Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: Retro

Why Would You Play Mega Man 3 Today?

Posted on by Viljami

It takes some nerve to play Mega Man 3. You can play it with emulation or hardware. What ever your chosen form of play is you are going to face a very difficult game. Although it takes only three hours (regarding to HLTB website) to beat the game it does require a concentrated mind and good reflexes. NES as a gaming platform is not making things easier in any way. You also have to memorize many elements of this game.

I did try my best to beat the game in one sitting. I played Mega Man 3 for about two hours. I can only imagine the players back in the day trying to beat this game for hours and hours day after day until they finally could say something like “Man, I just beat the Mega Man 3 on my Nintendo Entertainment System!!”. For me the Sega Mega Drive was the closest thing to something like this. Even with Mega Drive I didn’t face a game as difficult as this one. This also tells us something about how gaming actually was back in the 80s and early 90s.

While Mega Man 3 is a hard game it is kind of rewarding after all. You get to know this game so thoroughly. When to jump and how hard should I push to accomplish a perfect landing that secures a some way of progression inside the game. You might get a hit from an enemy. Is it a critical hit? Can you continue to your goal or did you just miss something important that takes you all the way back to the beginning of the level?

Mega Man 3 isn’t for someone that is somewhat of a perfectionist. In several cases your character gets hit by an enemy or you miss a correct spot of a jump and lose some of your health. The health bar is your most important way to see how are things going and how are you getting with the overall progress in this game. Often in this game things get tight. There is a constant tension present while you keep playing and trying time after time.

Should you even try to play this game in 2026? You might like it. You might not like it. Regardless of the way you are going to play Mega Man 3 I am going to say to you that you will have to try it. It is a legendary game. That’s not even something to debate about. The game is legendary in a way that many youngsters today will never going to able to understand. And if you really like NES games the question about if you should or should not try to play this game, if you haven’t ever yet, is a kind of a “no brainer”.

We can go through some game mechanics. In Mega Man 3 you control the main character with a basic controller. You can move the character to forward and backward. You can jump and shoot with a press of a button. There are obstacles and enemies, that sometimes shoot ammo at you. If you get hit by an ammunition or an enemy you lose some of your health. You can pick up bonuses that can give you more health, lots of more health or maybe an extra life point. You get try each level for three times. The game progresses to a certain point. If you spend all three attempts, you’ll have to restart the whole level. Once you progress to a boss you get a try to defeat it. If you defeat the boss you get through the whole level. There are more than eight levels in the game. I only got to play two levels as I only played for two hours (I guess I will have to try again some other day and spend some more time with this game).

With some limitations that NES console does have I am encouraging you to play this game. If you like NES games this game is a must to play. You actually cannot save the game. You do have a password system that helps a lot if you are going to try to beat the game. Mega Man 3 was originally released in 1990 for NES. There are some later games released in the series. We can mention Mega Man X series and also some collections that have been released just lately. I think the game is also very much available as a NES cartridge as it doesn’t cost a whole lot. The price of Mega Man 3 seems to be about 45 euros today.

Red Dead Revolver

Posted on by Viljami

Red Dead Revolver was released in 2004 for PS2 and original Xbox. It tells you the story of a gun handler named “Red”. It is actually the first game in the series of Red Dead games that featured also, later, Red Dead Redemption and a sequel Red Dead Redemption 2. Red Dead Revolver was published by Rockstar Games.

The game is formed around 27 stages. The website, “How Long to Beat”, states that it takes seven hours to finish the game. I have played this game for a bit over nine hours already. I have almost finished it. I got stuck to the last stage that has a duel battle against the final boss “Griffon”. The duel, and also other duels in the game, are a bit hard to go through. “Griffon” is the final person that “Red” has to defeat in his journey of a revenge. There is a somewhat deep plot in the game but the action, at least for me, seems to be the driving force for trying to beat the game.

There is a lot of shooting and lots of weapons in this game. You basically select a rifle and a hand gun and also a melee or throwing weapon, like a knife, for you when you start a stage. You achieve some money from taking down the enemies that you can spend to buy better weapons. There exists also some other items that unlock some more content if you are interested in these special features of the game. Toughest parts are duels in which you try to pull your gun and aim it and also trigger the shooting to try to kill your enemy before the enemy kills you. There are some of these parts, maybe three or four, in this game. It can get tricky and you might have to spend a lot of time in trying to get through these parts.

You can buy Red Dead Revolver from Xbox store for fifteen euros. It is also possible to buy the physical copy of this game. It is backwards compatible with Xbox Series X. It isn’t the most expensive game but it can cost even as much as 70 or 80 euros since the prices seem to be rising. There are only a bit over 60 games from original Xbox that are actually backwards compatible with Series X. It might be interesting to try to collect all of them. I just recently got one more game that is backwards compatible in this way. It was “Star Wars – Jedi Knight – Jedi Academy” and it cost only ten euros. I got also some PS1 games with this same purchase. I am hoping to have some time with these games, also. One interesting game that I bought was “V-Rally 2”.

Red Dead Revolver is 22 years old game. It can be considered a retro game. What makes it remarkable is that it is actually the game that inspired the development of Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2. These were released in 2010 and 2018. I will always remember the launch of RDR2. Back then I was working in a game shop as a customer servant. I wrote a blog post of the shop about the release on this game shops own blog. We also sold a lot of RDR2 games and had a launch moment that started at midnight when RDR2 was actually released. I don’t know the actual sales figures of that happening but I can estimate that there were hundreds of games sold back at that moment that lasted maybe three hours.

Red Dead Revolver reminds a bit of Max Payne. It features very similar action in the gameplay. Both of them are shooting games with a slightly detailed plot that does make the game deeper as a video game experience. Plot can be very important in a video game but it never is the driving feature when it comes to how I like to play my video games. I actually even think that Max Payne was a bit more advanced and more realistic although it was released already three years earlier than Red Dead Revolver.

Old School Rally

Posted on by Viljami

Old School Rally is something for you if you like games like Colin McRae Rally and Colin McRae Rally 2.0 that were originally published for the first PlayStation. The driving feel is very much like in those classic retro games. You get actually to control your rally car using just your plain original gamepad. This seemed to be the norm way back. The gamers actually didn’t have so many driving wheels and pedals. The graphics weren’t as realsitic but yet these games just had something special in them.

I bought my copy of Old School Rally for Nintendo Switch for a bit over 30 euros. It think the precise price was 32 euros. It is a physical copy. The game is also available for PS5 also as a physical game and also for Steam as, of course, a digital copy of the game. With this same purchase I bought Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection. I tried briefly also this compilation of some earlier Mortal Kombat games. It was fun to play the first MK game like it was meant to be played in an Arcade. I got as far as trying to beat Goro. Then I had to give up for that session. Maybe I’ll try again later.

Old School Rally is really nice to play if you are familiar with CMR PS1 games. There are some differences. The cars aren’t official ones. They are fictive manufacturers and models. You also don’t get to fiddle with car settings actually at all. The damage that the car takes does affect the controllability of the car. If you damage your car greatly the driving becomes more difficult although not impossible. Car has breaking and steering functions although I don’t get to see under the hood so much and I think it isn’t actually required. My notes here are based solely on plaiyng this game. I haven’t seen the source code. This isn’t an open source release after all.

Breaking seems to be the critical fact when it comes to how you can handle your car. It isn’t, in my opinion, as accurate as was with CMR games. You also don’t get to fix how the breaks work. Other abilities of the car are the ability to accelerate and also the highest speed you can reach. Also, there aren’t any other competitors. There isn’t a series to compete in. Instead you get a record time that you have to beat on each stage.

Graphics are a bit fuzzy but I think they work just fine considering the clear comparison to CMR games. Actually, if you think about it, the CMR games are already almost 30 years old. This fact brings for me and also for a lot of other older gamers a huge amount of nostalgia. There is actually a lot to play in Old School Rally. I did spent over ten hours playing the campaign of this rally game. The How Long To Beat website states that it takes eight hours to finish Old School Rally.

I could share some tips for a beginner. Try not to completely wreck your car. Try to break in time with the corners. Don’t break too late or too slightly. Figure out which car to buy or not to buy. If you totally wreck your car during a stage consider retiring from the event and starting over. You can easily end up with a broken car trying to desperately beat the record time. This can be almost impossible. At times I found myself in this loop of repeating a stage. The driving is in Old School Rally more difficult with a broken car.