Intensive Gaming Diary

Blog about different aspects of retro and new video games.

Category: PC

Split Second – A Good Driving Game from 2010

Posted on by Viljami

I recently bought Split Second for my Xbox Series X as a digital copy. It was a cheap game (I bought it for about ten euros). I actually have played this game earlier but the platform was PC. I remembered having a great time with this game so I decided to grab it.

Split Second reminds me of Burnout 3 – Takedown. The gameplay has been adjusted. You don’t actually try to crash other vehicles. Instead you trigger some trap type of obstacles in your opponents way so that they will crash. You get power to trigger these traps by following close at your opponents tail or by drifting while you are driving in a corner.

I have to say that Split Second isn’t a perfect game. It has its flaws. Then again what game today wouldn’t have some disappointing features? The driving can’t be considered a simulation. It is actually very much like playing an arcade game. It is also already a bit outdated with its graphical presentation. This game was originally released for Xbox 360 and PC and surely also for PS3. So, I have played this video game for PC and Xbox 360.

This game reminds me of a somewhat better era for video gamers. Back in 2010 these games were easy to get into and also easier to complete finally. Every game released weren’t as ambitious commercially and in terms of how addicted gamers would become to the game that was in question. I kind of miss those days. We had way more games released. I think that every game can’t be a masterpiece. Every game cannot be a legendary one.

As there are fewer games being released and more money involved in the development process we are getting this clear picture of the state of this industry. Game developers might be aiming too high. At least thats how I feel. Well, maybe we will get some support in this matter from some indie developers.

One thing we can also have a debate about is how Nintendo has managed to get its console, Nintendo Switch, to be such a success. Switch is currently the most sold gaming console ever. It is soon passing PS2. I think its pricing and these good quality games that this platform seems to have have given this gaming device the success that it does currenlty have. Are you waiting for Switch 2? It is rumored that it will have a backwards compatibility with current Switch and also that it might not be such a powerful system when comes to pure technical performance.

As you can imagine I did play Split Second a bit over ten years ago with my PC. I have the game also as a physical copy. I have the frigging DVD disc! It is almost frightening to see these DVD boxes in my video game shelf. They are something that collectors do not wish to have. Do you have a DVD drive still in your PC? I do have, but actually I have disconnected the power supply from it. I did this partly accidentally as I had to change some parts to my desktop PC a while ago. I just haven’t had the time to try to connect the power again to the DVD drive. Actually I have also an external DVD drive that I can connect to my PC through USB. The main point of this paragraph must be that PC has been a digital platform for several years alreaady. What I mean is that if you buy a PC game you propably buy a digital copy of it.

There are plenty of good Xbox 360 and even some original Xbox games available in the digital store of Xbox. I actually bought three games just the other day for 21 euros. If you are into Xbox 360 gaming I highly recommend getting your hands on these games. It is a very good option for buying the physical game from a game store. And of course you might just have an only digital gaming console. Digital gaming seems to be more and more popular as the provess does progress.

What Are Some Reasons to Play Older Games?

Posted on by Viljami

First it has to be said that there are many reasons to play also older, or to use the right term, retro games. In this blog post I am going to explain and give some reasons that I and many others still play so to say old games. While there are many reasons to still play these games there are also reasons to play the newest games instead.

There are many things that have advanced in gaming technology. Happenings are processed more quickly since there is more memory to be used. Also, we have seen larger games. They contain more details. They have more complex scenery. These worlds offer even larger areas to be explored. The artificial intelligence of other characters than the main character has been improving.

This of course has a huge effect on what is actually happening while a player plays a video game. The game processes more data. The input of the player is analyzed more thoroughly. Some old games offer some nice game design solutions and today many game developers can make use of what was already designed in a game maybe even thirty or forty years ago. While technology has advanced also we have to remember some of these good solutions that old games had and still have.

One reason to go back to older games is of course the nostalgic feel that you get while playing a game that you have some memories with. You clearly remember the first time you started playing a game. You get the first reaction that you had and it reminds you of the feel that you had back then. The game hasn’t changed but your situation does have. The last time I had this kind of feeling was while I was playing Sonic Origins Plus. I got caught into nostalgic feel when I started playing the first Sonic The Hedgehog game. It was a huge game and also a huge character for Sega, The year that I first played this game was, I think, 1993. It brings back so many memories.

What about the way that we get to play retro games? It is a huge advantage to older game if it is easy to play it. I am talking of course about the importance of backwards compatibility. I have this way that I organize all my games. I keep these games in these two shelves that I am actually able to play with any console I have. I keep my other games in a storage. I do this because I think it is not so reasonable to keep games visible that I am not even able to play. Sometimes I like to demonstrate a game for someone visiting our home and sometimes a visitor picks up some game that he or she would like to play. And of course I myself can pick any game that I would like to play.

If you want to play retro games you have two different ways to do it. These ways are using original hardware or using an emulator. There has been a lot of conversation about emulation. I am not going to talk about so much of is emulating even legal or anything else like that. Lets just say that it is an option. Some think it is totally illegal and in a way it is. On the other hand preserving older games can be very valuable. After all we have to some way keep in touch with our video game history.

I have many gaming consoles in my setup. One part of my gaming setup has been already for some years these cool mini consoles. There have been mini consoles available for devices like PlayStation 1, NES, SNES and Mega Drive along with systems like C-64. You could of course just download an emulator for your PC and play these games but… Is it legit or legal? After all you are paying for something very interesting and valuable right here. The problem is that there just isn’t a mini console available made from all gaming systems. For example we are currently missing original Xbox and Sega Dreamcast mini console.

We talk on and on about what is the right way to play our retro games. I think the most important issue is that there has to be a connection between the old world of video games and the new world of video games. We have to somehow document our past. There are just so many games that game designers can take influences from. I think that it is a value for a game designer to know a lot about games. Of course if you know good games you can also design good games, right? You know the logic and what appeals to gamers.

Think about John Romero, one of makers of the classic FPS game, Doom. I mean, he started with playing old games in arcades. He played hundreds of hours of Pacman. He also had influences from Dungeons and Dragons, NES, SNES and Mega Drive games. And look what id Software did with Doom. It definitely revolutionized the way that we consume video games even today. Some games of this same era are Diablo and NHL 94.

So, it might not be possible to play every retro game. Do we have what it takes to document our video game history? Who has the power and responsibility to pass on these important lessons to our younger generation that doesn’t recognize all these older games? There can definitely be something to learn form them. While modern systems have the most power they also need the design. That’s where older games come into play.

Hades

Posted on by Viljami

Hades is an action role-playing-game that was published for Xbox Series X in 2021 after being released also already for Switch and Windows back in 2020. It isn’t currently one of the latest games but since it was priced very nicely (I paid only 19 euros for the physical copy) and there were news in this Finnish gaming magazine, Pelaaja, about the next Hades game, Hades II, to be released soon, I decided to pick this game and start to go through it.

Hades borrows elements from different role-playing-games. You don’t actually gather experience points. You buy upgrades that will help you to finally complete the game. You can have different strategies along your way. I have played Hades for almost thirty hours now and I have reached the final boss of the whole game only once. There is a certain need for luck in your guest. Also you play the game you get to understand how the different enemies take action and you learn how you can defeat them more easily. One of the key matters is your level of health. You have to try to dodge your enemies when they are trying to get you.

While the story is not so deep Hades does offer a lot to play. You do die often but when the game progresses you get longer runs eventually. Hades takes some time to learn to play. so you understand how the enemies take their action and when is the proper moment to try to hit them with your weapon. There are many different weapons to choose from. You first have to unlock them and then you will get to choose which one do you prefer. I ended up using the type that reminds me of a rail gun. It can shoot twelve times, quickly, and then you have to reload. You can also shoot a grenade that makes lots of damage. My main way to try to complete this game has been to try to get a weapon upgrade that triples the damage and also makes you vulnerable to the grenade. There are many other upgrades for weapons available and you can also unlock features that make you get a nice upgrade more likely.

Hades has very nice controls in overall. It is a very nice and fun game to play when you get the hang of it. The graphics are made to remind of some cartoons. Of course I have to say that all of the characters take deep influences from Greek mythology. Many characters that help the main character as the story progresses are actually sort of gods. I just had a conversation about this game with my friend and we talked about if this game is actually a three dimensional one or not. I don’t have a clear answer to this. The graphics look nice and they work very well.

You will also get a code with your physical copy of Hades so you can download the soundtrack of the game. The music in Hades feels nice while not having any deeper relation. I am saying that the music has an effect but it isn’t actually in the center where everything happens in this game. There are just so many other elements in this game that hold your attention. Music is nice but not so appealing. I have to say that for example in games like Burnout 3 Takedown or the first Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater the music had a very important role and this is just not the case with Hades.

You get to move a lot while you try to dodge the attacks of the enemies. You have to time your attacks well so you can be victorious. You progress through the levels. There is an enemy boss that you have to defeat after every level until you finally get to battle with the main boss of the whole game. It is of course the Hades. So the whole game is about trying to escape from your father’s home. After you finally loose your life you will have to start from the first level, again. The game consists of these runs. I have now had almost one hundred runs that are also attempts to escape.

This is a very good game. If I would have to say something negative I would say that it seems in a way a bit repetitive as a game and it has only a few levels. It does give you a lot to play. After all I do have spent almost thirty hours playing it. The game mechanics and the way that you handle the main character are very good. This all makes Hades a very pleasant game to try to beat and also to play.

Doom Guy – John Romero

Posted on by Viljami

Doom Guy is a book by John Romero that has been published in 2023. In short words it describes the creator of such games as Doom, Quake and Daikatana, just to name a few. The book goes through his whole life starting from being a child of an alcoholic father and some other issues he had as a young child growing up.

The beginning of the book is kind of sad. But I can appreciate that Romero is so honest. Ultimately the story is a happy one all in all. Yes, it is a happy and amazing story of how a hobby that involves spending hundreds of dollars to play video games in arcades transforms to a career that molded the whole video game industry.

The story begins from about 1970s. In the 80s was when John Romero was already actively developing some kinds of computer games. There was going on a transition from games that took only one screen in use to some games, like Super Mario Bros 3, that were played as they scrolled along to the sidesof the screen. The screen was scrolling to the players movement. This was, back in the days, something that required the newest technology.

Apparently there were games like Commander Keen released by Apogee. Later, when the company started getting their actual form, they decided to call the company “id Software”. And the “id” in the name was pronounced like it was written (not like “ai dee” an more like “id”). This team also had a very talented and hard working member – John Carmack. Carmack focused mainly on the hardcore programming while Romero also programmed and made sure on his his part that the vision that they were moving to was the right one. Romero also made many tools the team used and had his fingers in designing new levels for their games.

So, Doom was a revolutionary game. Before that game id Software released a game called Wolfenstein – 3D. Doom was released in 1993. Their next big game would have the name Quake. It was originally ment to be more of a phantasy type of a role-playing-game. Quake was actually a game that can be described more like a FPS game with very nice graphics. So, the team had to make some adjustments and start in a way to move towards a different goal with this game. Eventually this lead to Romero leaving id Software and go on to work at Ion Storm that was a new game company.

I have to mention that role-playing palyed a strong role in the team of id Software being about the most innovative game development team in the whole world in the 1990s. They especially enjoyed session of Dungeons and Dragons. Romero brought the vision and Carmack workd long hours programming these amazing games. They also had people working as level designers and as producers of music. They had also people working with the business side of the company.

John Romero has been successful in his career. We have, throughout the whole history, witnessed also some of his games being somewhat flops. This was the fact with a game called Daikatana. It was a disappointment for many of Romeros fans. The writer, John Romero, still adds a thought that you kind of have to fail some times to learn and to succeed. This seems very sensible to me.

All in all Romeros book offers some very satisfying details about these games that he has been working with. There is also some very nice insight to how games were designed at this time around 1990s. I can definitely recommend this book for any fans of id Softwares games or to somenone who wants to learn how the gaming industry was back in the 90s.

NES Games That Are Still Relevant in 2024

Posted on by Viljami

You might not spend so much time with NES games as you do with modern games that directly aim to keep you focused for tens or even hundreds of hours. This has everything to do with quickly advancing technology. Designing games goes forward also when the developers learn more and more and more hobbyists are starting to get into the world or playing video games. In this blog post I go through some NES games that are, in my opinion, still relevant today.

There are practically hundreds of games in the whole gaming library of NES. If you don’t have a clue what gaming console I am referring to I can tell you that NES comes from words Nintendo Entertainment System. It is a retro console that was introduced to us, gamers, in 1983. I have picked up these five games that I own. These all are very good games and I can definitely recommend them.

I have a Retro Trio console that plays NES, SNES and Mega Drive games. I can also use an adapter to play Master System or even Game Boy games. These adapters I have bought for a cheap price. I think I paid just under 40 euros for the Master System adapter and maybe 35 euros for the game boy adapter. It is very nice to play Game Boy games this way. The screen is very clear and bright compared to the screen of Game Boy or Game Boy color. There are some other ways also that you can play Game Boy games but lets not get carried away too much.

You can of course take your chance and use any NES emulator to play NES games on your PC. If you are going with this option I definitely recommend to get a replica of the original NES controller that you can attach with a USB cable. This brings the certain sense of authenticity to your NES games. These physical copies can be a bit pricey. They can cost anything from I think 15 euros to even 100 euros. Some rare games are even more expensive. So, I totally understand if you go the emulator way at least when you are just starting to get into NES games. The USB controller I mentioned earlier has a price tag of maybe 20 euros. I have never got into troubles with the compatibility and you can probably get it to work easily even if you use Linux.

You can sense that for example Super Mario Bros, that was released in 1988, has this certain lightness in the whole gaming experience. I mean the fact that it uses only so little memory. You can talk about randomly accessed memory or even hard disk. As I think you have witnessed NES doesn’t have a hard disk at all. You can use saved games in some games since they have an extra battery that enables long term memory usage. With emulators you can of course go around this and use saved states that come with your favorite NES emulator. So, this is one more reason to use software emulators instead of old retro hardware.

Graphics are two dimensional in these games. Sound is of course pretty terrible. If you are deeply into “chip tune” musical genre you might even like it that way. I personally think it is some kind of miracle how they could program the music for these games with all these limitations. Same goes to the overall design of these games. There are over 600 NES games that were released. These five are the ones that I have managed to grab. I have a total of maybe ten or twelve NES games in my collection. I did buy these all already some years ago. I can definitely say that I enjoy these games even if they are old and even if the time keeps moving forward. I think Nintendo did  agret job!

Every Gaming System Is Unique

Posted on by Viljami

I have a gaming setup in my living room (or maybe “gaming room”) currently that has total of 8 gaming consoles. Some of these devices are old and some of them are more recent. I have a Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series X that represent a more recent of a gaming system. I do have retro consoles also.

These are Sega Mega Drive Mini, PSOne and Retro Trio Plus. The last-mentioned is capable to support Mega Drive, NES and SNES games. I have also some adpaters that enable a gaming system like Master System or Game Boy to be played. I have also PS3 and a PS4 in my current setup. I almost forgot my Nintendo GameCube.

Here we are getting some kind of an idea of my gaming setup. The idea was to ponder on how every gaming system is unique. This comes in mind when you are thinking about game controllers. Every system has its own kind of a controlling device. NES has a very edgy controller while PSOne functions with a DualShock 2 controller that is originally a PS2 game pad. It is nice to have this kind of a compatibility between PS1 and PS2.

Some devices have backwards compatibility with games or some accessories. Nintendo Wii is a very special gaming console. It has this sort of a “magic wand” that you operate and control your games with. Wii is also backwards compatible with a legendary gaming system – GameCube. I liked the last-mentioned better and even went as far as replacing my Wii with GameCube in my setup of gaming consoles.

Some games can be expensive. While it seems to be a good idea to run some sort of an emulation gaming system there is one particular question that comes to mind: What controller should you use? There are two approaches to this matter. You can change your controller to support any gaming system or you can go with the latest and best controller for any gaming system that you are emulating.

You can think about a gaming system and consider how powerful it is. Every device cannot be as powerful as some newer device. If you want the most powerful system you should get yourself a PC. There are however many other matters that take count when you consider about which gaming system you prefer to play your favorite games with.

How is Switch able to compete with Series X and/or PS5? The gaming library can be one matter. Nintendo has games that feature characters like Super Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach and Kirby. Of course these games aren’t going to be released for these competing consoles. What Switch lacks in power it makes up in originality, design and content of its games.

Some factors that make game consoles unique have to do with their part in the history of video games. Technology is always improving. We are moving on all the time. We hear every day gaming people talk about what would be the newest console to appear in the markets. We have already heard about Switch 2 and PS6. What does the future hold for us gamers? We can only wait and see.

We have dealt with different gaming consoles. Some of these facts that make a system unique can be summarized are the design of the controller, library of games that are available, performance and raw power and backwards, or any other, compatibility between other gaming consoles.

I collect and play old and new games. It is a very tempting thought and I have already considered to just install an operating system like Lakka OS (or some other OS) to a device like Raspberry Pi 5 or maybe on an old desktop PC that I do have laying around in my home. In this way it would be possible to play many games from many devices. Physical copies can be pricy at times.

Game consoles are usually sold for cheap price. Companies like Sony manufactor these devices and sell them with a loss just to increase the console base world wide. Then they release games for the system. Games are where these companies get most of their profit from. This makes it a definitive fact that games do in a way make the gaming system to be also kind of unique. What do you think?

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.

Alone in the Dark Series

Posted on by Viljami

I have played lots of games during my whole lifetime. I just thought that it might be interesting for readers of this blog if I would write about Alone In The Dark game series. They might not be the best of the best in survival horror at the moment but their influence to this genre is huge. There is also a new Alone in the Dark game getting released in 2024.

The first game in this series was published in 1992. If you were playing it back when it was released I think there is a chance that you played it on a PC. Some of the first three games of Alone in the Dark were also released for PlayStation during 1990s. There are a total of seven games in the series.

What makes the influence huge was how the camera angels were adjusted. It made the game a scary one. Also the game utilises 3D graphics in a way that was never ever seen back in 1992. The most popular game that took influences of Alone in the Dark was Resident Evil and it was released in 1996 at least for PC and PS1. I obtained a book about RE some time ago and I am hoping to get to read it soon. I just have to finish the book that I am currently reading so I can begin with the book. It is called “Itchy, Tasty” and it is written by Alex Aniel.

Games in the series that were released during the 90s were of good quality in the standards of the games of that era. I think it might be a waste of your time to get back to them seriously. Well, maybe if you want to experience something old. There might be a retro feel in them.

So, is there a game in this series that would be a nice game to play even today? If we take a look on two games that were released in 2001 and 2008 we can figure an opinion for this question. Let’s face it. These two games are poor games. They don’t live up to standards and they defnitely don’t match my expectations. Out of these two the one released for PS2, Alone in the Dark – The New Nightmare, is better but it isn’t in any way a great game. It has also received a score of 66 out of 100 in Metacritic.

While these two games weren’t so good there are of course excpectations gathered towards this new Alone in the Dark game that is set to be published this year (2024). The genre of survival horror might bem rising its head again since there are rumours about new Silent Hill and also Resident Evil games getting released soon. There was already a short Silent Hill game released recently. It was only for PS5 and its name was Silent Hill – The Short Message. The game was released for free and it takes maybe three hours to complete. So, it is a short game for the fans.

One of my favorite game shops is saying that the new Alone in the Dark will be released in 19th of April. It will be released for PS5, PC and Xbox Series S/X. You can buy the PC release for example from Steam. The game has received open and cheerful welcomes and many fans are expecting this game to be good. For now we must wait for some more information. There are some trailers and early previews of the game avaialble online. You can also order it in advance if you wish to play it as soon as is possible.

 

A Whole Lot of Call of Duty

Posted on by Viljami

I got this idea for this blog post as I was playing Call of Duty 3 on PS2. I started to think about how many games there are actually in this series. Why is it that there are so many games in the series and what are the main reasons for its success? Why haven’t we seen other games or other types of games? What is the secret here?

The first game of Call of Duty was released back in 2003. The latest game in the series was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III that was released last year (2023). And of course I have to mention that this is a remake and the original Modern Warfare III was released already in 2011. We have seen a new game almost every year since the series started its journey.

I have enjoyed especially the first Call of Duty, Call of Duty – Modern Warfare III (the 2011 release on PS3) and the first Black Ops. There are several good quality games in the series. I don’t have a full collection of Call of Duty games but I do have many of them as you can see from this blog posts featured image.

What kind of games these are one might ask. This can be a mystery to someone that has never played a Call of Duty game. They are shooting games and in more detail first person shooting games or FPS games for short. The first three games took place in the second world war. Many Call of Duty games also describe some more modern scenes. You are typically fighting against terrorists.

While being first person shooters the Call of Duty games have this certain edge in them. They differ a whole lot of games like Crysis, Doom / Doom Eternal and maybe even some other FPS games. Definitely there is a some sort of strategy or style of play that can be clearly seen. Of course I have to also mention a tight competitor of Call of Duty. It is the Medal of Honor series of FPS games.

We can count how many games are there in this gaming series. There seems to be precisely twenty games that have been released from 2003 to 2023. The latest CoD game I have had a good time playing was Call of Duty – Vanguard that was released in 2021. I played it on my Xbox Series S. I currently do own the Xbox Series X but I played Vanguard already back when I only had the digital version of Xbox Series or Series S.

You can play the earlier Call of Duty games with a PC and with a mouse and a keyboard but I think that at least I personally enjoy very much playing them with a good quality game controller meaning a game pad. I found some information online that said that PS3 would be the first platform that a game in this series was released. I am not sure if that is correct information since I clearly remember playing Finest Hour, the first CoD game, on my original Xbox already back in 2006.

We haven’t got a clear answer to the questions I made in the beginning of this blog post. Why is the series so successful? Why are there about twenty games released and do they keep making more games of this kind? Of course the series has been successful. So why break the mode? There have been many developers for these games. Infinity Ward has made many of these games along with Sledgehammer Games. Also a developer named Treyarch has been very involved. I think that since there have been many developers there has been this clear possibility to keep making games through all these years.

I can definitely recommend some of this series’s games but I advise to have some carefulness as every title is not a pure diamond here. The games remind of each other. I recommend to start from the beginning and progress to some more recent games. I can definitely recommend also Black Ops games and I did enjoy some titles of Modern Warfare. If you are completely new to this series I recommend either playing Call of Duty Finest Hour (the first game) or the newest CoD – MWIII remake.

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