Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: 2000s

Back Again to Play Some EA WRC

Posted on by Viljami

I have been recently playing some EA WRC (again). I first got into this game when it was first released in the end of last year. It is a very good rally and racing game. Last year also a new Forza Motorsport game was released. There was a sort of a competition going on with these two on which one would be the greatest racing game of the year 2023.

I am playing EA WRC with a game controller. This is the way I have been playing racing and rally games since I first stumbled on Gran Turismo and Colin McRae Rally 1 and 2.0 back in the dominant era of the first Sony PlayStation. I got a wheel and pedals for PS3 in the 2010s but I never truly played racing games with them. Although I did purchase a converter to adapt my PS3 wheel and pedals to PS4. I also got a stand for these. I never had a racing seat. That would have been expensive and I didn’t really get into this so much after all.

I did play recently some Dirt Rally 2.0. That game was released a bit earlier. It was released in 2019. I first got the game for PS4 but I have also it for PC and Xbox Series S/X as a digital copy. If you know anything about the history of Codemasters it is not needed to say that it basically was the rally game company of the 90s and even 2000s . It has brought us some very memorable classics.

There is however another good rally game series that has to be mentioned here. It is the WRC series. It has had the official license of WRC. It has brought us many very good rally games and especially in the recent, say, five or ten years. So there has been a healthy competition. Codemasters hasn’t earlier had the opportunity to make a rally game with a license but now it was the time for that since EA WRC was finally released last year.

We can have some sort of a comparison between Dirt Rally 2.0 and EA WRC. I think these both games have a similar price so this is a good way to think about which one should you get. Which one has the most value out of these two games? The price is actually about 30 euros. I can only tell you how it feels to play these with a controller. Graphics are awesome in both. Music in the background and defnitely while in menus is great also in both. What makes me go to the direction of EA WRC is how the controlling of the car feels.

I find myself constantly spinning or flipping my car around while I play Dirt Rally 2.0. The driving feels realistic and I don’t know if a wheel would actually make the steering more comfortable. So I think this is an issue  with playing with a controller. So, EA WRC feels better in this sense. Of course also in the last mentioned some cars like RWD and Group B feel also more difficult to handle.

I have put about 20 hours in these games solely on Xbox Series X. I am more familiar with the older game that is Dirt Rally 2.0. I would think that playing one game more would make it a bit easier in the end but I guess that the experience with game pad only makes the sense in this one. So my conclusion to the question at hand is that I would be rather playing EA WRC if I have to use a controller and not a wheel and pedals.

Okay. I hope that this post once again gave you something. I am trying to write to the blog more often. It has been a while since the latest post. It was nice to write you about my experiences with gaming lately. Have a nice day and I hope to see you again soon.

Itchy, Tasty – The Book About Resident Evil

Posted on by Viljami

Itchy, Tasty is a book written by Alex Aniel. It tells the story of Resident Evil video game series that was developed by this huge game developer Capcom that became famous by releasing Street Fighter II for arcades and Super Nintendo. Street Fighter wasn’t their first game but it might have been the game that took Capcom to the top. The book has been published in 2021. It holds well over 250 pages and is focusing on the games that were released in the series before Resident Evil 5.

Resident Evil begun with a game titled Sweet Home that was a NES game. There were debates about releasing a horror game for such an childish and powerless gaming console. While there do exist many great games on Nintendo Entertainment System the developers at Capcom thought that it would be difficult to release a good horror game for this system because of its limitations. The music and graphics would have been too unimpressive to satisfy the vision they initially had about the new horror game that was about to be developed.

Itchy, Tasty describes how Resident Evil managed to create something completely original and new in video games. It can be held responsible for creating a new genre of survival horror. It took some elements, the weird and stationary camera angles, just to name one, from first games of Alone In The Dark series that was released some years before the first Resident Evil. You can probably figure how Resident Evil impacted on games like Silent Hill and any other survival horror game that has ever been released.

For me Resident Evil 2 was the first game in the series that I actually played. It wasn’t the first PlayStation 1 game I played. That honor goes to Gran Turismo. But that piece of survival horror really impressed me. Well, it made me also feel agony but in a somewhat desirable in a way. It is hard to describe this game to a person that hasn’t played it. I think about RE2 as a retro game. It was something impressive back in 1998.

Soon after, maybe some moths or something like that, I had beaten RE2 and wanted something more to play. So, I picked up the first Resident Evil. I soon found that it was also a very good game. I also completed the third game. As there were several spin offs that I haven’t got into I cannot say that I would have played every game in the series. I do have completed Resident Evil 5 but that is just out of the scope of Itchy, Tasty.

The author of Itchy, Tasty, Alex Aniel, is very much involved in the gaming scene. He writes firmly about the history and development of this series. Every game that was released before Resident Evil 5 is covered. Even a game for Game Boy Color has been mentioned. What I found as a very interesting piece of knowledge was the part of describing how the first game was ported to Nintendo 64. You know, it was originally developed for PS1. What is the main difference between these systems? Well, N64 used 64 MB game cartridges while PS1 had an optical disk drive that used CD-ROMS that had 650 MB of space.

This wasn’t the only difference between these systems. N64 was faster when it came to loading the data that game used. It is miraculous how it was actually possible to fit RE2 to a N64 cartridge. Later the series moved on to GameCube. For a while there was a decision in place that RE games would be developed only for Nintendo GameCube. As you might know already this wasn’t a long lasting decision as you can today find RE4 for PS2 also from your favorite gaming shop.

I can recommend this book especially for someone that is a fan of survival horror games. There are many interviews and a lot of background information that makes clear how the writer of the book has come to the writing of this material. Mainly persons that worked closely on the series have been included in these descriptions.

 

My PS1 Games Collection (Currently)

Posted on by Viljami

I recently wrote a blog post about the first PlayStation. This gaming console was first released in 1995. That makes it almost thirty years old. I had to make a decision and move my PS2 away to storge from my gaming setup. I replaced it with my PSOne console. That made me to take a look at my current PS1 games collection for this retro gaming system.

I have well over sixty games in my collection of PS1 games. Some games are definite classics. I have to mention the Final Fantasy series. I have four games in this series. They are FFVI, FFVII, FFVIII and FFIX. I would like to own some day FF Anthology and/or FF Origins. There is also a pixel remaster collection of FF games from I to VI for Nintendo Switch out there and I have a feel that I might some day buy it, also.

PS1 was actually my second gaming console that I owned. My first console was Sega Mega Drive. PS1 turned to a more mature way in a sense. It also introduced real 3D graphics to gamers all over the world. I sold my PS1 and all games and other accessories in the beginning of 2000s. This is something that I greatly regret.

Some other games that are of good quality are the first three Resident Evil games, Vagrant Story, Colin McRae series of two games, Tenchu 1 and 2 and also Tony Hawks Pro Skater 1 to 4 and the first two Grand Theft Auto games. These are just few good titles that come to mind when I look at this collection.

Some PS1 games are cheap and some are expensive. You can get a sense about this as you browse through your favorite gaming web shops. The library for PlayStation 1 is enormous. There are almost eight thousand games in it. You have to understand that some of these games haven’t been sold in every region so there might be some games that are only available in some areas of world. PS1 was in production all the way to 2006 and it received new games through all these years. I believe there are no limitations for a new game to be released for it even today.

I am keen to find some new games for my collection. I think I do have almost every most important game that I used to play back in the days. I also have some titles that I somehow didn’t have some way an opportunity to get into and that I just recently had a chance to get into. I think there is lots of games still out there waiting to get discovered.

Visually PS1 graphics are appealing but you definitely cannot expect so much from this retro console. If you desire I can also recommend to getting into some DreamCast or GameCube  games if you want some more powerful graphical experiences. There definitely are limitations in these retro games. You have to remember that these games are retro and you yourself have to like retro games if you wish to play PS1 games in 2024. And this is why we are using the term “retro” all the time.

PS1 was there among one of these 3D capable gaming consoles. It introduced gaming to many of us. I remember hearing for the first time that some over or almost 30-year-olds were also getting into playing video games. PS1 was the most powerful of Sony all the way to when PS2 was released. There were over 100 million units sold. PS2 sold over 150 million units.