Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: Gaming Philosophy

What to Play Next?

Posted on by Viljami

I have to face it – I have a huge amount of games in my backlog. I have both physical and digital copies of many games that I haven’t had an opportunity to get into and to play. This is something to discuss about because there are some clearances in some of those game shops right now. I have to bring up Steam. There was recently a query in Pelaaja (a Finnish gaming magazine) about are people actually excited about ongoing clearances. The results were a bit mixed. A lot of people though their backlog is already huge and that they wouldn’t have a chance to play any of these new games that were on sale.

This is somewhat a problem. There are currently so many games that you have to really give a thought about what game you are going to buy next and what game would you play next. At the same time game buyers are looking more and more how games are rated. There is a lot of money involved. This brings it harder and harder to actually spontaneously pick a game that would suit your taste as good as possible.

It’s not that we wouldn’t have any good new games. This year there has already been many hit games released. We have seen titles like Gran Turismo 7 and Elden Ring already this year. I have to also include one thought to this monologue. There are too many games trying to be everything a game can be. I mean that these games are trying to be more than good in just one genre. This turns games into mega games that have everything. I don’t know if this is healthy for gaming scene. At the same time we are seeing more attempts to bring these mega hit games to the audience. Every big player in the game is trying to make the next big hit. Maybe they should try to accomplish something more simpler and not to try to take such a huge bite.

I greatly enjoyed Gran Turismo 7 some months ago. I played it over 30 hours. Other games that I have recently played a lot are NBA 2K22 and Diablo II Resurrected. How many games like this does a regular gamer need yearly? I am good with two to three titles that take a lot of time to complete. So I’m satisfied with 2-3 games yearly that take up something like 30 or 40 hours to complete. I am not able to play every game, and not even every good game, that gets released. As games try to provide everything for everybody this is very problematic. Actually I am satisfied in a good driving game or two, a good sports game, like FIFA or NBA, and maybe an adventure game or some other game that has also some action game features and maybe a goof first person shooter and all this in about a year. That would make my gaming needs for new games satisfied.

What about retro games? I am talking about older games. For these I prefer to pick some interesting titles as new games that I haven’t yet played. Sometimes these games are legendary and sometimes they are just rare and good. Price of retro games has gone up in recent years. But it is good to read reviews and recommendations from YouTube and also from some good news feeds and blogs. I think there is no reason to buy a lot of old games. It’s better to pick the good ones that you really want in your collection. Some games I pick because they give me nostalgia and I have something in my memory about them.

It’s nice to have kind of an network of influential persons, like bloggers, that can share something, be it a picture or a review or just a comment, about games that they like. I personally like reading reviews the most. I don’t like to always look just for the score that game receives. I like to really get an idea of what kind of a game it would be and what kind of an experience it brings. I enjoy also watching videos from YouTube about hunting games from flea markets. There are people that make their living like this. They buy some games cheap and sell them for a bit higher price.

All in all collecting games is a great hobby. I am a bit worried about gathering too many games to my backlog and that I am not able to play all of them. So I have to make compromises all the time. But I can’t help it. There just are too many games out there. I hope I have time to get into at least some of them.

That Certain Randomness

Posted on by Viljami

There is this certain randomness in video games. There is fast learning involved especially when you start playing some game. Games are usually easy to pick up but hard to master. That gives you a feeling that you want to play this game some more. You learn a lot. How much does your skill develop when you are playing? It seems to develop a lot. That isn’t although the only thing your success in playing the game depends. It also has a lot to do with good luck. We can name this element “certain randomness”.

This idea became clear to me as I was one day playing again Need For Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered. I had to catch at least 5 racers as a police officer. The task seemed hard. I kept failing and failing. After trying as hard as I could I got lucky. There were several bad guys captured. It didn’t have so much to do with my skills as it had to do with pure luck.

You might be familiar with randomness in programming. While it is debatable if the random number generated is actually random or not there is a nice way to generate a random number between certain values that can be defined in almost every programming language. At least this is possible in Java and Python. How I first got to know this type of numerical behavior was as I had to deal with a Java application that had to generate a value of a dice getting tossed. You basically had to generate a number between one and six and do it as randomly as possible so that it would describe in the source code how a dice would act in real life.

If you know anything about dices and how are they used in games like Yatzy or some roleplaying game you can figure that their role is to create this random feature that gives you a nice feel when you are playing. It gives you an element of luck. For example if dice gives you 1, 2 or 3 your hit of axe has hit and if it gives you 4,5 or 6 you have missed. You can also define the enemy’s body part that was hit and define the amount of damage caused. A common way to use dices in board games is how many times you can move your character. You get to move the character the amount of times that the dices value is showing.

Playing video games is not only about your skills or your reaction time. It would be very boring to play games that only required skill and would have nothing to do with luck. But if everything in a game is random that isn’t satisfying also. Take poker for example. It is nice to play a game or two of poker. Would you play poker for three hours? Would you enjoy the game if there were no money involved? Of course the answer to these two questions are both “no”. Poker is such a game of luck, isn’t it?

I think the best games are the games that mix randomness smoothly to the skills needed to succeed. If you succeed all the time doing exactly the same thing it gets quickly boring. You want challenge. And you want some surprises. Nowadays video games are getting more complex. This makes things more interesting to us players and I think for also game designers. While you can mix things up by making them abstract and random you always don’t even have to. That’s because games are more complicated than this. You can watch the statistics, like how many kills you have in a shooting game, and make these figures random but in this case the number of kills depends also about the players skills and this forms the players performance. Some things can be simple and random while others can just be thought to be like that.

Anyways. Thanks for reading, again! I am going to continue to have my couple days of since it’s the mid summer party here in Finland. I am probably going to play, make music and read some books. We already had a small meeting with a friend. I have also something more to tell you about our game that we hope to have for sale soon. See you next time!

Selling Your Games

Posted on by Viljami

I have some experience of selling my video games. I thought PlayStation 1 was getting old and decided to sell it and all games I had. As you can imagine I am not satisfied of this move I made. I sold the console and games back in 2000 or 2001. Many game stores accept used games so you get a discount and some stores also even buy games and can pay you some money even if you aren’t buying anything.

How can you get an offer from your games that you would like to sell? Many game shops have instructions of how to achieve this. The shop is trying to get profit. You don’t get as much money out of your games as you would if you sell them directly to a collector or another gamer. It however doesn’t hurt to make a list of your games and in what condition they are in and send that list through email to the game shop.

When should you sell your game or games? That depends a lot about what kind of a gamer you are. Do you play or collect retro games? Do your games have a value for you? If you have a an old collection you have kept in a closet or in storage and you don’t display them there might be no reason for you to keep your games or consoles laying there unused and collecting dust.

You have to keep in mind that you might regret it if you sell all your old retro games. That’s what happened to me back in the days as I sold my PlayStation just like I told in the first paragraph of this blog post. It might be easier for a gamer to sell a recently published new game that you maybe have just completed than selling a game that you played as a young teen. We have this thing called nostalgia, right.

There has been a lot of discussion going on about digital games. You have to remember that physical copies of games are limited with the time they are usable and playable. Moving to emulators might be a good thing. There is just all this discussion and thinking involved when we are talking about piracy and what’s legal and what’s not. So we have to be a bit careful when the talk turns to piracy.

I am not going to link directly any specific game shops. If I would they would be in Finland any way. I can say that I know maybe four different places that accept used games. You can just email your question to the local game shop and have a word or two with them.