Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: 2000s

Some Good Xbox 360 Games That Can Be Played on Xbox Series X

Posted on by Viljami

In this blog post I introduce to you some Xbox 360 games that can be played on a Xbox Series X. As you might have noticed there are plenty of used Xbox 360 games available. This might be a good time to buy some of these games. They don’t cost so much.

Now, every Xbox 360 game is not compatible with the latest Xbox which of course is at least at the moment Xbox Series X. There are many games available as a digital copy. They also don’t cost too much. So, if you prefer digital just go ahead and get maybe some of these five titles that I have in this featured image of this blog post.

I don’t like to buy games that I can’t play. That is why I have removed some Xboc 360 games that aren’t compatible with Xbox Series X from my gaming shelf. How do you know which games are supported? I use this list that is featured on Wikipedia. Just make a search with your favorite search engine with the words: “xbox 360 games compatible with xbox series x” or something similar and you will find the list. It holds currently 633 games out of every 2155 games that were ever released for Xbox 360.

So, when I am browsing a list of some game shops Xbox 360 titles available on-line I go and check every time I come across an interesting game. I check if the game is compatible or not. Since this list is ordered alphabetically it is very easy to check if the game is actually compatible.

These games don’t cost so much. Xbox 360 was released back in 2005 so these games are not the newest ones out there. They actually aren’t retro games also. They seem to be these very good games that are beginning to get old and might be forgotten somewhere in the near future. So, it must be important to just remember how good games they actually were. Who is there to stop you from playing them?

Another fact about these games is that they don’t take a whole lot of disk space. You can install a game and it takes only about 10 GB of space from your gaming console. There are hundreds of games like these available. So, what games should you choose?

Here in this picture I have five games that have been very popular. These aren’t hard to find. There are plenty of copies available that you can buy from a gaming shop that you like to buy games from. Here in this image I have Gears of War, Alan Wake, Call of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare, Red Dead Redemption and Bully – Scholarship Edition.

Now I can remember that I didn’t pay above 15 euros of any of these games. These are all popular and very good games. I encourage you to check the prices from your local game shop or maybe from some online game store. I once bought maybe ten or fifteen games as a bunch since there was a nice discount for original Xbox and Xbox 360 games. And you must remember also that some original Xbox games are also comaptible with Xbox Series X.

So, there you have it. This small set of games might just be what you could be palying next on your Xbox Series X or maybe also on Xbox Series S as a digital copy. These games are cheap. They are not remakes. They are not new games. They are just something that you might want to own in a near future.

A Word or Two About N-Gage

Posted on by Viljami

So, I read a book about N-Gage. It was a phone slash hanheld gaming console that was developed by famous and legendary Finnish phone company Nokia. The way that Nokia tried its hand in also gaming business just shows how huge the company was. It had the money and power to make it.

Finally N-Gage proved to be a flop. As it wasn’t a successful product it did open up many doors to Finnish gaming developer companies. N-Gage sold 3 million copies worldwide. If you consider that Sega Dreamcast sold 9 million copies and was a failuire for Sega you can get a picture of how the market was back then.

If we think about Nokia a bit we can figure that it was at its time a huge leader in personal phones markets. After all iPhone that was first released in 2007 took the crown from Nokia and a new generation of smart phones started to conquer the markets. Things changed quickly as Nokia depended on phones that had buttons while IPhone had a touch screen.

Smart phones took a step to this new direction. In 2014 Microsoft bought Nokias mobile phone business. For a while we had a smart phone that was called Nokia Lumia. Soon it was clear that Nokia couldn’t compete even when it had a partner like Microsoft. Rest seems to be a history and it tells us of the success of Android and iOS mobile devices.

The roots of Nokias phone games are actually very deep. I have some personal experience about this also. Back in 1990s I had a Nokia 5110 that had “matopeli” that can be translated to “worm game”. It was a casual game that you could start playing while waiting for the bus for example. With N-Gage Nokia was actually targeting some more serious gamers.

N-Gage was an ambitious attempt from Nokia to get seriously into gaming business. You can think how interesting it would have been. The markets were growing all the time. We saw at the same time how Microsoft entered the competition with its Xbox gaming console.

N-Gage had its critical flaws. When you wanted to change the game you had to turn off the device and remove the battery. Only after that you could change the game cartridge. The way you actually talked to N-Gage was a bit akward. You had to place the phone sideways on your ear. Also, the screen was placed just like in every phone model and it had more height than width which was a different approach compared to other gaming devices of time.

Nokia was trying its hand in a new field. This wasn’t cool with other big gaming companies. There were lots of memes moving around where people were mocking N-Gage. It was difficult to enter the field of video gaming. There were some negotiations with Nintendo about some co-operation but this never lead to anything. Sega seemed also interested in supporting Nokia. There were huge game titles like Tony Hawks Pro Skater that were introduced for N-Gage, also.

While N-Gage seems to be a flop it did affect the gaming industry at least locally in Finland. They had resources and money that they brought to the industry. I must mention here also the best selling N-Gage game: Pathway to Glory. It received good scores from reviews of different internationally known video game magazines.

N-Gage wasn’t a huge success. It does have a small group of supporters. I am not sure if this book that I read, “Fantastinen floppi”, is available in English. So, its a bit akward that I am writing about this book here in this blog that I write to in English. However I thought that it would be cool just to tell you all about the book.

The Role of Technology Has Changed

Posted on by Viljami

I really think that the role of technology has changed. I am talking about the last, maybe, thirty years. We can go back to the 1990s to see how things were back then. I am old enough to remember these matters today. All this time has passed. What has changed and how things were.

I had some experience already with a personal computer. During 90s I was first introduced to Sega Mega Drive and later to Sony PlayStation. I had a moment in my personal history in which, can you imagine, I didn’t really play video games. This was when I started high school in the beginning of 2000s. I got back to gaming again during the 2000s. So I do have a relevant personal history to write about this.

I can also clearly remember how things were with smart phones and how they started to conquer our free time. One important technology is internet. It has brought us connectivity and ability to play multiplayer games on-line. Also memory cards aren’t used anymore. The games evolved from lasting maybe three to five hours. Suddenly you couldn’t complete the game in a day. Games became longer and a possibility to save was becoming more and more important. This has everything to do with hard drives and the advancement that made more and more space available to use.

Video game consoles technology advanced very quickly. We can go from the beginning of the 1990s to 2000s and have a comparison. Mega Drive might have been the most popular gaming console along with NES and later SNES. Basically you couldn’t save a game. There were batteries included in the game cartridges that enabled this. Game had to be fit in a space of only some megabytes. This changed when CD drives came available. Also at some point disk drives became a norm in gaming consoles.

So, the technology advanced fast. We went from getting a benefit from technology to today when we are being somewhat even controlled by technology. Do you get what I am saying? The role of technology is what I wanted to talk about in the first place. How is it with this matter, today?

While I was growing up we didn’t have internet. We didn’t have smart phones. There was no GPS. If you wanted to search for information you probably went to a library or tried to find a book about the subject. Things have changed a lot.

When I was young there was this kind of positive thinking that was common that technology would improve our lives if we just kept studying it and building and developing it. So, many young people were introduced to mathematics, physics and computers. I was among those that were very interested in technolgy and wanted to study it and also have it as a hobby.

Technology has made huge leaps. We are today in a society that uses internet and smart phones to several functions. We handle paying and buying with these tools. We use them daily. How has this made our lives easier? It seems to me that today everyone can use a smart phone to perform any functionality that is needed. These huge technology companies have formed a business about us and our normal lives. This is basically how the role of technology has changed.

I could go on and on about these changes. This is still just a one blog post. I didn’t even go to how big data affects and has already affected on the situation. We are here right now. We understand where we are. Technology has become part of our lives. And everything can be changed tomorrow. Our choices are what matters. Companies like Facebook and Google have made the technology avaialble to us. How can we make it so that it gives even some benefit to our functioning?