driving Archives - Intensive Gaming Diary

Spending Some Time With Forza Motorsport

Posted on October 22, 2023 by Viljami

Forza Motorsport was released almost two weeks ago. I was a bit sceptic towards it but decided finally to purchase it. As I have spent some hours already playing it I think it isn’t a total disappointment as a racing game. I think it is actually a very nice game.

This is the first Forza Motorsport for this console generation. We have of course seen games of this series been released and playable with Series S/X consoles through backwards compatibility. I am talking about games that were released originally for Xbox One.

I am a huge racing game fan. What I am not so inspired of are Forza Motorsport games. I get the point that Microsoft wanted to create this series of racing games to compete with Sony and their Gran Turismo series. I think GT is a bit better when it somes to a comparison. I especially have enjoyed the first GT, the fourth and, latest, seventh.

I am also waiting for the new WRC game. It sohuld be in our faovrite game shops 3th of November this year. I am not going to get this game in advance since there is always some problems with the delivery. This doesn’t mean that the game shop has done something wrong. I just can not believe that the game would be delivered in time of its release. Maybe I’ll get a digital copy, who knows?

EA Sports WRC has currently a price tag of 50 euros and it will be released for PS5 and Xbox Series S/X. We are not getting a release for Switch this time. I am not surprised. Switch does lack some power that it would need for hnadling this kind of a game. So far the reviews have been mainly positive.

So, lets make a conclusion right here. We have a new Forza Motorsport game currently in our hands. It is a decent racing game and provides some fun racing gaming times. The price tag was 70 euros. I think the price is a bit high. It doesn’t make it sound any better that the price of the digital version is same. If you are into racing game you might want to pick this up. If you are tight on your budget you might want to save some money for the upcoming WRC game and maybe you want to buy this game after its price is getting lowered a bit sometime in the near future.

This game isn’t percfect but it stands as a decent new sequel to this very legendary racing game series. I think that’s it for this blog post. Thank you once again for reading. You are the ones that I am making this content for. Do, please, remember that. And keep reading the blog!

Playing Some Dirt 4

Posted on April 28, 2023 by Viljami

I have been playing Dirt 4 a lot lately. I got to admit that I do like it as a rally game. It was released back in 2017. I have it for PS4, as a physical copy and also for PC. I have been playing it on my PC. The featured image is this time a screenshot of the rally of Sweden. I think the game feels better on PC. I am quite satisfied with my PDP controller. I have had some thoughts about buying this new controller that is actually Elite Pad 2. It would cost me something like 130 euros. I am considering still if I am going to buy it or not.

Codemasters is one heck of a rally game maker. There is some worries about what is going to happen now that Electronic Arts bought this game studio. This happened in 2021. Dirt 4 was released before that. There have been many good quality rally games released as games of Codemasters in 2010s. Back in the days when our retro games were newest games that existed Codemasters was delivering a heck of a quality. I got my introduction to rally video games as I played Colin McRae Rallly 2.0. I was actually first playing this and after some time I also just had to get my hands on the first game that was titled Colin McRae Rally.

Back in the 90s there were no serious competition for Codemasters. More recently there has been some competition in the form of a game series WRC. They have actually held the official game badge since they have had the rights to the license so they have been able to claim that they are the official rally game. I like also these new WRC games. I really got into them as late as 2020 when I bought WRC 9 for PC. Lately there have been games like WRC 8 for PS4 and WRC 10 and WRC Generations. I like these titles also.

Codemasters is responsible also of Dirt series. It started witb a game called Colin McRae Dirt and advanced into titles called Colin McRae: Dirt 2 and Dirt 3 and then again Dirt 4 and even Dirt 5, which in my opinion, slightly flopped as a video game. There is also Dirt Rally seiries that currently consists of two games. Dirt Rally games brings us gamers some simulation type of rally racing.

Dirt 4 is still a game you definitely would like to play. It has flashy graphics and even the soundtrack is bouncy. Driving feels somewhat challenging. Maybe not so realistic as in Dirt Rally. I like Dirt 4 a lot. One game that wasn’t mentioned, yet, is Richard Burns Rally. That is also a very good rally game. It is a bit old one but I can still recommend it to you if you don’t mind or if you are a retro fan.

All PS3 Racing Games (That I Own)

Posted on April 1, 2023April 1, 2023 by Viljami

Today I started first playing a game for PlayStation 3. This game was Castlevania – Lords of Shadow. I played for some time. I had an idea of a new blog post about some of my favorite games for PS3. I thought about racing games because these are my favorite type of games. I remember many good games that can be said to be in this category.

First I thought that I would like to introduce all my driving games for PS3. I started picking up these games. Suddenly I understood that there were many titles that weren’t so good. I didn’t spend time with them so much. Some titles I had bought from flee markets and I haven’t played them at all. So there is a wide variety of games introduced here. I decided to write a paragraph of every driving or racing game that I currently own. So, here we go.

First in this pile of racing games is Test Drive Unlimited 2. I remember that I was excited about this game when I first got it. Test Drive is a classic and retro type of a game that was released for PC back in the day. However, I didn’t enjoy this game so much. I was actually a bit short of money and I thought twice about even buying this game.

Next we have Dirt 3. It is the third game in a series of Colin McRae Rally Dirt games. This is a very good rally game. I played it for so many hours. I also got my first experience of a setup that I used a racing wheel and pedals. This game I can definitely recommend.

Then there’s Ridge Racer 7. I am sorry for the picture is a bit dark and I can actually barely see the title of the game in this picture. This game is more of an arcade racing game but don’t let that fool you. There’s lots of stuff in there if you play this game. The feel of driving is very different than in any other racing game.

Need for Speed – Undercover is one these games that I’ve found from flee market. Actually I think I have never even launched this game with my PS3. I think it is a typical NFS game that get released so so often. So I don’t have a much to say about this.

Gran Turismo 5 is the first Gran Turismo game that was released for PS3. I played this for some time but I didn’t like it that much. It is a decent game but I think Gran Turismo 6 and 7 are better and of course Gran Turismo 4 might be the best out of all games in the series.

Colin McRae Dirt is a very nice rally game. I think Dirt 3 is still better. I just liked it more. Dirt 3 has also a very nice soundtrack. There is also a second Dirt game for PS3 but I only have it for Xbox 360 and not for PS3.

I really liked Burnout 3 Takedown. So I was anxious to buy this new Burnout game back in the day. And this game was Burnout Paradise. It has a funny soundtrack. That’s where the title of the game comes from. It had a huge open world of diffeerent kinds of roads and goals. I didn’t play this game so much.

Need for Speed Shift is a game that I was practically addicted to back in 2010 and 2011 when this game was actually the best racing, at least in my opinion, game that was available. Very nice game. In can definitely recommend this one if you like this genre.

F1 2011 was sort of an update to F1 2010. I never played this game. I didn’t buy it when it was actually first released. I got it many years later from flee market for very cheap price. Might be a good game. I don’t have anything more to say about it. Maybe I have some day time to get into it. Well, there are some newer F1 titles available so I will probably not.

This is a bit longer post than what I usually write. But it’s a nice subject. So, lets move on to the next game of this pile of racing games. And it is Shift 2 Unleashed. It is a sequel to the first Shift game. I found this game to be very enjoyable. And you can figure why I went and bought this sequel. Because I of course liked the first game so much.

F1 2010 begun a series of high quality F1 games. It was a decent game. I just didn’t play it all the way through. It offers a variety of difficulty. I tried this game also with wheel and pedals. This is a nice game. I can recommend it if you are into this genre and platform.

Last, and maybe the least, heh, is a game titled Formula One – Championship Edition. I think this cost me three euros. So, what the heck…why wouldn’t I pick this up. I remember that the disc was in a decent condition. Otherwise I wouldn’t have bought this one. And…I never have played this game.

There you go. We just went through all racing games for PS3 that I currently own. And, I almost forgot one game. That is Gran Turismo 6. I just played this recently so it wasn’t directly on my shelf. It is a very good game and you should play it.

Is Gran Turismo 4 The Greatest Racing Game of All Time?

Posted on February 3, 2023 by Viljami

Although I have still not finished Resident Evil Village I picked up Gran Turismo 4. I have thought about playing GT4 for a while now. It is said to be maybe the best game in the series and it is definitely a very good racing game. It is definitely the best racing game for PlayStation 2.

Another very good racing and actually a rally game of this era is Richard Burns Rally. It was for propably a decade the most realistic racing simulation to be found. It was released also for PC and original Xbox while Gran Turismo 4 was released for PlayStation 2 with exclusive righs. Richard Burns Rally lost its spot as the best rally simulator since there were newer games released in this genre. I can mention titles like Dirt Rally and its sequel Dirt Rally 2.0 just to name some games.

I am playing GT4 with a game pad. The game supports also many tpyes of driving wheels. It would be nice to play it this way. I do have a driving wheel but I am too lazy to try to learn using it. I would also like to have a decent driving chair. I currently don’t have one. But the game supports driving wheels and why not pedals also.

In Gran Turismo 4 you start with no license and also no car. You have only 10 000 credits. I started with getting a driving license. The first license and also the easiest to get is B license. There are several other driving licenses that give you access to competititons.

You have to upgrade your car if you wish to get some credits. Then you can upgrade your car more and maybe after a while you get a new more powerful car. Sometimes the game gets a bit repetitive because you have to compete in same chllenge for many times to get enough credits so you can make some progress. This can be dull at times.

Gran Turismo 4 has hundreds of cars. Getting a good car can be hard at times. You have to buy some upgrades to get to fiddle with your cars settings. The first thing I got to adjust was the transmission. You can set your car to have a high maximum speed with a lower acceleration level or the other way around. So, you can also make your car accelerate fast which then lowers the maximum speed. This can be handy in tracks that have lots of slow corners and not so much straights.

Graphics are a bit dated. Controls defnitely aren’t. There could be more decent music tracks in the soundtrack. I am talking about these nice tracks that we had in the first Gran Turismo. If you are thinking if you should return to the first game we can consider that if you haven’t played Gran Turismo 1 or 4 at all I think the fourth game would be a good way to start getting into Gran Turismo. I also liked very much the latest game of this series, Gran Turismo 7, that was released last year for PS4 and PS5.

What Is Burnout 3: Takedown About?

Posted on September 27, 2022 by Viljami

I have some experience playing this game. The game, as you can tell, is Burnout 3 Takedown. It was released in 2004 for PlayStation 2 and Xbox. I am playing it on my Xbox 360. The first touches of this game I had already back in 2006 and I was then playing it on original Xbox.

Burnout 3 Takedown can be categorized, and has to be categorized, as a driving, or racing, game. Well, compared to my latest experiences about WRC 10, we can definitely state that this isn’t simulation definitely. But aren’t the coolest games almost every time those games that are the most playable. I can make a comparison to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. It isn’t a skateboarding simulation. Maybe Skate series was or tried to be something like that.

As we are talking about fun, entertaining and challenging game, I can share with you some tips that I’ve learned during these years that I have been playing this game. I actually bought this one also for PS2 that already some years ago broke down so I couldn’t make any progress. I bought this game maybe a year ago and just, I think, yesterday started getting back into it. So I’ve progressed already a bit and I have 15 percentage of the game finished.

What about the driving tips I talked about? As there is several types of events let’s first talk about races against one or several opponents. Try not to drive too far ahead of the pack. This makes you more vulnerable for crashing and losing your position as the leader of the race. Try to focus on knocking out the second fastest car. That way you can keep your position and earn a lot of boost so that you can take out more drivers, earn yet more boost and eventually you will win the race. If you have a good opportunity to accelerate or drive fast just after you have knocked out a driver you can really sometimes make a difference. But this depends about what kind of a part of a road you are on. You probably get the idea.

Playing Burnout 3 is not all about driving fast and faster than your opponents. It’s also a lot about taking risks. It doesn’t hurt also if you have quick reflexes and a keen eye to spot your driving line clearly. You are almost constantly trying to figure out how to get through the traffic. It also helps if you can analyze a bit about the risks and if you can make sense when to take a risk and when not to.

This game also knows how to be entertaining. There is a commentator that cracks jokes and throes in a punchline or two in between the racing events and even during them. The music in this game is backing well to the whole experience. It might be for younger players, but after all this game is already a retro game. And today’s retro gamer’s are a bit old. Well, it has been 18 years since the game was released.

As I did a quick search it appears that Burnout 3 isn’t available at the moment in Xbox Store as a digital release. There might be some copies left and sold as physical copies but then again you would need at least Xbox 360, if not original Xbox, for you to play it. So this might be something for the collectors and retro gamers. If you have an opportunity to buy it I will certainly recommend you to do so.

I have bought maybe ten copies of original Xbox games but I haven’t yet had enough spare time to get into them. You can probably find out about them when I post my next blog post. I have games like Silent Hill 4 The Room, Goldeneye Rogue Agent, Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer, Alias, Jurassic Park Operation Genesis, True Crime Streets of L.A., Hitman Contracts, NBA Street vol. 3 and Need For Speed Underground 2 waiting for their turn. Also I just ordered myself a Nintendo GameCube, so you know just what might be in my next blog post. See you soon and I hope you enjoyed the post.

WRC Series (8, 9 and 10)

Posted on September 21, 2022 by Viljami

I don’t remember, at least clearly, why I didn’t get into WRC series earlier. I do remember that one if this game series’s game flopped very badly. This kept me from starting to play a game in this series. It was back in late 2020 when I got my newest PC and I wanted to buy a game for it. So, I read some reviews and soon I was on my way to order a physical copy of WRC 9.

This was my introduction to the series. I am a big fan of Colin McRae Rally games and also racing and rally games in general. Driving games might be my favorite genre of games. I enjoyed WRC 9. It was a good game. Maybe a bit over half of a year after this positive experience I saw WRC 8 for PS4 in my favorite super market that has a section for gaming products. It’s price was about 20 euros. I decided to purchase it. And I wasn’t disappointed.

What about WRC 10? I recently got my Xbox Series X. WRC 10 was actually the second game that I bought for Xbox Series X. I had bought many digital copies of some games but my first and second games were GTA Trilogy and after that WRC 10.

WRC 10 had received some bad reviews. Finnish Gamereactor gave it 5/10. This score made me really consider about my purchase seriously. I find Gamereactor to usually be a realiable source when I think about buying a new game. Some other reviews, I am not right now mentioning these two blogs names, said, actually something like, “this game isn’t perfect but if you are a true rally game fan, you should definitely buy it”.

One other factor that made think about not to buy WRC 10 was that I already know that there is a new game, WRC Generation, going to be released soon. After all I went and bought WRC 10. I thought that since it was available and I would have at least some weeks to play it before starting to plan on playing WRC Generations I made this decision. Also the price was in my opinion right. I only had to pay about 35 euros for this game.

Just yesterday I got my WRC 10 from mail. The installation process was a bit slow, but it is the same with every new game. They seem to take up some space and more than some years earlier. So the process of installing a game today can take a long time. I have played it only for like two or three hours. At this moment it seems to be a good and solid rally game. I have to adjust my driving style for this game since I have played recently a lot of Forza Motorsport 3. I think WRC 10 is more of a simulation game than FM3.

There are some comments on those reviews that I wrote above. The driving seems more comfortable if you have a wheel and pedals. It might be more difficult to play with a game pad. I can say that graphics, being 4K and displayed from a 4K screen, are absolutely amazing. And you must also consider that this game has a license so you are going to experience all real cars, drivers and teams. Also, this license is going next year (2023) to Codemasters so we are also waiting for a rally game from them.

I really have to get more into WRC 10 and soon. As I am an adult and I have responsibilities, I don’t have all day every day, twenty-four-seven three-six-five for gaming, you know? To summarize, I have some experience of latest games in WRC series and I can recommend them. Especially if you are a rally game fan.

Spending some time with Gran Turismo 4

Posted on November 11, 2020January 11, 2022 by Viljami

As I may have mentioned earlier I kind of missed PlayStation 2. So it’s finally time for me to pick up Gran Turismo 4 and start getting in to playing it. The game was released in 2005. With over 700 cars and almost endless possibilities to race and tune your vehicle to it’s maximum performance it brings a huge game for the player to enjoy for a long time.

My history with Gran Turismo begins as I picked up the first game of the series. It was end of the 90s. Graphics were beginning to become more realistic. The capacity of CD-ROM brought more details and content to be used by game developers. Gran Turismo was also good for promoting PlayStation. It soon became clear that PlayStation would see some very nice driving games. The second Gran Turismo game was also released for PS1. The third one started the era of PS2s racing games.

There are lots of games that are dealing with driving a car or some another vehicle.
Gran Turismo made a difference. It delivered almost pure racing. Almost nothing else included. It had real cars and not only some but hundreds of cars that actually existed also in real life. It’s amazing to understand how the attributes of these cars tell you exactly how they behave while being handled on the road. These include mass, suspensions, tire selections, engines capability and so on. There are lots of things to mess with. You can modify the settings while testing the car. Upgrades to your car are essential. You have to win to get money for the upgrades.

I really enjoyed the first Gran Turismo. I hope my experiences with the fourth game of this series are enjoyable. I have to bring this fact up. The graphics aren’t too smooth or nice. It has been 15 years since the release. What could you expect? As the sixth game was released for PS3 there haven’t been a release of this series for a while now. Gran Turismo Sport did appear to the gaming stores but I think it was more of a eSports type of game.

We are expecting Gran Turismo 7 to be released for the newest PlayStation. I have to Google this one. And yes, the release is scheduled to quarter 1 / qurter 2 of 2021. As Gran Turismo 4 is even today a very enjoyable game with many interesting features you have to wonder a while what could there be inside the seventh Gran Turismo game.

Recommendation From A Friend – Carmageddon (PS1)

Posted on July 25, 2020January 11, 2022 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