Intensive Gaming Diary

Blog about different aspects of retro and new video games.

First touches of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 on PS4

Posted on by Viljami

I’m a big fan of THPS. I have been that way since the very first game that was released on PlayStation 1. So it’s not a big surprise I have been waiting for this remake to drop. I bought this remake two days ago. In this blog post I’m going through my feelings on this release. I have played only completed 50% of the first THPS so I have a lot to play. It’s been nice to find out that the game is basically a lot like it used to be. Oh the nostalgia!

When first THPS was released on PS1 you couldn’t do manuals. This feature has been added to the game. It’s not a bad thing. This game, or collection, if you want to say so, is a good remake. It doesn’t stand up as a full new game. It is, to me anyways, a very good remake. There are some limitations that were probably there when the original game was released. Those slight flaws are also ones that make the game what it is and what it always was. There could be another very good skateboarding game to be made. This is a very good remake of a very good original game. And I’m happy I got this for about 45 euros instead of, say, 65 euros.

I can recommend this collection even if you haven’t played original THPS one or two. It would be a nice introduction to this genre and maybe even an introduction to how gaming used to be in the days when THPS 1 and 2 were the newest games ever released. Three dimensional modelling has advanced greatly since the release of these original games. Back then it was easier to spot an object just because there were so few of them. I particularly noticed this one as I was trying to trash all the “no skating signs”. It was much more difficult to spot these signs.

All in all I am very pleased in this gaming product that was brought to us by Activision. I haven’t found anything that would disappoint me or make me unable to enjoy this experience. It’s nice to have a good PlayStation gamepad to play this game. I think DualShock 4 is way better to play this game than some earlier PlayStation controllers. I hope I find some time to play this game a lot more.

Connecting gamepad of PS4 to your PC

Posted on by Viljami

I have for a long time used Xbox Ones Elite gamepad for playing games on my PC. This is fine when dealing with PC games but when it comes to PCSX2, the emulator for PS2 games, I would like to play with a good gamepad that has buttons layed out correctly. What I mean is I would like to play with a PlayStation controller. It is kind of stupid for me to play PS2 with Xbox gamepad.

This is where a program called DS4Windows comes in to play. It is very simple to use. You just run the application and connect your DualShock 4 gamepad to your computer. You can use USB or Bluetooth connection. That’s right – you don’t need to connect your controller necessarily with Bluetooth since a USB cable works just fine. You can download this application from http://ds4windows.com/ .

I am planning on buying another DualShock 4 gamepad to use for this particular purpose. I currently only have one of these controllers. They are in my opinion a great way to somewhat make PS2 games more playble and modern. So the player can concentrate to the game instead of loosing interest as the gamepad is too bad. This can be a great improvement considering FPS games like Call Of Duty series’s games that were hardly as nice to play with older gmaepad like DualShock 2.

As PS5 will be released, I think it’s going to be sometime in November this year, there is a new controller introduced to large audience. It is called DualSense. I don’t have any experience, which in this case is understandable, of this new gamepad. I am a bit excited about it and I am curious of what kind of quality and playability it will have inside. There are some great differences between Xbox and PlayStation gamepads. One of the biggest is the layout of thumb sticks on these gamepads. I hope the new PS5 pad gives us many new improvements in technology of gaming controllers.

Making games is big business

Posted on by Viljami

Right now video games are more popular than ever. PlayStation 4 has now sold more than 110 million copies. Nintendo Switch has sold more copies than Nintendo Entertainment System. Switch and PS4 haven’t been around so long. Switch was released in 2017 and PS4 in 2013. Let’s think about this. NES was released in 1983 and the most popular and the most sold gaming console ever PS2 was released in 2000. So PS4 has been around only 7 years and Switch only 3 years. What will these figures be after 15 years? You don’t have to be any genius to figure out what’s going on. Games are popular. Making games, and selling them, is big business.

I sincerely hope that big game companies keep bringing more quality in form of good games to growing group of gamers. Making a HD remake is sometimes okay but where are the new innovations? I don’t meen big changes, such as virtual reality, but those small things that made video games of late 90s and early 2000s so great. Game developers would have to take time to experiment with a gaming console and find its limitations and opportunities. That would be a way to win my hearth back.

I have already said this. I don’t care how excited you are about PS5. I am not going to be one of the first ones to buy it. I bought PS4 back in 2014 and I was a bit disappointed in it. That just tells about me as a person a lot. It tells us about my history in gaming. I started messing around with video games well before I even bought my first console. That’s just where I’m form and that also tells a lot about in which direction I’m headed.

I am a bit worried. At the same time I am hoping the best. I keep buying PS4 titles for twenty euros and I have now about five or so games that I haven’t even opened up. I haven’t played them. I haven’t even installed them. Why did I buy them? I don’t know the right answer. I just hope we get some very good games in the future. I have to also get to my retro games at times to get the idea of what a perfect, or at least good, game is and why. And what gaming means to me…Well, there’s a lot to think about there…

The picture is a screenshot that I took from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles

Burnout 3: Takedown – An Action Packed Racing Game For PS2 (and original Xbox)

Posted on by Viljami

I fell in love with this game. Well, maybe not in love but it had me spend hours playing. I have to tell you that I first bought this game for my original Xbox. Then I was many years away from Xbox and my gaming centered more around newer PC games and PS3. I got back to it some years ago as I found it from a local flee market. The price was maybe three or four euros.

So, what is this game about? Racing is the first thing that comes to mind. But that isn’t all. There is this “boost” feature that forces you to gather sort of fuel. You get more fuel for boost from taking risks when driving. For example you can drive almost hitting another vehicles. You can also sort of drift with your car. The most fuel you get from slamming your opponents to the wall, another car or a train. It also makes your opponents to lose important time and you can have a huge advantage by taking out your opponent or opponents. That’s what “Takedown” stands for in this games title.

“Why do you love this game?”, you might ask. It’s like having a break from these very realistic racing games. It is more approachable than some more realistic driving games like Richard Burns Rally for example. There is a nice mixture of skill and randomness needed to play Burnout 3: Takedown successfully. So it’s good entertainment. But like with almost all video or computer games you have to understand that this content is purely fictional. One day I was thinking about this as I was playing this game. You really have to take down your opponents. I mean you have to make a push to eliminate your competition. Driving like this in real life would be disastrous. Would someone be so influenced by this game that he or she would actually try these tricks while actually driving? I mean you have to have a reason to understand that this not real. You have to separate this game from reality.

Original Xbox vs PlayStation 2

Posted on by Viljami

Xbox

+ Better controller and better feel for FPS games like Halo

+ Hard drive included so saving games is smoother

– There is actually no working emulators for PC

PS2

+ Good support for PC emulation

+ USB connectivity

+ Lots of used games available because of huge popularity

– Need for memory cards (though nowadays you can buy for example 128 MB card that holds all your saves)

There are many differences between these game consoles that had to battle against each other in the beginning of 2000s. Above I have made some pros and cons for these two devices. We can start from controllers. Xbox had a different layout for buttons in its controller. While PS2 laid out the analog buttons side by side Xbox placed them quite differently. I don’t know technically how Xbox managed to be more playable when discussion turns to FPS games.

These consoles had many games that were only released for Xbox or PS2. Xbox had Halo. PS2 had God of War games and Gran Turismo. Xbox sold 24 million units as PS2 sold amazing 159 million units. That should explain why there were more games released for PS2 and why there is now lots of used games on sale right now for PS2. I remember that players had back then an attitude against Microsoft. It was entering gaming industry and Xbox was its first gaming console. It already dominated PC operating systems markets. Many thought it to be too large company and now it entered the world of gaming.

In my humble opinion you really can’t tell which one is better. They are different consoles and have different abilities. They both reflect the time and situation that gaming was in as it was the beginning of 2000s. I like to play both of these systems. It takes me back to this time and brings up a lot of nostalgia inside my mind. There were also many identical games that were released for these systems. So I really can’t tell which one is better – you have to figure it out yourself. If you have any comments or something to add feel free to comment below.

Recommendation From A Friend – Carmageddon (PS1)

Posted on by Viljami

My friend messaged me that he had a good subject for an article for my blog. He had an opportunity to send me a picture of his favorite PlayStation game. The game is Carmageddon. It wasn’t so familiar to me but it was a cool idea to feature him on this article. So the guy you see in the featured image is the friend. His name is Pauli. We are actually from the same street and we lived close by as childs.

Carmageddon is kind of a racing game. You race against time but you get more time and points for crashing to opponents and hitting people that are watching the race. This game was popular in the 90s. It was considered to be a bit violent and I somehow remember that it was even banned in some countries because of that. Why haven’t I played it? I think this game was more popular as a PC game and I didn’t play. It obviously had a port to PlayStation but it never got to my hands as I was actually playing my PS1. I played racing games like Gran Turismo or Colin McRae Rally.

So who is this Pauli and why did you let him on the cover of your new blog post? To answer to this question I would have to say that I just had make a blog post about this game. Maybe the idea just gave me kicks and it was cool idea also. And I think this blog could be more to some social sides of gaming also. And a little bit less about me writing stories about my somehow and somewhat interesting stories where I play alone my game consoles. Yeah, you must get it. I play single player games, alone, in my room, with dimmed lights? I know that’s not the case. So this story was about Paulis favourite PS1 game. Thanks for reading…

And if you want to hear Paulis music you can head to his SoundCloud page

How Did I Get Started With Call Of Duty

Posted on by Viljami

I first got into playing Call Of Duty games back in 2006 when I first bought then already a bit old gaming console – the original Xbox. So it was fourteen years ago. I started to look for games, mainly used ones, that were of good quality. I ended up buying maybe three games that I thought were interesting and CoD was one of them.

So there have been many games released inside this game series. I might not have played all of them but I can tell you that some good ones are the first Black Ops and also Modern Warfare Three. I liked the first CoD but I don’t think it’s the best. We had already seen games like Halo on Xbox. It wasn’t anymore so special to have a first person shooter on a console. I am talking about the situtation that we had in the end of 90s when players were thinking that you couldn’t really play FPS’s on gaming consoles and they would have to be played solely on PCs. So the first CoD wasn’t the first FPS on a console.

I have really enjoyed playing CoD series’s games. After getting into the first two of these games on Xbox I went on to buy some CoDs for my PS3. I even have played some CoD games on my PC. I think the newest game in this series is Ghosts for PS4. I recently grabbed CoD Black Ops 1 for PS3. I really enjoyed it. I also bought WWII for PS4 but haven’t yet played it.

I just liked very much how you move inside the game and how you can aim and move. This playing style combines realism and play ability and I think that was finally the thing that got me hooked. Action inside the game is supported with many different options of weapons and historical facts that are at least somewhat correct.

Still this series of games isn’t perfect. I was disappointed in one game of this series that I bought for PS4. It was Advanced Warfare. I just couldn’t enjoy it. The weapons that were used brought to my mind some clips I had then just watched that described how soldiers shot civilians in the Middle East. So I really couldn’t enjoy the game. I’ve heard some bad criticism on Infinite Warfare also and I do have witnessed as it was sold for 10 euros in many gaming stores.

So I hope this post gave you something. Whether it was a new point of view, a nice recommendation or review of a game you was thinking to buy or any other type of reason that you liked this article. It’s nice if you liked it. Keep playing them games!

What in the world was (or is) DOS?

Posted on by Viljami

DOS stands for “Disk Operating System”. It has to be mentioned also that it was developed by Microsoft. It was the most popular and most used operating system before Windows, and even Linux, started to dominate. Windows brought graphics to user interfaces of operating systems. MS-DOS required users to type commands to for example list files in a folder, move from one folder to another and to start a program or launch a game.

It has to be mentioned that while DOS was the most popular main stream operating system it wasn’t the only one. In academic world there existed an operating system called UNIX. I have stumbled on UNIX as I have studied computer science. In UNIX you have to write commands also.

This article deals more with the use of DOS and games that you could play on it. I am not going to explain more about technological views of DOS. I remember playing many games. Some games were clearly made for children to learn new skills. My dad even programmed a tool for me to learn multiplication table.

I remember times when I tried to program a simple game with QBasic. This is crazy. I remember the kinds of floppy disks that were used back in the day. I can hardly translate the names in Finnish that these were called. If you want to know the bigger and flat one that had less space on it was called “lerppu” and the newer, smaller and one that had more capacity was called “korppu”. So remember this words if you ever have a chat with a Finnish nerd.

I have written earlier another post about this topic. You can read it here.

Playing NBA 2K14 on PS4

Posted on by Viljami

How I got in to playing basketball games? First I started to get interested about these kinds of sport games as I was already playing basketball. It was my hobby for 7 years. Then I stopped playing as I wanted to concentrate to studying more. The first basketball game I ever had was Super Real Basketball. It was a game for Sega Mega Drive. It wasn’t the greatest game or the most realistic. But that’s how I started to get into basketball games.

The game that really caught my attention was NBA Jam. I played it in arcade in the 90s. It became my favourite game at that time. I liked also very much Mortal Kombat. These were the best games for us to play in arcades. I usually played with my friends in arcades. Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam are so great titles that I still play these original games on my Sega console even today. There have been many games released later that had better graphics and controls and so on. I still like these original games also.

NBA Jam was a hit in arcades all over the world. Sure, it was appealing and attractive. It wasn’t so realistic. There was NBA Live series that was trying to create games that were more detailed. I didn’t like this series so much or get into it. I remember playing some basketball games on PS1. But the best games that were dealing this sport were yet to be released. I have also played many basketball games on Xbox and PS3. I just didn’t so much get into them. I have to mention, in this context, a very good basketball game for PS2. That game is NBA Street vol 2 on PS2.

NBA 2K14 isn’t the latest basketball game but it surely is the one I have played the most. This game was also among the first games I bought for my then fresh and shiny PS4. I started creating a character. My imagination started flowing. I created a player that was 6 feet tall. He played as shooting guard. I added some base skills to ball handling, passing and 3-point shooting. When the game, and new season starts, you don’t first get to play. You might get 5 minutes at court to prove your skills. Then you start to get more playing time as your character progresses.

NBA 2K14 has many dimensions in it. I found it appealing as I have some history inside basketball. I have learned new ways to look at this sport. I have tried to make some kind of a game myself. This has not been easy for me. I would like to create some kind of strategy game. I went on to play 2K14 for maybe 100 hours as I developed my characters skills to overall of 99 and managed finally to win the MVP and the championship. This is a very good game. I think it brings some role playing games’s elements to sport gaming. As I had achieved almost everything the game had to offer I moved to NBA 2K18. I didn’t like it so much. This time I created taller character that played the position of power forward.

The legacy of Colin McRae Rally

Posted on by Viljami

Now that Dirt 5 is coming to us later this year it would be nice to think about how Codemasters started this whole rally game thing. So it was 1998 and PS1 was the best and most popular gaming system out there. We had already seen some really good racing games. Gran Turismo was released early in 1998. The first Colin McRae Rally game was good, but in my opinion, the second game was even better. It had some awesome physics modeling that made it the most realistic rally game of its time. Back then racing games were mainly played with gamepad instead of a wheel and pedals. This made playing not so realistic but also really fun and it also demanded a good concentrating.

Two first games were popular. Third game, Colin McRae Rally 3, was released on the next generation of gaming consoles. It was released for PC, PS2 and original Xbox. I really liked this game also. Graphics are better than in the first two games but the feeling and controlling is very much like in these first two games. Colin McRae Rally 04 and Colin McRae Rally 2005 followed some years after. It tells a lot about this games popularity that there were so many games released. It actually had competitors. One really good simulation rally game was Richard Burns Rally. Some players thought that Colin McRae games weren’t actually the most realistic racing games that existed. That was about to change. But it took several years for Codemasters to develop its most realistic rally simulation game yet. I am talking about new games that were released to PS4.

Dirt series started with Colin McRae DiRT. It brought nice rally driving experience along with some other kinds of vehicles for players to drive with. It was a good racing game. It was followed by Colin McRae Dirt 2 and Dirt 3 that were both released, also with the Dirt series’s first game, on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. I talked about how Codemasters were also beginning to develop a racing game that would be more realistic. The game, which also has a sequel, was Dirt Rally. It was released for PS4 along with PC and Xbox One. It brought realistic driving experience to players that could even use wheel and pedals to play this racing simulation.

Surely there are many racing games and even series’s of racing games. Colin McRae Rally is still very important to me and close to my hearth. It introduced me to rally games. I also played other racing games, but not really any other rally games. With Dirt Rally 2.0 and Dirt 4 released already some years ago rally game fans will know where they are turning their heads to as they need some more rally gaming experinces. The saga continues as Dirt 5 will be released later this year.

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