Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: 2020s

A Great Movie for a Total Fan of Resident Evil Series

Posted on by Viljami

In this blog post I am taking a view to the movie Resident Evil – Welcome to Raccoon City. This movie was released in 2021. I am seeing this movie for the first time. I really don’t know if it was here in Finland in film theaters at all. At least every theater would have been closed anyway. So, I watched this movie as a 4K Ultra HD copy on my 55 inch telly with my Xbox Series X. In many ways this is related to playing video games. I am likely justified to write this here.

I am watching a movie on my Xbox Series X and it is about the strange incidents that happened in 1998 in Raccoon City. There is a company called Umbrella Corporation that has something fishy going on in this small city in USA. The movie is based on at least the first two games. You will have a benefit in a way for seeing this content if you have played Resident Evil 1 and 2 or maybe even the recent remake of RE2.

This movie is rated 5,2 out of 10 in imdb. It has received some criticism. Of course hopes have been very high. We have had movies based on this survival horror video game series which isn’t such a surprise, but these movies have been of low quality. Even Milla Jovovich wasn’t able to save them. I don’t like these movies at all. I hate to even having to mention anything about them.

How did I like the movie? Were there anything I would have liked to work a bit  differently? Well, it’s a nice package. It is causing me anxiety in a similar way that the games used to when I picked them up back in the 90s and even recently I have this gloomy feeling if I start to play them. My only possession remaining from these games is a copy of the original RE2 which I think is the best out of the first three games. Now we must remember that there have been remakes and also some more recent RE games made, like for example Resident Evil Village.

This movie centers around happenings in Raccoon City when the zombie apocalypse starts. There are characters like Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield. There aren’t any superstar actors which can be also a good thing. The movie opens these strange incidents a lot and it has more going on than what can be achieved what it comes to the main plot of the whole story that is being told through first three games. At least that’s how I felt. Even my wife enjoyed the film although she said that it was scary and caused a bit of anxiety for her. The movie is actually forbidden for age under 16.

I think this was a good movie. Although it was nothing compared to the Last of Us story that was brought to us also some time ago. I watched that thing on HBO. This RE movie was one of my first films that I got as a 4K disc. These things are expensive, you know? I paid 30 euros for this movie. It has also the Bluray version and it came in a steel book. I can definitely recommend this movie to you especially if you like RE.

 

How Does The Business of Selling Used Video Games Work?

Posted on by Viljami

If you have been involved in gaming or playing or collecting video games for several years you might have faced the issue of not getting your money back from a game that you bought just some months ago. You are trying to trade the game and get a good price, right? Obviously this doesn’t work this way. Because the game shop you are dealing with has to make a living. You can get maybe 20 percentage of the money you paid for the game…if you buy a new game…with that money. Does this seem complicated or unfair? Let me explain this to you so we all can understand this issue better.

Of course if you are willing to sell the game yourself and directly to another collector or player you can get a decent amount of money out of the game. Game shops are facing the fact that they have to be profitable. There are lots of expenses. Shipping of products that are coming into the store, rent of the premise and or web services for a web shop and of course the subsistence of all of the workers. Now this is a business right here. You can make a living out of this. Easy it isn’t but possible it is (did that sound like Yoda from Star Wars?).

There are several companies here in my home land, Finland, that operate this type of business that I have described right here. They might have a shop, maybe even two or three shops, and of course a web shop. There are also many smaller shops that sell games here. You can also find some people that are interested in selling some of their game collections and we have platforms like Huuto dot net and Tori dot fi for someone who wants to sell any used stuff. And I must mention also re-use centers and flee markets whose prices are usually lower since they get the stuff they sell mainly for free. And this is where we get to people that take advantage of this and…it isn’t very nice as you can figure.

Where do you get games for a low price that you can sell to some collector? I know some people that have received an estate that has contained games. Usually there is a huge collection to be sold. And if you buy the whole stack you get it in a fair price, right? Now we are starting to figure this out. You can sell these games piece by piece. A game collector is someone that needs maybe one game or two or three games that he or she is missing from his/her collection. So you can sell a few game for a decent price and make a profit a bit by bit. This is the magic of selling used games. You buy a large batch and check the unique games prices and you will get a profit out of this.

What makes the used game’s price high or low? One important thing is the condition of the game. It can be a sealed copy. It can have a manual and all of the covers. Or maybe its a loose game with generic cover or no packaging at all. PC games can be packaged in so called “big boxes” that make them more valuable. And the condition of the box matters. It matters also how the labels look like and does the CD/DVD disc have scratches on it. Sometimes the condition of the game can be enhanced quite easily. I am not going into that so deeply.

Some games can also be rare ones. They might be so good that no one just wants to sell them. They can be rare in a way that they weren’t even so popular when they first got released. These types of games are just uncommon. Some games gained popularity and valuation only when some retro hobbyists noticed their true value. Some games are so amazing that they seem to define a whole gaming system. These types of games can be something like Super Mario for NES or Sonic for Mega Drive or something similar.

Should you sell your old games? This is a tough question. I regret selling my old PS1 back in the beginning of the 2000s. The system and all the games I had for it would have been so much more valuable for me today compared to the price that I got from them then. Like, I sold all of them for under 200 euros. If you consider only the money this is clearly a financial loss for me. And I would have liked to play these games still. I just didn’t seem to have such an interest for retro games back then. You have to consider how I got back into playing video games in 2006 when I got my original Xbox. And…it was 2017 when I started my plans for starting to collect older and retro gaming systems again.

For some years already I have been writing to this blog. It is very interesting. However this is only a way for me to express my thoughts. I am not currently getting anything financially from this. And so is the way also that game collectors necessarily don’t get anything from collecting games when it comes to money. Game shops do make profit. That is a good thing. Without them we wouldn’t have a place to trade and buy games.

What is it like to work in a game shop? Sometimes it is busy and sometimes there’s only a few customers. It can be a place to build your dreams and fantasies. It is definitely a technical job. I also got to write, of course, blog posts for the game shop that I worked in for six months. The biggest parts of my job were handling and shipping orders, responding to customer feedback and being a customers servant face-to-face and also in some other ways. It was a fun job. It was a busy job. And ultimately…it was barely profitable.

 

The Role of a Single Variable in an Application Source Code

Posted on by Viljami

What is the role of a variable? In case you don’t know about software design, or basics of programming, let me show to you what kind of a term it actually is. Variable has a type which defines what values it can have. It can be a number, a single character or combination of multiple characters. A variable can also be part of an array that has several variables that are of the same type. Objects have properties and every implementation of an object has a variable as a value to its properties. But we are not going to object oriented programming or modeling…at least not yet.

Together with other variables in a program variables form a state of the program. If you think about thing in any retro game console emulator there are so called “saved states”. This means actually what it exactly is. In Super Mario you have variable, which says in which world you are, which stage you are, were you are positioned in the actual level and, for example, how many lives you have left. So all these variables form the state. You with me?

One thing I wondered for several years especially when I wasn’t too deeply involved in actual programming and I was still trying to get my thoughts gathered was “how can you save the entire game when you are saving your game in any modern game?”. Of course you aren’t saving a full copy of the whole game. You are only saving these values of all these variables. You are saving the state in which the application currently is. And basically, this means text. How much would a text file consisting of, maybe, some hundreds of lines of variables and their values take space? Yeah, you figured it out…it wouldn’t take a lot of space. Not at all.

What does take space if any commercial modern game would be considered? Graphics, 3D models, the recorded sound effects and all of the dialogue of the game. They all take a lot of space. Especially when you think about today’s high quality screens with 4K pixels and high quality sound coming out of the selected audio device. Of course what takes also power is all this processing. The processing of code is done by processor of your computer. Graphics are processed with GPU (Grpahics Processing Unit). Today there is a need to maximize the use of a powerful GPU to process the data as efficiently as possible. The processor then works with the GPU and also the hard disk. We have already witnessed fast data processing of SSDs. SSD is short from Solid State Drive. Earlier we had hard disks called HDD (“Hard Disk Drive”). If you are really into computers and building setups you probably know that HDDs are a lot cheaper than SSDs. I mean, of course, the monetary expense of a unit of space. It is a lot more expensive to get a 256 GB of SSD space than it is to get this same space in a HDD.

Right now we are deep in the workings of a personal computer. All these facts I have already covered took me years to get into. It took me involvement. And mostly, it took a lot of time. I started getting in this, very deeply and by studying, back in 2008. That was the year I started studying first electronics and after two years I moved on to study computer science in an University of Applied Sciences. After I graduated back in 2016 I was having a hard time finding a job. After two years of looking for a job I found one as a customer servant. I have worked my way from there and now I work as an IT support person. And all this started from trying to figure out how the saved game system works in my favorite computer or video game. I think the game I was thinking about was Fallout Vegas.

The question made think deeply. How was the game able to save all this information to a small saved game file? I got the answer but it sure wasn’t an easy peace of a cake. I didn’t succeed very well in courses that dealt with a computer’s memory usage or how is magnetism, a physical phenomenon, handling all this data on a hard disk. But little by little…I got the whole picture. I finally got to combine all this information together. All this started by playing games.

Today, I find that there are several areas that are really interesting to me. If you want to learn some knowledge very deeply, like how computers actually work, you will have to use your past knowledge and experiences to guide your thoughts through it all as a process. Writing something “open” to yourself so that you understand what your mind is dealing and handling is one big key for understanding complex and theoretical matters. And teaching someone or having a conversation about the fact is very useful many times.

I don’t know a lot about actual electronics or how the architecture of a full computer work. Well, I actually know something about it. That isn’t however enough for me to solve every problem. This is also where search engines or even a tool like ChatGPT would come in handy. Of course you can look up information from books or your notes and study some more. Just try to remember to take it piece by piece. There is an old saying. It goes something like this: “nobody is a master as you are born”.