Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: 90s

Why Would You Play Mega Man 3 Today?

Posted on by Viljami

It takes some nerve to play Mega Man 3. You can play it with emulation or hardware. What ever your chosen form of play is you are going to face a very difficult game. Although it takes only three hours (regarding to HLTB website) to beat the game it does require a concentrated mind and good reflexes. NES as a gaming platform is not making things easier in any way. You also have to memorize many elements of this game.

I did try my best to beat the game in one sitting. I played Mega Man 3 for about two hours. I can only imagine the players back in the day trying to beat this game for hours and hours day after day until they finally could say something like “Man, I just beat the Mega Man 3 on my Nintendo Entertainment System!!”. For me the Sega Mega Drive was the closest thing to something like this. Even with Mega Drive I didn’t face a game as difficult as this one. This also tells us something about how gaming actually was back in the 80s and early 90s.

While Mega Man 3 is a hard game it is kind of rewarding after all. You get to know this game so thoroughly. When to jump and how hard should I push to accomplish a perfect landing that secures a some way of progression inside the game. You might get a hit from an enemy. Is it a critical hit? Can you continue to your goal or did you just miss something important that takes you all the way back to the beginning of the level?

Mega Man 3 isn’t for someone that is somewhat of a perfectionist. In several cases your character gets hit by an enemy or you miss a correct spot of a jump and lose some of your health. The health bar is your most important way to see how are things going and how are you getting with the overall progress in this game. Often in this game things get tight. There is a constant tension present while you keep playing and trying time after time.

Should you even try to play this game in 2026? You might like it. You might not like it. Regardless of the way you are going to play Mega Man 3 I am going to say to you that you will have to try it. It is a legendary game. That’s not even something to debate about. The game is legendary in a way that many youngsters today will never going to able to understand. And if you really like NES games the question about if you should or should not try to play this game, if you haven’t ever yet, is a kind of a “no brainer”.

We can go through some game mechanics. In Mega Man 3 you control the main character with a basic controller. You can move the character to forward and backward. You can jump and shoot with a press of a button. There are obstacles and enemies, that sometimes shoot ammo at you. If you get hit by an ammunition or an enemy you lose some of your health. You can pick up bonuses that can give you more health, lots of more health or maybe an extra life point. You get try each level for three times. The game progresses to a certain point. If you spend all three attempts, you’ll have to restart the whole level. Once you progress to a boss you get a try to defeat it. If you defeat the boss you get through the whole level. There are more than eight levels in the game. I only got to play two levels as I only played for two hours (I guess I will have to try again some other day and spend some more time with this game).

With some limitations that NES console does have I am encouraging you to play this game. If you like NES games this game is a must to play. You actually cannot save the game. You do have a password system that helps a lot if you are going to try to beat the game. Mega Man 3 was originally released in 1990 for NES. There are some later games released in the series. We can mention Mega Man X series and also some collections that have been released just lately. I think the game is also very much available as a NES cartridge as it doesn’t cost a whole lot. The price of Mega Man 3 seems to be about 45 euros today.

The Role of SNES In The History of Gaming

Posted on by Viljami

There was a time in history of gaming when SNES was the most powerful and the most newest gaming console in the markets. This period of time was followed by many years of dominance from Mega Drive, or Genesis as the system was called in the USA, that in turn was a following of dominance from Nintendo Entertainment System, or for short, NES. What had happened earlier, before Nintendos dominant era, would be known as video game crash. It was a time when video games weren’t selling so well. NES begun the new era when video games started to begin to be popular again.

What makes Super Nintendo, or SNES, so significant is reflected in these games that were released for it. They were beginning to look like something that could be considered a true form of art and not just some entertainment for kids. There were stories that were told through these games. There were some limitations about the amount space available and also some considerations about how to, for example, save a game with this technology. However the progression was fast and SNES had its time when it was actually considered the greatest gaming console of all that were available.

Now, you can debate on which one is better, Mega Drive or SNES but actually the way I see it is something like this. NES was the best during 1983 to 1988. Mega Drive dominated from 1988 to 1991. And SNES was the greatest console between 1991 and 1995. After that it would be the era of PlayStation 1 which would continue all the way to the era of the generation in which PS2 would belong to. Take this as just an idea and not something I could somehow actually prove to be true. This is a sort of a theory.

How were the games that were released for SNES? I would point out that there were games like Street Fighter II and Super Mario World. They were full of action and included graphics that were very impressive at their time. There were also some role-playing games that I think moved gaming very much forward at this time in the history of gaming and playing video games. These games brought us closer to the games that could be later found on PS1. I think that when PS1 came actually as popular as it would show to be we were actually starting to realize the full potential that video games actually had. RPGs on SNES were something like a bridge to more complex and modern gaming.

So, the whole scene of gaming was advancing very fast at this time. Everything I have told you here makes me think how little I have spend playing SNES. I have several RPGs to explore if I choose to go to that path. I am thinking that this system, SNES, has some great games. But the question in my mind seems to be “are they actually worth playing”? I ma thinking this because they are old games. I don’t have so many memories of playing SNES back in the 90s. I have more memories about Mega Drive.

I am still thinking about this. Some good games for SNES include titles like many of Final Fantasy titles, Secret of Mana, Dragon Quest VI and III, Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG. It also had many good games that weren’t actually RPGs. These titles include Super Mario World, Super Mario All-Stars, Donkey Kong Country, Star Fox and F-Zero just to mention some of them.

If you are a retro collector you must have heard how there was a device that would have actually been a Nintendo console that would have had a CD drive of some kind included with it. This was actually something that would have been a collaboration of Sony and Nintendo. We never saw this machine and Sony went on to release its own gaming console. PlayStation, later. This leaves my imagination with many possible outcomes of what we would have had as video gamers if it would have come to reality.

SNES is a huge part of history of video games. As I am more of a Mega Drive and PlayStation 1 fan I have lots of playing to do if I wish to get into SNES a bit more. There is a lot to explore. Some games might not be ones that I will spend tens of hours or even hundreds of hours playing since they are already a bit old as video games. I might play some newer video games instead. However it is great to acknowledge how these games shaped the way we experience gaming today.

Some Features of Optical Discs

Posted on by Viljami

Some time, not so long ago, we used to use optical discs way more and in a different way compared to how it is today. I have recently been playing lots of PS2 games using an emulator. I have these PS2 games in their original form. That is on these game discs. That copy of Metal Gear Solid 2 also has a documentary film also on another DVD. DVDs aren’t also so popular anymore. We are used to streaming our video content. If you prefer physical copies you can buy movies on Bluray or 4K.

Some things have changed. We do buy games, sometimes, as physical copies on optical discs. When we do we use the disc to install the game. Part of the installation process is handled through internet connection. Back in the days, in the early 2000s, we had game consoles like PS2 and GameCube. They utilized optical discs in a different way.

If we inspect our PS2 video game console we can see that it doesn’t have a hard drive at all. So games are basically on optical discs. It is the disc that holds almost all the data. There are memory cards used that can store the save files. These memory cards could hold only 8 MB of storage. GameCube is very much like PS2 in this way. It did handle smaller optical discs and it also had to use memory cards. Lets mention Dreamcast here, also.

What about the original Xbox? It actually had a hard drive. This makes playing a game like Max Payne a bit more of a pleasure since loading games from same save spot can make the game very repetitive. That’s why I find playing Max Payne on the original Xbox than on a PS2 console my preferred way to enjoy Remedy Entertainments masterpiece more enjoyable. I think it is best played on PC. But you probably get the point here.

So, the games were played from DVDs. This made the disc very valuable. If it had a scratch the game would stop playing. Sometimes the console you were playing on did break so that you couldn’t play it anymore since it couldn’t read optical discs anymore at all. There are ways to fix consoles, all right, but just let me say this. I have found it way more pleasurable to install an emulation system on a PC with a dedicaded operating system and just ripping my PS2 games to some .iso-files and playing them again and again, fully functioning, from a fast SSD hard drive. You basically have to rip your PS2s BIOS and also the games to enjoy gaming this way. After all it is very easy to rip a PS2 game. You just have to use an external DVD drive and some software application, like ImgBurn, that is also freely available.

We have went through lots of changes. The gaming has evolved a lot. If you think that we used to have games taking some space, like 4,7 GB. We are actually now in a place where a game can definitely take tens, or even several tens, of times the space we were used to back in the days. We went from large HDDs to SSDs. We went from slow internet connections to modern and very fast connections offered while using Steam or Xbox Store or some other web service. This makes me wonder where do we go next.

Today hard drives are faster and can hold even more space than they already used to. I have for example two 2 TB SSDs on my personal desktop computer. That is enough to hold some games. You don’t have to install every game you buy because you probably don’t play tens of games at the same time. There are more games available than ever. You probably play something from three to six games at a time. When you think that you don’t want to focus on a game you can uninstall it and keep your save files and continue playing after some time when you think that you want to install the game again.

We are actually doing something reasonal with buying games as digital copies. We are reducing the amount of carbage in this world. You can debate on that DVDs, these opticla discs, are something that you can hold on to for several tens, maybe even hundreds, of years. Buying a video game console or a PC without an optical disc drive is becoming also popular. You can save some money.

There are many facts here that you can debate on. In my opinion there are just facts against facts. There is no right or wrong answer. In this blog post I told you my perspective on optical discs and how and what they used to be compared to what is the situation right now. You can make your own opinions based on everything I have said here. I am going to enjoy some more time with Gran Turismo 4 since I started playing it again. I have played it for well over 18 hours. I think it takes over 70 hours to complete. I have lots of playing to do.