Intensive Gaming Diary

Blog about different aspects of retro and new video games.

Tag: shooters

A Neat Find from a Local Flea Market

Posted on by Viljami

You don’t have to necessarily guess what I found from a local flea market. While looking to the image right above this blog post you can see that it is an original CD-ROM of the legendary FPS game Quake. What you can guess is how much did I pay for it? It cost me two euros. Yes. That is right. Two euros. I am a bit tempted to sell this forward for maybe ten or fifteen euros but I decided that I would like to keep it.

I already figured when I decided to buy this that this game isn’t going to work on my modern Windows 10 PC. Fortunately I have a dedicated PC that runs Windows XP. I am going to play it on this old PC. I also understand that there are versions of this game available for Switch, PS4 and Xbox Series X. I think I made the right choice when I decided to buy this game. While re-use centers don’t necessarily always have the right ways to analyze the stuff they are selling I am willing to support them with buying a game for two euros.

There is one cool feature with this CD. It does play the games official sound track if you insert it to a CD player. I think this was why they had it in the audio CD section of this re-use center that I bought it from. I was actually a bit surprised that this disc didn’t have even more value. I have seen some CD-ROM PC games that were for sale for maybe 30 euros. This is of course a price of a game shop and those prices are always a bit high. This is due to some expenses that these special stores have like rent for example. I am very content in this latest purchase that I made. It is definitely a good purchase. Two euros. Wow!

I actually have a holiday at the moment. I have spent it sleeping, reading and playing. I have been just relaxing. I did spend some time in a hotel. And we are going to our family’s summer cottage next week. My wife has her holidays at the same time. We have spent some time together, of course. So, I have had a lot time for these activities I described a bit earlier. Today I had time to go to three different flea markets at Myyrmäki, Vantaa.

Quake has gained lots of attention lately. So I guess that here’s some more hype for the game. I am also waiting to get to listen once again the soundtrack of this game. The soundtrack was produced by Nine Inch Nails. If you like old school first person shooters then why not give Quake a try. Back in 1996 it was something different. It is a good game and a legendary game also.

Missing Old Times and Playing Alien 3

Posted on by Viljami

I got Alien 3 for Sega Mega Drive. I paid 25 euros for it. It might not be the best Alien game ever. There are although many elements that make this game interesting for me. I also got Mortal Kombat for Mega Drive and a NES game that was actually Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers.

I am thinking of collecting some more Mega Drive games. There are over 900 games for this system. I currently have a bit over 30 games. I also have the Mega Drive mini console. While Iike to own the cartridges the classic mini offers the opportunity to use save states which makes playing more comfortable.

I miss the 90s. We seemed to have that feeling of progressing technology and everyone thought that this fast advancement would continue. Well, it has continued, but today we also see all of these threats of technology and there are lots of difficult issues with modern and ever developing technology. We are facing an issue of technology bringing more difficulties than advancements and improvements to our lives. Technology has grabbed us and is holding us as hostages in a way.

Alien 3 is a shooting game. Your mission is to rescue all persons that are captured in the maze. There are 15 levels for you to play. I played this game for some hours and got to level 4. There is a lot to play for a 90s Mega Drive game. You get to choose from different weapons. Ammo is somewhat limited. You can choose a grenade launcher, flamethrower, submachine gun and grenade. You will have to combine the use of these three weapons since ammo is limited as I stated already. There is also a time limit.

The world of sound is very nice in this game. When the time is about to run out you get an annoying beeping from the game. This is, well, annoying. Otherwise I like the sound in this game. You have to play the levels for a couple of times so that you can figure when an alien is jumping at you or where to find a captured prisoner that you need to release. It is said that this game takes 4 hours to complete. Í think this is very close to true.

I like Alien 3. I am going to try to complete it when I have some more time. It brings me very comfortable memories from an era of past. I can recommend this game if you like solving puzzles and figuring out where to move in a challenging maze. If you like 90s 16-bit Mega Drive games I think you will like this one also.

The Importance of a Plot

Posted on by Viljami

If you think about games and gaming and what it comes to games having a strong inner story, a plot, you can have many opinions. There are two extremes. Some might think that there should be sort of interactivity and action in games and that a plot is just something that doesn’t have such an importance.

This of course depends a lot about what kind of a game you are experiencing. If you have a shooter, maybe a first person shooter, you don’t necessarily want to follow something that is comparable to a story or line that walks you throuhg the game. You are happy to just shoot everything that moves, right?

What about adventure games? Here the plot has more meaning. Also in advneture games the dialogue and conversations bring a lot to the content. You also have some puzzles to solve. You have objects to pick up and use in some situations. That’s how adventure games work.

Can you think about a role playing game wihtout a plot? I hardly can. But of course in a role playing game you are also very interested how your main character or characters develop. Usually there are also choices made inside the game that vary how the story keeps moving on. Some games have a solid story line while others might have various events launched by a decision that the player has made.

If you want an example of a storydriven role playing game I would have to bring up Fallout and Fallout 2. These games had a deep and interesting story that also formed based on the desicions that the player makes.

So is strory or a plot important to you as a player? If we compare games to other mediums like books and movies we can think that games differ from them in that that they have this interactivity in them. Player can move a character or characters and make decisions that make an impact. You could hardly think of a movie that has no plot at all. But if you think about a classic game like Doom you could do fine wihtout understanding it’s story line.

Some games give a plot a lot of importance. Some games give us a slight idea of what is going on and deliver some action instead. Some games, maybe some simple games, might not have a plot at all. There are as many games as there are types of players. And we can say that that is many indeed.

About Crysis 2

Posted on by Viljami

I have hyped some games that I really enjoyed in this blog. So I guess it’s time to say something about a game I didn’t get so much in to. I’m not saying it is a bad game. Also I’m not saying I haven’t played FPS games at all because I somewhat have played them. Actually I’m currently playing Call of Duty Vanguard. There are lots of differences between these two considering that they are both in a same genre. In this text I would like to write about these differences and explain why I didn’t play Crysis 2 so much.

Crysis 2 is a good game. But my point here is that it is really difficult. What makes this game hard? At first it looks like your regular FPS experience. When you get to action you suddenly notice that the enemies are all over the place. When you fire a shot lots of enemies notice you and start shooting at you from different angles. You can dodge and take cover but because there are enemies behind you and in front of you…the game forces you to shoot accurately. If you miss a shot you get punished. There’s not lots of ammo also.

If we compare Crysis 2 to some Call of Duty, lets mention Vanguard here, we can see a clear difference. Call of Duty is easier. You can play it even if you are a casual shooter game fan. The enemies appear mainly in front of you. You can take cover easily. You just have to remember to reload your weapon and if there are lots of enemies you have to take cover if they fire at you heavily and if you get also wounded badly.

Weapons are a bit different also between these two games. Crysis 2 brings you some futuristic weapons while in Vanguard you get to use old weapons used in World War 2. But basically in Crysis 2 you get a shot gun or a sub machine gun with a bit limited aiming. In Vanguard you get to shoot with a sniper rifle a lot and also with some basic rifles and you can effectively use sub machine gun at close combat. Vanguard also features some stealth action and it may have more of it than Crysis 2.

So all I wanted to say about Crysis 2 is that it is basically a very good game. It’s just that it’s in my opinion just too hard. I know there are lots of fans of Crysis series all over internet. So please don’t be offended. Crysis 2 was originally released in 2011 for Xbox 360 and I think there is currently available a trilogy of HD remakes that includes all three Crysis games remade with todays graphics.

Introduction to Halo

Posted on by Viljami

Halo was first released for the original Xbox back in 2001. It was also some years later released for PC. First person shooter fans had already seen some games of this genre released for consoles. As you can easily figure FPS games were first designed to be played with a keyboard and a mouse. Nintendo 64 already had a game or two that can be categorized to be first person shooters. One of these games is Golden Eye 007.

So Halo brought a strong feel of FPS gaming to the Xbox. I think it worked really well and I have enjoyed this game for a long time. The game play is structured so that it is easier to play with a controller of that generation of gaming consoles. You had to move with left thumb stick while you had to aim with the right thumb stick. You could fire with the shoulder button on the right. This was, for me especially, a strong and a positive experience as I had played Half Life and Return to Castle Wolfenstein with a PC setup using keyboard and mouse.

I have to say that I didn’t play Halo until it was about 2006 or so. As I have told in some of my earlier posts on this blog I had some other things going on in 2001. So I got my original Xbox in 2006 and it was about four years ago, 2017, when I started moving towards original Xbox again as I got all my games back from my brother and bought the console again from flea market for a very low price. My Xbox broke just last year. After that I have utilized my Xbox 360’s backward compatibility and I gladly found out that Halo and Halo 2 also work with the 360.

This blog post is named “introduction” because I wanted to introduce the game because it has it’s own and original game play that is a bit different from the FPS’s of it’s time. Also I just some days ago started to play Halo 5. You can start from whatever Halo you have available. I know that there’s a package sold in online stores for Xbox and PC that contains Halo’s first  four games. This four game compilation is called Master Chief Collection. There’s also the next Halo game soon to be released. I think it it’s release date is in December this year.

I have completed Halo 3. I am not sure if I have completed other Halo games totally but I do have tens or even hundreds of hours of experience from this great game series. It is possible to play Halo with your friends. The original Xbox enables up to four players to play with a shared screen and from the first game it was also possible to play online. This brought the hardware and design and features of the first Xbox to their maximum. That was basically how the game was designed.

Halo is a first person shooter. You have health level. If your health level drops to zero you die. After that you start from the last save point. The health increases back to maximum level when you stop receiving hits from shooting enemies for a long enough time. So there are no health packs at all. You have many different weapons. You have a limited amount of ammo. Some weapons are from enemies that are aliens so they also have a limitation that makes your can like burn in your hands if you fire too many rounds. When this happens you have to wait a while as your player regains the ability to shoot again. You have to change weapons often. Different weapons have different abilities. Some weapons have less ammo than others and some weapons shoot faster and some are more accurate to shoot with or have a way to zoom to the target that you are trying to shoot.

This is the basics. The weapons are very uniquely designed. I think you cannot find similar weapons in any other game released before the first Halo. Maybe the first Half Life is the most close to Halo if you want to think about games that are similar to it. I was very disappointed in the Half Life’s release for PS2. In my opinion the controls were horrible. This was corrected in Half Life 2 when it was released for Xbox later.

Halo has a certain science fiction feel to it. It has been for a long time one of the most popular games. It has been exclusive for Xbox for a number of game console generations. There is no end in sight. I am a big fan of Halo games. The controls made it easy and fun to play FPS games with Xbox. It helped to bring game pads to be used more and more in gaming in general. After Halo was released for consoles many other same kind of games followed it. I could name some titles that I liked but that list would maybe be too long for here. I know many PS3 and Xbox 360 games and also games for PS4 that have taken influence from Halo. The image you see as the featured image is a screenshot I took with my Xbox Series S from Halo 5.

Sine Mora EX – A Modern Space Shooter

Posted on by Viljami

I wrote a post some time ago about space shooters. I have played many nice shooters mainly on Mega Drive. So the thought about getting into a more recent game in this genre was interesting. Sine Mora EX is modernized side scrolling two dimensional flying and shooting game. Graphics are clearly today’s graphics, there are some modes to choose from, you can save the game and play with two players cooperatively.

I bought this game, again, from some sale a while ago. The price was very low. I think it was about ten euros. The game has been released in 2017. I checked how long would it take for an average player to get through this game and the website tells me that it takes about two and a half hours. I have played it now for five and a half hours. As I’m not a professional game player it takes some time for me to finish especially this type of game. The genre isn’t one that I would have lots of experience with. But things do get interesting as I delve deeper into what this game has to offer.

Basically your mission is to avoid ammunition that is shot at you and at the same time you have shoot your enemies before they kill you. You get, I think, randomly some updates to your weapon and more time and some other important updates. You can even get a shield for you plane. When you get hit you loose all your weapon upgrades that give your weapon more power and you can then collect them back to you if you are fast enough. There are also updates for your planes speed. Time can run out. You get more time when you kill enemies or get an update. When you get hit you lose also time. You have ten lives and when time finally runs out you lose one life and you have to start from the latest checkpoint.

The game is exciting. It may seem to be a bit repetitive as games in this genre might sometimes be. As I played this game today I spent many hours playing it. So it keeps you well captured while it still is a smaller and more of a casual game. It’s nice to play this type of game that doesn’t require so much work in getting into it and actually learning how to play it. It can be a nice introduction to this whole genre. I hope I have the time to learn to play this game a bit more. In overall this game is good and it delivers a nice shooting experience tweaked into a modern gaming experience.

How Doom changed gaming?

Posted on by Viljami

Back in 1993 I was a young kid and I heard some of my class mates talk about this new game that was said to be totally awesome. They kept talking about it. Our crappy PC that our family had wasn’t able to run it. So I played it with my friends computer. And it definitely was something we players hadn’t seen before.

Creators of this game, mainly John Romero and John Carmack, brought to us a game that had never-before-seen graphics and which was also very violent. I remember a long conversation that I had as a kid about does Doom have some kind of a plot in it. You basically walk around and shoot monsters. But there is some kind of a story included though. You are a soldier that is ordered to go to work at Phobos, a moon of Mars, but someone has accidentally opened a teleport to hell. Everyone else is dead. You are figthing monsters from hell all by yourself.

Back in the day graphics were blurry. Just compare the original game to newer Doom released in 2016 and you clearly see the difference. Violence does exist but now graphics tell you more accurately what happens if you for example cut a zombies head off with a chain saw. Some people claimed already in 1993 that games were too violent. This kind of discussion is of course necessary but I think you can not blame solely games for real life violence. My opinion in this issue is that a healthy person can draw a line to what happens in game and how you act in real life. Of course everyone has an opinion but lets not, again, go there.

So how exactly Doom impacted gaming? Well, it certainly brought a 3D experience to larger audience. Makers of Doom had already released Wolfenstein 3D some years earlier. There was this new genre starting to rise its head. It was the birth of a genre called First Person Shooters. And I think Doom is the father of all FPS games that came later. If Doom wouldn’t have been released there wouldn’t be games like Quake, Half-Life, Unreal, Soldier Of Fortune and so on. Doom started it all. This might also be the reason why gaming industry started to grow towards games that included textures and 3D models. Doom was definitely a real pioneer in this formation of gaming that was yet to come even more popular.

Doom started its journey to minds of gamers as a PC game. There was one particularly smart way to release a game that was used by Romero and Carmack. It was called shareware. It worked like this – You could copy the first episode free and if you, or when you, liked the first part, you could purchase the whole game. This was first time that this kind of releasing of a game was used. And it was genious. Doom was also ported to many gaming consoles including Sony PlayStation and Super Nintendo. One of the best versions of Doom could be the one released on Nintendo 64.

Doom made a comeback in 2016 as the game was released to modern gaming systems. There have been numerous Doom games and listing them all would be pointless. You must not forget Doom Eternal that was released just weeks ago. It’s the latest Doom game right now. I think nobody seriously has doubts about how great game this really is. If you still think this game didn’t have impact on the whole gaming industry I will answer that it sure did shape me and some people I know as players of computer and video games.

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