Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: Gaming Philosophy

Characteristics of Sega Mega Drive Games

Posted on by Viljami

I was playing Shinobi III – Return of the Ninja Master as I started to focus on how the game is actually developed. I am sometimes, maybe subconsciously, starting to think how the game that I am playing is programmed or how the graphics are put together. I am not a professional game developer but I still find thinking about this very interesting. I started to realize that there are some characteristics of games that are developed for Sega Mega Drive.

Mega Drive, or Genesis, was released in the late 80s. It aimed to be a serious competitor for Nintendo Entertainment System. It also made it’s best to bring the experience of arcade to consumers living rooms. At this point the hardware performance of game consoles was beginning to be a lot closer to the level of arcade game machines. It was clear that Sega wanted Mega Drive to be more powerful than NES. Sega made this message clear by printing the text “16-Bit” to the surface of Mega Drive game console.

What kinds of games there were back in the day? Are they still worth playing ? We can start from the visual perspective. As Mega Drive had power, it produced very nice graphics if they were compared to the graphics that NES provided. I think SNES has a bit better graphics if you compare them to Mega Drive’s. But SNES was released way later than Mega Drive. The graphics are of course two dimensional as 3D modeled games weren’t yet available.

Mega Drive games are said to be repetitive. I think this is somewhat true. Many times you have to play the same part of the game over and over again until you finally succeed and get to progress. Mega Drive games can be a bit more violent than Nintendo games. You can understand this by thinking about hockey games that have or do not have fights. If you also compare Mortal Kombat games released for these systems there are some clear differences. Sega’s version has more blood on it.

Let’s talk about the gamepad a bit. As you think about how the controller looks you realize that it definitely was designed to be an improvement of NES controller. I mean, just look at it! It’s completely round. NES controller is so edgy and simple compared to Sega’s. There are three buttons, a start button and an axis button – nothing else. This makes this controller simple and easy to use. Although in some games it would be nice to have some more buttons. There are of course some more advanced gamepads available and this is only the one that originally came with the console.

Mega Drive games are addictive. You can play it’s games for hours. That’s just about how long you can spend playing Mega Drive. I think PlayStation later made it possible and even preferable to play the same game for tens of hours and it’s sequel, PS2, took it even further to this direction. Playing Mega Drive can cause you some serious raging. I think this has to do with the repetitiveness. Mega Drive was in late 80s and early 90s very affordable if you compare it to for example PC. In those days you had to spend a fortune if you wanted to buy a personal computer.

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!