of War (PS4). I started with the easiest difficulty level but soon found it to be too easy. I figured that this game wasn’t a right game for this moment. So, I went to my PS2 library and chose to play Flatout 2. I played it for about five hours. I actually started also playing Zelda – Tears of the Kingdom but I got stuck in the beginning and gave up. Yesterday I picked up WRC 7. I played it also today on my Windows 11 PC.

So, it can at times be hard to find a game that offers you as a gamer a proper challenge and you get to adjust also your chosen game’s difficulty level. Lets hope everyone finds a nice game this weekend that they can really enjoy! We will get back to some gaming content next time I decide it is a time for a new update or just when I feel like writing some more content to this blog.

The Power of Batocera

Posted on August 30, 2025 by Viljami

This blog post mostly deals with what Batocera can accomplish as an operating system for a PC. I recently bought a new personal computer. There were many reasons for this and one of them was the global transition to Windows 11. After October 14th (2025) Windows 10 wont be supported anymore by Microsoft. This means that there are no guarantees that your Windows 10 computer would be functional. There will be no security updates. So, I had to buy a new PC mainly because of these considerations.

My older PC was bought at the end of 2020. It wasn’t an old computer. It just wouldn’t be supported by Microsoft anymore after October 14th. I have to agree that it had some age already, but I really wasn’t ready to buy a new computer. I would have liked to use the old one a bit longer than was actually possible. My new PC runs the latest PC games smoothly. It also runs Xbox 360 and PS3 emulation which wasn’t possible with my older PC.

I figured that since my old PC was powerful enough to run PS2, GameCube and original Xbox emulation, I wanted to use it as a retro gaming platform. I have had some nice experiences with Recalbox, so, that was my first option. Well, I wasn’t at first able to get Recalbox installed directly to my older PC. It did run but it was kind of installed to my USB stick. I wanted to try to install Batocera instead. I had heard a lot of positive debate about it. So, I went with Batocera and finally it worked like a dream.

Batocera is an operating system that is very much related to Linux and is also dedicated to being able to run some retro games. My older PC was powerful enough for this purpose. After some fiddling with installations and moving some games to the computer I managed to get some games running. I think original Xbox, GameCube and PS2 have many interesting games for me to play and experiment with. Since all my gaming consoles of this particular era have ended up getting finally broken I figured that emulation could enable me to play these kinds of video games one more time.

I have this issue with older gaming hardware. I have a Nintendo GameCube, Sony Playstation 2 and also an original Xbox but they all broke down as I had them set up in my corner of gaming in my living room. I guess they are gathering too much dust and finally end up not reading the disc at all. I also have a Xbox 360 console that isn’t functional and the reason seems to be dust.

You can actually run Batocera from a USB stick but I wanted to install it to my older PCs hard drive. This required me to boot the computer to my USB stick. This required some fiddling with BIOS settings. This isn’t actually difficult but it requires some knowledge. However there are instructions that can be found online. I also wanted to wipe my disks completely. I did it with a program called ShredOS. Now, this procedure took about 14 hours. I ended up running it through overnight so I wouldn’t need to monitor this. After I got rid of all the content from my hard disks, that were a 2TB disk and a 256GB disk, both of them SSDs, the actual installation process was simple. Of course I had to set up all of these systems BIOSes and move over all the game roms.

I wanted to be able to play my retro games on the Batocera that I had installed with a controller of Xbox Series S/X. I find this controller to be as comfortable as a controller can be. I also bought a good quality cable that was three meters long. This way the controller didn’t need a battery at all. I don’t actually mind about the cable. I actually prefer using cable over using a battery in a controller. The latest Xbox’s controller is also a natural choice because it is very much compatible with a PC. I am playing my GameCube, original Xbox and PS2 games with this controller. It is very versatile as a game pad.

Batocera needs some power to run this kind of emulation. It is nice to be able to actually have a dedicated device for playing retro games like this. I am very content that the system is able to run also Dreamcast games if I would just set up the BIOS and move over the game roms. You can also play some older video game consoles games with Batocera. Some of these games feel a bit clunky since they are a bit old already. All in all I find Batocera a good video gaming operating system for any gamer. It is a good way to utilize also your old personal computer if you are replacing your old PC maybe because of the transition to Windows 11.