Intensive Gaming Diary

Fighting Force (PS1)

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Viljami

Fighting Force is a fighting game in three-dimensional world for PlayStation 1. It was released back in 1997. I remember this game very well. I did only play the demo version of this game back in the day but decided now just some days earlier to give it a try. First I checked if it would be a game that would require a long playing time. As I usually do I went to How Long To Beat and checked this matter. Playing this game through would take approximately three and a half hours.

So, it is a bit of a short game but I decided to start playing it and I already felt it would have something to give to me as a retro gamer and a huge fan of PS1 games. I would compare this game to some fighting games that were released earlier for Sega Mega Drive. Of course the graphics are three-dimensional and better than what Mega Drive was able to offer. Although the playing style, you basically just beat your enemies up, is very similar. You get score bonuses and health updates. You also get to use melee weapons and even some guns and grenades. The amount of ammunition is very limited. Grenades make a very powerful explosions and you often end up hurting yourself also in Fighting Force.

It takes a while for you to get really into Fighting Force. I played the game through with one of the four main characters – Hawk. You also get to choose the difficulty level from easy to medium to hard. This does give this game some replay value. In this game you can hit or kick. Jumping is also possible. You can also try to kick your enemies while you are running to make a kick in the air or try to slide on the ground and hit your enemies. It is necessary to try to pick up health bonuses or weapons that these enemies do drop. You can also wreck your environments. At the end of a level you might get continues if you have gathered enough of a score. There are possibilities at some points also to save your progress which feels comfortable.

There is a bit of a variation between the enemies in Fighting Force. Some of them keep healing and you have to beat them quickly or they will heal themselves fully. Some enemies can hit you with a strong punch and you have to run away from them at times. Some enemies can give you electric shocks that make you hit the ground. It is also important to try to kick your enemy if it gets knocked to the ground for a while. It doesn’t take a whole lot of time to understand these basic tactics when you are trying to beat this game.

Back in 1997 Fighting Force was a new PlayStation 1 game. Now it is a solid peace of gaming history. It was very interesting to go back to this game. You can compare it to some of the greatest games of this era. I am comparing it to maybe the first two Resident Evil games which offered something very similar graphically but that had already a deep plot and some more advanced ways to make the player more involved to playing the game. While Fighting Force is a bit simple as a retro video game it still manages to offer something for a retro gamer and a PS1 fan like myself.

If you have a chance to play this game and you do like PlayStation 1 games I can definitely recommend Fighting Force. Just don’t expect too much of it as a game experience. It sure can bring some memories and also nostalgia to a retro gamer. It was nice to go back in time and play this game for some hours.

Physical, Digital or Something Else?

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Viljami

Physical game cartridges and later discs (CDs, DVDs and so on) was how games were sold way before video games were available as downloads from internet. Internet came to be during 1990s and it was only in 2000s when game consoles started to be connected to it. First there were consoles like PS2 and Xbox that could be connected to internet. Later it came a norm that discs only held parts of the game and you actually had to download some parts of the game. This is also how many games were patched or updated even after they had been released.

The progress towards faster networks and downloading games has been a slow one. However just some days ago Sony announced that it will discontinue physical game discs in the year 2028. This makes a gamer think about the release of PlayStation 6 and the matter that it probably won’t have a disc drive at all. We have seen this kind of progression already in PCs. Steam and other software web shops have provided us the games that we play today and this has been the norm for already several years. You can buy yourself an internal or external DVD or Bluray drive for your PC and this can make you some trouble and you have to pay for it.

If we go from the beginning to end and inspect how have games been delivered to customers through times beginning from 1980s when Nintendo, or NES, was first released. Now, Nintendo wasn’t the first home console but it was the most successful console in the 1980s with some competition from Sega’s consoles. Back then games were delivered as electronic cartridges that you actually inserted into your video game console. The space that a game like this takes is only some tens or hundreds of kilobytes.

After cartridges we moved forward as the technology progressed to compact discs. First we saw CD-ROMs that could hold maybe 700 megabytes of information. So, the amount of information was 700 000 kilobytes when NES could onyl deal with games of maybe 100 kilobytes. So, the amount of data became 7000 times bigger when games began to be delivered as CD-ROMs. Later the technology progressed and we moved to first DVDs and then to Blurays and later to 4K discs. So, now Sony announced that the progression of discs is going to end in 2028.

It is very easy to rip PlayStation 1 and 2 games. You only need a regular CD-/DVD-drive. I am myself using an external one. I do buy physical game discs for both of these systems. I just want to always rip the game disc from the media I have purchased so I am not limited to use only the physical disc. This way I can play the game on a PC and on an emulator. So I mainly use emulation for PlayStation 1 and 2 retro gaming. I do have in my setup a PS1. I mainly use it for some games that have multiple discs so the swapping of discs is smoother. It might be possible to use emulation also with multi-disc games but to today I haven’t found a way to solve this matter.

So, actually the game disc can and maybe even should be ripped to a digital format. When you rip the disc it becomes an image of the disc that you can burn to a disc or utilize it to play the game that it holds. It takes only about 15 minutes for my computer to rip the disc and then I am moving the image to the PC that has Batocera as its operating system that is connected to my home’s network. That way the disc isn’t required but it is a sign that you actually do own the game and it is not just downloaded from internet as a pirated copy.

Is it pirating if you just copy a game that you don’t own? I think it can be considered as something like that. Now when games might become fully digital the matter of who actually owns a game is becoming more unclear. Actually instead of huge shelves in our homes that hold some game discs and cartridges should now become digital libraries of games that you can install and uninstall. But what happens if the system that holds this digital library becomes somehow unavailable? The matter that you own a physical copy of a game makes sure that you do own it even if some web service game library platform becomes obsolete. And this seems to be the biggest part of the debate that has already been risen. Here were my thoughts about this matter. I think it is now time to stop and think about this a bit. Maybe I form some opinion about this later. You, my dear reader, can also think about this and maybe have a conversation with some gamer like you.

Splintered Fate

Posted on July 1, 2026 by Viljami

It has been three days since I wrote about some Turtles stuff and also about Splintered Fate for Nintendo Switch. This game was released already last year and now I finally had some time to really dive deep into it. Splintered Fate is a nice action game with some character development elements. One key part of the game is the run-based system where in order to beat the game you have to complete the run completely. A big part of the game is trying to gather some materials so you can update your character to have stronger attack power and also heavier health points. I managed to beat the final opponent, Shredder, in my last run and it took about 40 minutes. This way of building the plot in the game makes me remember playing Hades some years back.

There are several characters for you to choose from. There are four turtles, of course, and some other characters like Casey. I picked Leonardo and stuck with him for almost to the ending of the game. On my final and also successful run I played with Casey. I was able to finally defeat Shredder. While there is still a lot to play I figured that I at least give a break for playing this game. The total time I did spend was a bit over 15 hours. “How Long To Beat” website tells me that it takes 9 hours to beat Splintered Fate.

If I try to define how good of a game this was for me I think this might be the best Turtles game I have played. At least it is in a long while. I did enjoy “Shredder’s Revenge” that was released some years ago. I also liked to play the Turtles games that were released for SNES and Mega Drive. Names of those titles are “Turtles In Time” and “The Hyperstone Heist”. They are, at least Hyperstone Heist is, very expensive. I have seen these games for sale for some hundred euros. Luckily there is a legit way for you to play these games and that way is obtaining a copy, be it digital or physical, of the “Cowabunga Collection”. But this game that I just finished is a very nice game especially if you are a fan of Turtles.

If we inspect some reviews on Metacritic we can clearly see that it has received mixed and average scores. It might not be a contender if we have a debate about the greatest game of the year. But in any ways I can say that I still enjoyed playing it. If there would be something negative I would have to say about it would be that the progression of the main character could be based more on the experience of that gets gathered along the way. I am missing something like Diablo has as a progression system where every battle gathers up experience points. Also I think there is too much to do with pure luck when you fight through your run trying to beat the game.

The game, Splintered Fate, is currently available for PC (Steam), Switch (1 and 2), Xbox One and Series S/X and PS4/PS5. It has also earlier been released on iOS. I am not aware of any release on Android devices. So, the game is also available on iPhone and iPad if you are into playing video games on these mobile devices. I enjoyed playing this game very much.

As Turtles has been a very popular trademark from the early 1990s and as this era since then has been very much involved in playing video games we have already seen over 50 video games that were themed with Turtles. Turtles has been a strong part of several gaming console generations. I think it all began with NES, it progressed with Mega Drive and SNES, and kept going all the way from PS1 to PS2 and all the way to this modern era we are today facing. We cannot say that every Turtles game would be a good one but if you consider these 13 included in Cowabunga Collection I think you are getting the best retro titles that have been made in history of Turtles games.