Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: 90s

Childhoods Favourite – NHL 94

Posted on by Viljami

I wrote recently about Sonic The Hedgehog and how it was my first Sega Mega Drive game. I am going to present to you another game that I liked to play on this gaming system. It was Electronic Arts’s NHL 94. I remember it well as a game that was fun to play and which delivered awesome playability and challenge. You could play just one game. There was possibility to play an All Star game. There were no national teams but I remember how I found many Finnish players on various NHL teams. I think best of them were Jari Kurri and Teemu Selanne. Selanne played in Winnipeg Jets with another Finnish player Teppo Numminen.

You could also start a Playoffs series. I think there was a possibility to play the whole season but as there were no way to save your game that would have been pointless. You could adjust the difficulty level and the length of a period. Big part of this game were the statistics. Players had different abilities such as speed and shot and passing accuracy. Sometimes players were injured. The game kept record of user stats. I remember how I tried to make the crowd cheer more because I wanted to break the record of the desibel levels of the crowd.

I played this game a lot. I think it’s the game I played most on my Mega Drive. NHL 94 was released also on SNES and Sega CD. There was also a release for PC that was simply titled “NHL Hockey”. It had official NHL license. Wikipedia states also that many people think that this is the best sports game ever released. According to my text above I don’t think this becomes as a surprise. It was developed as two dimensional point of view. If you like to play older NHL games I can tell you that I also like NHL 97. Maybe I will write a post also about that game some day.

How Resident Evil (1/2/3) made you feel anxiety?

Posted on by Viljami

The first Resident Evil game made you feel anxiety in a way that was never seen before in history of horror games. There was formed a new genre that would be called survival horror. Resident Evil took strong influences from adventure games and converted it to be presented in three dimensional world. We had seen already some Alone In The Dark games that used different camera angles to deliver its horror to us players.

Resident Evil had some shooting and zombies took lots of bullets. You had only limited amount of ammo. You had to think when is a good time and place to save the game. This was also limited. This was a result of some very clever game design that made you actually feel like it then felt. I think today you wouldn’t have so many chances of creating tension inside a game this way. In almost every modern game, if you can compare it to original Resident Evil, you have the opposrtunity to save the game and change camera angle. You rarely find these kinds of effects used in todays games.

The first three games of the series were released on PS1. I think the second RE game was the best of these. And it stands out today as one of the best games that I have played on PlayStation 1 gaming console. This was my first touch to horror gaming. I have found some good games inside this genre later that include some titles that represent a modern view of Resident Evil. Only horror game series that comes even close in comparison is Silent Hill. And if you have a debate on which one’s better that is an endless discussion. They both have their own styles and there are lots of different games included. Let’s just say that comparing them is difficult.

If you want to get to know RE better I suggest that you start from the first game of this series. If asked, I would prefer the original rather than a remake. All of the three first games are good. Resident Evil Zero is also very good and playable. If you have played newer RE games I advice you to also check the earlier games as you will probably find them very interesting.

Sonic The Hedgehog

Posted on by Viljami

Just stopped my daily evening routines, or maybe I had some free time, to play some Sonic The Hedgehog on Sega Mega Drive. This was actually my first game on this platform. And actually it wasn’t on the original system but on Retro Trio HD. I haven’t yet figured a way to get HDMI out of my Mega Drive. I should really dig into that some day. There might be a converter available for that specific purpose. But let’s get back to the game.

There exists tens of games that have the name, Sonic The Hedgehog, or at least Sonic, as their title. This was the first of them all. It was 1991 and Sega desperately needed some kind of a front figure or mascot to compete with Nintendos Super Mario. So Sega really made an effort to produce a quality game that would be able to compete with Nintendo. Sega had this issue of having a powerful console, more powerful than Nintendo then had, but it lacked good quality games. Nintendo had their Mario, Castlevania and Bubble Bobble games. Mega Drive games were thought to be too repetitive and not so appealling. That was partly true and even today this matter comes to mind when comparing these two gaming consoles.

So Sega made its best to bring to the game something different and in some way they even succeeded. Sonic was basically a platformer, just like Super Mario Bros, but it extended this concept a bit. Sonic had abilities Mario couldn’t even dream of. It could spin and it’s speed increased as it ran a little bit forward. It collected rings instead of coins. When an enemy hit Sonic, or the other way around, it lost all the rings it possessed. And…you could collect some of them back after you had been stroke by an enemy. This was something unique that had never seen before. Sonic had a wider and more approachable personality than Mario had. Sonic was maybe even cooler than its competitor.

As a game Sonic The Hedgehog isn’t as playable or enjoyable as for example Super Mario Bros 3. Even Bubble Bobble, that didn’t have these games scrollable screen, stands out as a better platformer. If you compare it to some good platformers that were released on later, newer, consoles, it loses to them. But Sonic has its own fans and it is clearly the most approachable mascot for Sega. The one thing you remember this company of. So it is honorable that they created this well known character.

I paused my life for a moment and played Sonic for about two hours today. I just had to take that picture with my phones camera and tell you a bit about this remarkable game. After all this the start. I have some other very interesting games that are having this blue hedgehog inside them. One of them is Shadow The Hedgehog that is a game I recently bought for original Xbox. And I’m now lucky enough to have a working Xbox 360 and I’m very satisfied that the game works on it also. Another very interesting game, which has Sonic, is Sonic Adventure, that was released on Dreamcast almost ten years after the debut of Sonic. So maybe I’ll tell you more about this character later. I have to go but we are going to continue with this blog in one direction or another as soon as I have some more time to spend and to write more…