Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: Modern

Super Mario Bros Wonder

Posted on by Viljami

Today I have spent maybe three to four hours into continuing to play Super Mario Bros Wonder for Nintendo Switch. This game deserves its spot as one of the best games available for this console. I proceeded to world number four. This game has eight worlds in it.

I just love the game play. Nintendo has put together a definite classic once again. There are many elements from earlier games but there is also something new for those of us that have witnessed the whole legacy of Super Mario Bros. I can picture gamer’s of all ages playing this video game.

It is said that Super Mario Bros Wonder takes ten hours to complete. That being that you manage to pass through slightly demanding puzzles that this game offers. There is a lot to explore. Mario or which one of the characters you happen to play the game with has many new abilities. You can add a special tag that can give you a skill like floating in the air or jumping a bit higher.

These certain elements are present here that are always relating my thoughts to this game series. We have seen earlier games like New Super Mario that have tried to bring back that feel of a nice platform game. This game reminds me a lot of the first game that was released in 1985. I also see many similarities to Super Mario Bros 3.

A big plus also in commercial sense is that kids and adults can all play this game. As you can see that the game is recommended for ages three above. Getting into the game isn’t difficult. I only got a bit stuck in these certain puzzles and made it to the end of the world 4. I had slight problems with tasks in the game that concerned invisibility. It was hard to jump to a certain spot while the character wasn’t almost at all visible. I think I will try to get through this point some day but it isn’t just today.

I don’t think you can complete the game in one sitting. Otherwise the game is very playable and progresses very fluently. The levels information that is provided to the player before entering the stage includes a rating of difficulty starting from 1 star and ending to I think 4 stars or maybe 5 stars. At least that was the way as I played these levels.

You can explore the whole surroundings quite freely. To progress you have to collect these some sort of rewards. You don’t always have to have everything completed to advance. So you can also skip some parts that might seem difficult. There are lots of item to collect. Coins are of course present as are cash points that enable you to buy many other items including extra lives. One hundred coins collected gives you of course one extra life as is usual in Mario games.

I definitely think this is the best Nintendo Switch game that I own currently. It is targeted to all ages but I wouldn’t call it childish in any way. More so it reminds of a deep technical fantasy type of product. Something that engineers and computer enthusiast have brought to all video game fans. And I have to mention one thing. I never got into Tears of the Kingdom so I cannot compare these two games directly. And how would you compare them? That’s like comparing an apple to a pear.

I am going to write one more paragraph to finish this post. I love Super Mario Bros Wonder. It being directed to whole family just makes it a better game and a better product. Congratulations Nintendo! You managed to bring Super Mario to us gamer’s once again with this game: Super Mario Bros Wonder.

How Did Skyrim Impact The Whole Gaming Industry?

Posted on by Viljami

Skyrim had a huge impact on gaming industry. It has been released and remade for several generations of gaming consoles. Skyrim has also been released for PC. It was first released in 2011 which was the time for consoles like Xbox 360 and PS3 to dominate the console markets.

What kind of a game is Skyrim? Have ytou ever played it? Skyrim is a game that gives you an open world for you to explore. You have main quests and also side quests to complete. Your character keeps progressing when you play the game. So, there is almost unlimited amount of things to do inside this game called Skyrim.

This isn’t the first Elder Scrolls game that has been released. I think some earlier games that remind a lot of it are Morrowind and Oblivion. There are also some other games in this series of games. This is the latest and all in all fifth game in the series. There have been rumours about a sequel already.

The game was a huge effort. Bethesda certainly knew what kind of a game they had in their hands. What I am concerned about is that these kinds of large games make it even harder for new games to be developed. I mean that we saw back in the 2000s many good quality games getting released very quickly compared to how long it takes today for new games to get to the markets. The demands are very high for a new game.

Gaming industry has grown. There are these huge projects that ever larger companies get their focus on. There is a lot of money involved. I am not sure if this is how I and propably many of you gamers out there wish things to be. We were content with our retro games earlier. Why wouldn’t we be content right now?

Games seem to go right now to a direction that focuses on making money. This is somewhat understandable. Money makes world go round or so they say. What this however means might be that we are going to see fewer independent developers. Maybe there are some small developers alive after thje next ten years but I mean – where would the rising new companies be that would take gaming to the next level. Currently we see huge releases that try to lure us to buy them over and over again on a new console. Just the old game with better graphics and so on.

Where is the innovation? I have been frustrated also in a fact that some things are just not available. I mean I am living in Finland. There are many great projects going on around the world and just so many of them are unreachable for me. I wish it wasn’t so. Take for example Analogue Pocket. I was very interested in this product but never bought one. We have seen Steam Deck and many of its competitors being released here.

Are huge companies going to release these huge games in the future also? They take at least 40 hours to finish. Thy might take several hundreds of hours of your precious time. Where does this lead? We would need some fresh ideas from programmers, designers and form the people that make graphics and 3d models and even soundtracks to games. And the question here is also how are the currently young people going to get into the industry and start shaping our world of games again to a more bearable form.

This Is a Very Bad Game

Posted on by Viljami

I rarely write to this blog about bad games. You know. No one wants to spend time playing a game that you really don’t enjoy. So, I am writing you about NHL 20 for Xbox One. I have  Xbox Series X so I played this game on it. Let me break my thoughts down right here.

How did I came to buying this game in the first place? I found it from flea market for a cheap price. It was only 5 euros. I know what is told about sports games. They are usually the same game that was released last year only with updates to the teams and rosters. This is exactly what this game is like. I am not a deep fan of hockey games. I know NHL 94, 97 and I have played NHL 2008 on PS2 some years ago. I also have NHL 21 for PS4. I partly got it because it included a new remake of NHL 94.

I don’t know a lot about hockey. At least not as much as I know about basketball. I do watch world championships every year but that’s basically it. I have never played hockey seriously. I do live in a country (Finland) that is very good in ice hockey. We have some good players like Mikko Rantanen and Patrik Laine and Laine is also on the cover of this game as you can tell.

I played this game a lot since I hoped that I would really learn to play it and finally spend some good time with it. This didn’t actually never get into that point. I ended up disappointed. I played this game for a bit over 20 hours. I wish I had read some reviews before I started playing. I think this game is a total waste of time. First things I did when I started playing was setting the difficulty level. I started playing with the second easiest difficulty level. I noticed that then this game was too easy. So I upped the level once. This was too hard of a difficulty setting for me. I also changed the button to “NHL 94 style” settings so I wouldn’t have to try to learn this new technique of controlling your shot for example. I had played some NHL 2008, as I mentioned, so the default controlling style wasn’t completely new to me.

This just wasn’t worth my time and effort. As you might have figured out I also spent many days and even weeks playing this game. I don’t know if the newest NHL game is any better. I guess you will have to find out somehow. But this NHL game, NHL 20, is not really a good piece of a game. I could have played something that would have given me some inspiration. I also haven’t wrote anything in some weeks to this blog.

I am skipping the rest of this game. 20 hours for this is long enough. I read form How Long To Beat that it takes about 44 hours to complete this game. That’s unfortunately too long of a time for me, at least. I did play a bit with Mikko Rantanen’s team Colorado Avalanche. I decided to stop playing when I got some more balance to my electronic wallet and this was also the time that discounts started in Xbox Store. I got myself some other games for also a very cheap price.

So, I got games like Dirt Rally 2.0 and Alan Wake II. These both have received very good reviews and I have also good experiences about Dirt Rally games. Immediately, when I started to play Dirt Rally 2.0 again I just felt so good playing it. The game was just way better than what NHL 20 did offer for me. This was the last point to my decision of not going to spend any more time on NHL 20.

NHL 20 isn’t a complete trash but I think you have many older and better NHL games available at the moment. Just give NHL 94 or NHL 97 a try. They are, of course a bit of retro games but you will definitely spend your time better this way. NBA2K series’s games are also very good and they have been that way for years. I don’t have really any experience about latest FIFA games or NFL games. Maybe that’s it for this time. Have a nice new year and may the year 2024 be something for you my dear reader!