Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Author: Viljami

Some Reasons for the Success of Nintendo Switch

Posted on by Viljami

Today Nintendo Switch is the third most sold video game console. Only some legendary and popular devices are above it in the statistics. Those consoles are PlayStation 2 and Nintendo DS. I am talking about the global top list of consoles sold. The statistics of a specific region, like North America, Europe or Asia, might differ from the ones that I here am writing you about.

The most sold consoles, huh? PlayStation 2 has held this position for a long time now. It dominated the statistics being the first DVD player for many gamers. It has also a very wide selection in a form of a game library. People were expecting something like this already when only PlayStation 1 was available. During this period we saw a great increase in the number of gamers worldwide as new players and groups were starting to get interested in video games.

What about Nintendo DS and its success. Why did it take place? I guess this has everything to do with it being a portable gaming device. You could take it everywhere and it provided solid library of games and a decent three-dimensional environment for these new types of video games. I guess that before the era of smart phones (I think Apple begun this era by releasing the first iPhone in 2007) this was something very attracting for a gamer.

We are taking now Nintendo Switch in to account while we are having a conversation about the most sold gaming consoles. And actually why is it so? Well, there are some quite clear matters that we can think for a while. One of them is that Nintendo Switch has a gaming library that has a very good quality. There are several Nintendo exclusive games being still released that are very good ones and that you cannot play on another console.

We have to take in count also these delivery problems that Sony and Microsoft faced during the pandemic. This is a reason you cannot underestimate in these talks. There was a long period of time that Xbox Series X and both PS5 models, the one with the disc drive and the one without, were totally unavailable. You could find a Xbox Series S if you were lucky but there was no serious lack of Nintendo Switch consoles. The availability might be the biggest reason that Nintendo Switch climbed to such high levels of units sold during these times.

Why is the Nintendo Switch so cheap? The price is today about 300 euros here in Europe while PS5’s and Xbox’s pricier models wear a price tags way higher. You have to consider that Switch doesn’t come with a proper controller so you might have to spend like 70 euros for Pro Controller. This is of course optional. One factor of the low price seems to be that Nintendo Switch is very underpowered especially when compared to its main competitors of this generation of consoles. It is compared to Xbox 360 when we are discussing about pure performance. The upcoming Switch 2 that we are going to get more information from Nintendo by 2nd of April is said to be as powerful as PS4. So, the pure power is not the case when dealing with success here.

We also cannot forget the appeal of Nintendo’s brand. They are known to be a “mega” huge gaming company since the early days of Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES for short, back in the beginning of 1980s. It was the video game console that made home video gaming popular again while many consumers were very disappointed in Atari’s 2600 and especially their games and overall quality that finally caused a big depression of video games consuming and playing in the first years of 1980s. NES was definitely the console that made gaming popular again. You could trust Nintendo and it was something considered to have a good quality.

Today PS2 has sold wolrdwide over 160 million units. Nintendo DS has sold 154 million units. Nintendo Switch is behind these two with 150,8 million sold units. It is very exciting to see how is the Switch ending up to sell as the sales might dive down after or even before Switch 2 is getting released. How many people are going to buy Nintendo Switch if the Switch 2 is already available? The price of this new Nintendo console is predicted to be somewhere between 400 or 500 euros. However the price or other details, like release date, are not yet officially announced.

Point and Click (Adventure) Games

Posted on by Viljami

The idea for today’s blog post originated as I got to play a remake of Lucas Arts classic point and click adventure game Day of the Tentacle. I have only played so little of this game and I don’t really have enough experience from it that I could tell you anything else about this game. Lets just say that it is still something worth to experiment with even today.

Instead of writing you about just one game I decided today to tell you about point and click games in general. There are loads of great games if you end up enjoying this type of games. This whole genre was at its time something that the latest hardware could support. This era was dominant way before we got used to playing in these interactive three-dimensional environments.

To understand point and click games we have to talk about how they evolved in such a direction. Where did this genre actually come from? The first thing, when it comes to adventure games, were text-based games. First adventure games were like this – you actually had to type in every move you could make in the game. Sierra leveled the game up so you could move around. Some years after point and click games became very popular. You could just click and point what you were trying to do in this game. It was a new way that you could interact with a video game. Of course you used your mouse to perform these operations.

Adventure games, and so also point and click games, involve a lot of discussion between the characters in which you have to make choices. There is also a lot of items that you have to collect and use with other items to solve different problems. You often have a score that tells you something about how you are progressing in the game.

Many adventure games in the 1980s were brought to you by a gaming company called Sierra. The strongest adventure game in the end of 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s was Lucas Arts. It brought us games like Maniac Manson, several Monkey Island games and many more. Sierra had also some point and click titles like the Space Quest series. I think the third one was somewhat a point and click adventure game. As Lucas Arts developed their user interface to suit point and click playing style also Sierra had to level up their games.

Day of the Tentacle is full of humoristic scenes, conversations, interaction and puzzle solving. It is promised a steady five hours of playing time that is described by “How Long To Beat” website. I have only completed a small amount, under 10 percentages, of this game but I think it was worth its price. The game is available today for Xbox Series S/X as a digital copy. I think there are versions for some other devices also. The price is today about 15 euros but the price might come down a bit if there is a huge sale or something like that. I paid only three euros of this game during a sale opportunity.

Some other classic worth-to-mention point and click games are Sam and Max series, Indiana Jones adventure games, Full Throttle and The Dig. Sierra has also some adventure games that have to be mentioned: Police Quest series and Space Quest series, Leisure Suit Larry games and also King’s Quest series.

Some other notorious point and click games are Clock Tower series and Discworld series. You can probably find more from your favorite sources of information be it a search engine, an actual physical book about the subject (my favorite is Juho Kuorikoski’s book (“Suuret seikkailupelit – tietokonepelien klassikot) about adventure games in general) and maybe you could try asking an AI tool for more information. This tiny blog post seems to be too small for a more detailed description. This was my post this time. I hope you enjoyed. See you next time!

Frontlines – Fuel of War

Posted on by Viljami

I came across this decent first person shooter, Frontlines – Fuel of War, while browsing the web and trying to find some new games from one of these on-line game shops that I seem to be almost constantly enjoying. I bought some more video games and I chose Frontlines – Fuel of War to be also included in my latest purchase.

I didn’t know almost anything about this game. I did find out that it was playable on Xbox Series X through backwards compatibility support. The game has been released back in 2008 for Xbox 360. Before I started playing this game I made a search about how long would it take to finish the game. I also wanted to know its grade on Metacritic. I was content as it seemed that it would take 5 and half an hour to finish this game. It had received 75 out of 100 from critics  and 7.2 out of 10 from users.

At this moment, right before starting to play, I wondered how the game would feel like. It is an FPS after all. It seemed to be a short game but that is not a matter at all for me. I actually like short games. I cannot remember a game that would have taken over 30 hours to play that I would have finished lately. Instead I have finished games recently, for example Split Second, that took only about ten hours to complete.

The actual game, Frontlines – Fuel of War, feels very different than any Call of Duty game out there. Now Call of Duty is a legacy and I don’t have the sense to compare these games. This game is only slightly like CoD. It manages to be just a bit more original in a way that actually manages to impress me. I do like this game. I do like playing it.

The controls take some amount of getting used to but after a while they seem to be working nicely. You reload, run, zoom a bit, crouch and shoot just using your game pad. There are many weapons, not loads of, but still many. In the game you have to consider a bit about tactics. There are some tanks that can only be taken out with a bazooka or another tank.

Many times I find myself dying in this game. It seems that if you don’t get an area under your control fast there is going to be an endless amount of enemies that just keep appearing to the fight. After you conquer a spot you get a tiny break from the action. There are also some vehicles that you get to drive with. One working tactic is to get a tank and drive inside it near to the enemy and then abandon the tank and start progressing through the level. You just have to be careful because only after three hits a tank is going to be destroyed.

The game does remind us about the war in the Middle East. This is very notable. Even the title is giving an idea of this. It seems that the developers haven’t tried to hide the message. The game can also make you idolize soldiers and of course this kind of a game has this sense of a slight propaganda. After all this doesn’t bother a seasoned gamer almost at all and you can concentrate to just playing a nice FPS game.

Now I don’t seem to remember if I paid ten or fifteen euros for this game. The game is a bit short. It can be a somewhat valuable purchase if you are into these special and unique type of FPS action games. It might not be the greatest shooter around but it is something to play and it can entertain you for a while. I didn’t try any multiplayer functionality and I don’t have an idea about that at all. I just played the campaign mode for some hours. I decided to set the difficulty level to “normal”. I originally started with a difficulty level of “casual”. There is also a hard mode that makes the game have three difficulty levels all in all.