Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

The Last Issue of Pelaaja Magazine

Posted on by Viljami

So, it’s a bit over twenty one tonight and I just received Pelaaja magazine as delivered in mail. I don’t know why the deliver was so late. Well, anyways, there’s also a book that I am currently reading in this featured image of this blog post. The book is about Snapchat (“How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars”). I find it very interesting and I am about hundred pages through this book at the moment. The book is written by Billy Gallagher.

The fact that I just received mail brought me the idea that I’ve been thinking about already for some days. I did already know that this issue of Pelaaja would be the last one. I was just waiting for the mail to be delivered so I could start writing this blog post. I knew that I was going to receive the issue sooner or later. So, this is the real news. Pelaaja is going to stop getting printed and it is going to be merged to another Finnish gaming magazine called Pelit. So, I, and also all the other readers that have a subscription paid already are going to get their still remaining magazines in their subscriptions delivered as Pelit magazines. We are also getting one issue of this magazine as a some sort of a bonus. Then we can make a new subscription to Pelit or just quit our subscriptions. This is how it seems to be going.

Pelaaja has been around for quite a while. The magazine was founded back in 2002 in October. Pelit, the other still remaining Finnish gaming magazine has been around for some time longer. Actually I remember reading Pelit already back in the middle of 1990s. I think it was established in maybe 1980s (it was actually founded in 1992). Pelaaja has for a long time provided a solid competition. I have bought some Pelit magazine issues. I have never subscribed to it. I have been a subscriber of Pelaaja for several years.

Back in the wild 2000s there used to be several printed gaming magazines. There are too many to mention or to even remember. I think we had a magazine called Peliasema that was focusing on PlayStation. Actually the word “peliasema” is somewhat translated as “play station”. Well, I had to make one more search through a search engine right here just to find that this was actually true and not just my imagination. It was founded in 1998. It was sort of a spin-off of Pelit and it featured some gaming journalists that were also writing articles to Pelit. So, there was some competition already in the field when Pelaaja was founded.

It is somewhat hard to trying to realize that Pelaaja has been actually discontinued. I thought that this magazine would have been up and running for a long long time. There are many trips, for example to our summer cottage, that I picked up the latest Pelaaja from gas station to have something fresh to read while enjoying summer, or winter, here in Finland. Pelaaja has been there for a long time and now it seems like there is a part of gaming journalism missing at least here and right now.

The direction for printed media is that we are getting less and less actual, physical, printed content and the news can be read online from your closest display that can be a smart phone, a tablet or a computer screen. More and more content is published digitally. More and more content is getting released for free online. And this has been the direction for already some time. I do enjoy very much reading content that has been printed to a paper as you can probably see from this blog posts featured image. I don’t have a e-reader device and my tablet is very poor and I almost never use it. Almost every book I read is a physical copy instead of a digital one.

In the last issue ever of Pelaaja we are going to deal with the new Doom game that is getting released next month. I am going to get that game. I know this already for sure. The last two Doom games were great ones. We are going to read more about Wreckfest 2, Housemarque, a Finninsh game company, turning 30 years and also some other very interesting content. I hope this is a good read. If its anything like every earlier issue of Pelaaja I am going to like it. So, thank you, Pelaaja, for everything and farewell!

Terminator 2D – No Fate

Posted on by Viljami

Terminator 2D – No Fate is a video game that will be finally released for Xbox Series X, PS5/PS4 and Nintendo Switch 5th of September 2025 (this year). What are my expectations about this game? From what I have seen in the official trailer we are going to see a game that is very close to the plot and happenings of the second Terminator movie. The action is going to be presented in an amazing two-dimensional style. I have to say that I am excited. I also think that Terminator 2 was maybe the best one in this series of sci-fi action and maybe even horror style of a movie.

The game, Terminator 2D – No Fate, is going to be available as a standard type of a release that is  going to cost, at least here in Finland, 53 euros. The collectors edition is going to cost, here, 109 euros. Collectors edition includes a collectors a silver tin, steelbook cover, art book, flipbook, a paperweight and a poster. This short list is just giving you a hint of what the collectors edition is including. You can probably make your decision on if you are going for the collectors edition or are you going to stick with the standard edition.

It is just purely exciting to even wait for some video game like this. As I mentioned already earlier we are going to see some famous and legendary scenes that were in the movie. The first Terminator movie was good. It was released in 1984. It was a peace of art made by the director James Cameron and featured the then rising star actor Arnold Schwarzenegger in a role that revolutionized hos career as an actor.

The second movie of this series was titled Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It was released in 1991 and was also, again, directed by James Cameron. The character of Sarah Connor is acted by Linda Hamilton that was also in the first movie. We are also seeing also Edward Furlong acting as a John Connor who is also later in the story in a significant role in the war against machines and robots that seem to be overpowering compared to human soldiers that fighting this war against machines.

If you are new to Terminator you might still get the picture with every word that I’ve already wrote in this blog post. The main plot handles between the machines, terminators, trying their best to destroy every human being. The terminator, a cyborg, is sent back to the past to kill, firstly, Sarah Connor before her son is going to be born. The second movie features a plot that describes how the second terminator, an advanced model, is trying to kill, now, John Connor while he is a young boy. I am not going so deeply in the plot. I highly recommend watching at least the first two movies since they are pure dynamite.

In the second movie Sarah Connor has had some hard time mentally while having the knowledge of a sort of an end of the world scenery that is going to happen in the future. The trauma has to be a deep one. After all she survived the attempt of the terminator on trying to kill her. In the beginning of the second movie she is being held at a mental hospital and his son and the “good” terminator, acted by Schwarzenegger, are freeing her from there at the beginning of the movie.

Everything that was good in the second movie, all the exciting scenes that we saw, I hope, are faithfully presented again in a form of a 2D video game. And all this has been made available to the most popular gaming systems of today. Now, lets just hope that it is not going to be another flop or a game that would perform somewhat poorly compared to the expectations. Lets keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.

Some Notes About PC Gaming

Posted on by Viljami

With all my video game consoles I am also very deeply into PC gaming. In this blog post I am going to write to you about my experience in PC gaming in 2025. What games do I play, what kinds of hardware and software I use and how can a PC be utilized to also play some retro games be it that they are on any platform including consoles and older PC gaming systems like MS-DOS or older Windows. I am not so deeply involved in Linux or Mac games. I have only played several Windows and DOS games. I think that Linux gaming is a very young field at this moment but things are moving forward all the time. Linux is today able to play many games that were available only for Windows systems earlier. We are not going to go so deeply into Linux gaming as I have at this moment a Windows 10 installed on my PC.

Some old school gamers might be a bit confused since many PC gaming hobbyists are utilizing a game pad today. Originally PC gaming was very focused on playing with a mouse and a keyboard. I once handed a game pad to my friend, he’s a total PC gamer and has been playing for a long time already with a PC, and he just couldn’t figure out how to even put the controller in his hands. He was trying to handle it like it would be a keyboard. This is just to remind you that some PC gaming enthusiasts are very keen on playing with this somewhat old school controlling method. Back in the 90s it was almost impossible to picture someone playing a FPS game with a game pad. This changed when games like Halo and Call of Duty became popular within console gamers.

Console and PC gaming has become closer and closer to each other. There used to be these two separate groups that favored PC or console games. Of course PC even today cost a lot more than consoles. It is somewhat ridiculous that some players demand same performance from devices like Xbox Series X and PS5 that is present in PC gaming. It has been some kind of a law of nature that consoles are cheap to buy and the profits that console manufacturers make are made out of selling software and mainly games for these systems. There are many ambitious and huge games while some games are developed by indie developers that don’t have so much expectations or technical ability in the games they are releasing. I think this is mainly a good thing. Not every game has to be a huge success after all.

I have lots of PC games in the form a DVD or CD-ROM disc. Today it is coming more and more common to see a PC that doesn’t have a optical disc drive at all. Many setups available don’t include the drive at all. My personal solution to this was to first buy an external DVD drive and just recently I got also a Bluray disc drive. It was a bit expensive. It cost me about 150 euros. I haven’t seen any Bluray Ultra HD 4K disc drives that would have been available in any web shop that I encountered online. This is the actual format of the latest video game consoles.

Gamers are buying their PC games mainly from places like Steam and GOG (“Good Old Games”). There is also the consideration about abandonware. This means that some games aren’t available to be purchased at all and the copyright holder doesn’t really mind if someone is sharing the game for free to be downloaded. You can run a search on your favorite search engine, like DuckDuckGo, or some else, to see some of these games. My favorite place to find abandoned PC games is “My Abandonware” that is a website that holds thousands of games. Soe games are tagged as “commercial” and this means that you aren’t able to download them at least from this site. Some popular abandonware games are the original Silent Hill 2 – Restless Dreams, Black and White 2 and Need for Speed Most Wanted.

It is also possible to play many retro games on a PC. This subject is a bit controversial. Some game companies, like Nintendo, are telling us that emulating older systems is piracy and illegal. Some consumers think it is totally all right to play these games that are downloaded from some gaming website. The law says that for example to use a PS1 emulator on a PC you have to extract the BIOS from the PS1 that you own and then rip every game from an original CD that you own. Then you are perfectly legit with this matter. We are not going to go so deeply in this topic ether. Let’s just state that emulation is possible and there are emulators available that emulate devices like GameCube, PS2, N64 and PS1.

When it comes to operating systems Linux has gained some popularity. At October Windows 10 users are forced to update to a Windows 11 system or then pay some more to keep using their Windows 10 systems. Some lucky people just need to update their operating system while others, that don’t have a compatible PC for this upgrade, are going to have to buy a Windows 11 PC.

How about the issues of performance? How powerful PC can run the latest games and how much does it cost? I have currently a systems that has 16 GB of RAM, a video card memory of 8 GB, a lousy CPU that actually isn’t compatible with Windows 11 or 12 and a 2 TB SSD drive (along with a 250 GB SSD that holds my Windows 10 system files). I also recently bought, finally, a screen that is 28 inch and can display 4K resolution graphics. I am going to upgrade to a PC that has at least 64 GB of RAM, 2 TB SSD, and a video card that has 8 GB of video memory. Also I need good and compatible CPU. This system should be able to run games like the new Silent Hill 2 and Final Fantasy 16. This kind of a computer is going to cost me about 1300 euros. I bought my old PC with a price of 750 euros back in December of 2020. So, it is already a kin do f time also to update my computer to enjoy some modern PC gaming. I think this is all this time and we’ll see in a new blog post later.