1980s Archives - Intensive Gaming Diary

Some Notes About Kid Icarus

Posted on March 9, 2022 by Viljami

How it feels to play a game that has been released over 35 years ago? It feels amazing and so nostalgic. I didn’t play Kid Icarus as a child. I was so small kid back then. I think I might have seen someone else playing this. But I never played this back in the 80s.

I picked up Kid Icarus as I was browsing a local game shops NES games. It isn’t a pricey game. It cost me 35 euros. I ordered also some other games. I now have a total of seven games for Nintendo Entertainment System right now. I am playing these games with my Retro Trio Plus console.

Kid Icarus is a simple platform and shooting game. You have unlimited amount of arrows that you can use to eliminate enemies which are flying or crawling and attacking you. When you kill an enemy you get hearts. With one controller button you can jump. The other button is used for shooting an arrow. You can shoot to your left or right or even up. You also come across some enemies that take lots of arrows to kill. You can find the ground to be slippery or icy at times.

You basically move upwards in a level and keep shooting at ghosts and other monsters. When you reach a certain stage the game gives you a check point where you can continue your game from. As is usual with NES games the saving is not possible. There is some kind of a password system but I didn’t get so close to utilizing it.

Kid Icarus is a fun game. And it’s a very old game. I don’t know if it’s so interesting after you have played it for a while. If you are really into some 80s stuff and NES I can recommend this game for you. I just don’t think it would be so valuable as a game for someone that likes to play the greatest or latest games.

As times have progressed Kid Icarus is a blast from the past. It makes me think how designing of games has evolved. It makes me think about all the limitations these developers faced in 1986. So, to sum it all up I have to say that it is a nice game but I don’t think its worth to spend an eternity playing it. So, today I’m going to play my Gran Turismo 7 for a while and maybe I have time to try to finish Diablo II Resurrected. Who knows?

How Basketball Games Have Evolved – From Super Real Basketball to NBA2K18

Posted on January 25, 2021January 11, 2022 by Viljami

The first basketball game I ever owned was Super Real Basketball. It was released for Sega Mega Drive. Later NBA Jam came and it was maybe the best basketball game, or maybe title, of all time in sport games history. Let’s take a deeper look into how Super Real Basketball was played and how it was compared to the latest basketball game I have right now in my collections.

Super Real Basketball was fast paced game. You could move one player that had or didn’t have the ball. You had your defensive play and your offensive play. You could steal the ball if opponent tried to pass it to a teammate. When you had a drive to the basket there suddenly appeared an animation that required you to hit the shoot button at right moment. If you were on defense and you were near the player that was trying to score you could block the shot, again, by pressing a button at correct time. If you wanted to shoot a three pointer that was also possible.

The limitations of one of the first Sega Mega Drive basketball games were that although it promised a sense of reality it actually wasn’t very realistic. One thing there is that could have been designed better and that was the statistics of the game. The game didn’t have strong statistics. There weren’t real names of players of NBA or any other league. Names were just some basic names. You really couldn’t make much of a difference between players. Some players were faster than others or had better shooting skills. You just couldn’t name a player that was good with for example ball handling.

When it comes to the latest basketball games there is lots of improvements that have been made over the time as sport games have generally developed more. The latest NBA game I have is NBA2K18. The 2K series of basketball games has had good reviews, I think, since the release of NBA2K14. I think you can already trust the quality. When there is another season beginning there will be a good basketball game made with the latest players and teams.

Statistics ar great in NBA2K18. You basically play maybe two or three seasons and develop your player. You first choose some qualities of the player that don’t change like the name, number of the players shirt and height and even weight. You have to think what kind of a player you want to create. Will it be a 3 point shooter, point guard or play maker or do you want to become a center that has amazing blocking and defensive skills. After that you play the regulat season, one season is 82 games long and if you win enough games, you go to playoffs. Your player gets skill points that give you options to buy more stats for your player.

The gameplay is very nicely developed especially compared to the first basketball game I was talking about earlier. You can make steals, although you can get a penalty, if you are too much into stealing the ball, block a shot of an opponent in real time. Shooting is based on how open you are, what kind of a release you have and also how good is the ability of shooting of your player. You have a strong feel that you are actually the player. The Mega Drive game was about team play – the newer game is about individual player, but you have some game modes that enable you to play as a team or as a coach. I’ve only played NBA 2Ks, 2K14 and 2K18, as a single, individual, player.

So there is a lot of progress. I can tell you about NBA Jam also a bit. I first started playing it in an arcade. We had a great arcade that had games like NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat. So that was the first touch. I later played with a friend that had College Slam on his PC. That was cool. Lately I bought NBA Jam for Mega Drive. It’s still a great and fast paced basketball game that is played two versus two. There have been many versions and I like the PS3 version the most. It’s funniest when played with an opponent that is a human person. It’s not so much fun if played against a computer.

So these two basketball games are ones that I truly have myself played and I’ve played them a lot. It’s really nice to see how the sports games have been developing since late 1980s. And you can see how licensing, and I mean here that the players and teams have real names, affects the experience of the game. You can name a player that is good at shootiing three pointers for example. Like, to mention someone, Stephen Curry. It gives that certain touch to the games build aaround playing basketball. There are also games in which you can play on the streets. Maybe I have space and time to write about them some other time.

Sega vs Nintendo – What was it all about?

Posted on December 16, 2020January 11, 2022 by Viljami

Nintendo released a maximum mega hit gaming console back in the 80’s. It was called NES or Nintendo Entertainment System. Atari had released gaming consoles targeted to use inside customers living rooms. It was about the time when arcades were quickly challenged by these kinds of devices you could easily set up inside your own home. The trend was there. Personal computers, PCs, were becoming more and more popular also.

While Sega Master System wasn’t a very bad console it couldn’t fully challenge NES. Sega knew they had to release a better, more powerful, gaming console to compete with Nintendo. Mega Drive, or Genesis as it was called in the USA, was released at the end of 1980’s and in Europe right at the beginning of 90’s.

I remember clearly the commercial of Mega Drive. It was a promise to bring arcades to homes. It delivered graphics and sound at 16-bit quality instead of earlier gaming consoles 8-bits. If Master System didn’t have so many hit games Sega promised also to bring good quality software in the form of great games. Sonic The Hedgehog and Golden Axe II were some of the most popular titles back then with not forgetting some greatness that was brought to paying customers by games like Splatterhouse, Streets Of Rage and for example Kid Chameleon.

Nintendo had Super Mario. Can someone say seriously that Super Mario wasn’t a great game? I think no one would say or think that way. So he was the mascot of the whole NES and also Nintendo. The battle for the gamers hearts (and money) was ultimately bloody and sweaty. You can have, if you wish, a great debate about which console had better games then the other.

As the battle continued Nintendo seemed to take in consideration how violent some games were. They started to deliver fighting games with no blood, hockey games without fights and cute characters that might seem to appeal to younger audience. Sega instead was reaching for customers that wanted this kind of rawness in their games. They didn’t remove the blood or the violence. You have to remember that things were a bit different back then since games in general weren’t so realistic. Sega was also paying more attention to the packaging of their games since Master Systems games were catching critic on that issue.

So who won the battle? You can definitely say that both consoles and companies were doing great. Sega was successful and so was Nintendo. Later, Sega made some bad decisions and started to be in trouble. The last console that was released was Dreamcast. Nintendo instead has been bringing gaming consoles up to this day as Switch is their latest console. Dreamcast was released in the end of 90’s and Switch was released 2017.

First games I remember playing

Posted on April 13, 2020January 11, 2022 by Viljami

I remember how I got started with gaming. It was 1980s. Playing video games was already popular. There had already been some consoles like Atari 2600 and Commodore 64. PC was also popular. First gaming system that I got to play must have been PC. And it was somebody elses. Our family got our first computer and I think it was 1987 if I remember correctly. So I was three or four years old and I had already begun drawing with pencils. I could recognise some letters but I was too young to start writing or reading. I got to learn those skills later in school.

Games that we had on this PC were interesting to me. We had some Sierras classics like Police Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and Kings Quest. I was fiddling around with some QBasic games. I even wrote a small game with QBasic later as I was a bit older. I didn’t clearly understand the full potential this machine had. So I didn’t get into coding so much. I was also drawing something with early Paint this PC had.

I learned to write my first words playing Larry. I didn’t understand this games sexism. My parents allowed me to play it. Sexy parts of the game weren’t so clear and we understood them later when we grew more. It is a soft game on this matter. At least I think so. I once asked my father what was a “prophylactic” and he answered to me “Gee. I really don’t know. Can you figure it out from the picture? It looks like a gem or something.” So I was allowed to play this Larry and it was only seventh game in this series that got my parents a little bit worried because I was young. I played seventh Larry maybe in 1996 or something like that.

There were so many interesting games. Some of them were Sopwith, Space Commanders (Space Invanders Clone), Bubble Bobble, Test Drive and so on. Too many to list here. I don’t remember so much of the techical side of our computer. Our dad upgraded its processor to 286 so before that the processor was much slower than that. One day we tried to play Wolfenstein 3D on the computer but we failed to run the game. We also installed newer diskette drive. So it had drives for 8-inch and 3½-inch diskettes. It’s funny to think how bad the first mouse was so we got a new mouse also. The standars then was the classic mouse with a ball in it. Monitor of this device was heavy and our computer was able to run EGA graphics. There weren’t any VGA or Super VGA available.

I would have liked to add a picture about this machine but I could only find this picture of floppy disk and its disk drive. I took this picture some years ago as my parents were getting this old computers all parts to recycling center. I’m not so into retro computers. This old computer we had was replaced by Mega Drive and later by PlayStation as number one gaming console. This PC was not functioning so nicely. It used to get stuck and I would have to press “reset”. Back then all computers had this function. The personal comnputer we had served properly and because of that I can still remembert it and it really launched my gaming activitites and layed the foundation for it.