Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Some Good Xbox 360 Games That Can Be Played on Xbox Series X

Posted on by Viljami

In this blog post I introduce to you some Xbox 360 games that can be played on a Xbox Series X. As you might have noticed there are plenty of used Xbox 360 games available. This might be a good time to buy some of these games. They don’t cost so much.

Now, every Xbox 360 game is not compatible with the latest Xbox which of course is at least at the moment Xbox Series X. There are many games available as a digital copy. They also don’t cost too much. So, if you prefer digital just go ahead and get maybe some of these five titles that I have in this featured image of this blog post.

I don’t like to buy games that I can’t play. That is why I have removed some Xboc 360 games that aren’t compatible with Xbox Series X from my gaming shelf. How do you know which games are supported? I use this list that is featured on Wikipedia. Just make a search with your favorite search engine with the words: “xbox 360 games compatible with xbox series x” or something similar and you will find the list. It holds currently 633 games out of every 2155 games that were ever released for Xbox 360.

So, when I am browsing a list of some game shops Xbox 360 titles available on-line I go and check every time I come across an interesting game. I check if the game is compatible or not. Since this list is ordered alphabetically it is very easy to check if the game is actually compatible.

These games don’t cost so much. Xbox 360 was released back in 2005 so these games are not the newest ones out there. They actually aren’t retro games also. They seem to be these very good games that are beginning to get old and might be forgotten somewhere in the near future. So, it must be important to just remember how good games they actually were. Who is there to stop you from playing them?

Another fact about these games is that they don’t take a whole lot of disk space. You can install a game and it takes only about 10 GB of space from your gaming console. There are hundreds of games like these available. So, what games should you choose?

Here in this picture I have five games that have been very popular. These aren’t hard to find. There are plenty of copies available that you can buy from a gaming shop that you like to buy games from. Here in this image I have Gears of War, Alan Wake, Call of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare, Red Dead Redemption and Bully – Scholarship Edition.

Now I can remember that I didn’t pay above 15 euros of any of these games. These are all popular and very good games. I encourage you to check the prices from your local game shop or maybe from some online game store. I once bought maybe ten or fifteen games as a bunch since there was a nice discount for original Xbox and Xbox 360 games. And you must remember also that some original Xbox games are also comaptible with Xbox Series X.

So, there you have it. This small set of games might just be what you could be palying next on your Xbox Series X or maybe also on Xbox Series S as a digital copy. These games are cheap. They are not remakes. They are not new games. They are just something that you might want to own in a near future.

A Word or Two About N-Gage

Posted on by Viljami

So, I read a book about N-Gage. It was a phone slash hanheld gaming console that was developed by famous and legendary Finnish phone company Nokia. The way that Nokia tried its hand in also gaming business just shows how huge the company was. It had the money and power to make it.

Finally N-Gage proved to be a flop. As it wasn’t a successful product it did open up many doors to Finnish gaming developer companies. N-Gage sold 3 million copies worldwide. If you consider that Sega Dreamcast sold 9 million copies and was a failuire for Sega you can get a picture of how the market was back then.

If we think about Nokia a bit we can figure that it was at its time a huge leader in personal phones markets. After all iPhone that was first released in 2007 took the crown from Nokia and a new generation of smart phones started to conquer the markets. Things changed quickly as Nokia depended on phones that had buttons while IPhone had a touch screen.

Smart phones took a step to this new direction. In 2014 Microsoft bought Nokias mobile phone business. For a while we had a smart phone that was called Nokia Lumia. Soon it was clear that Nokia couldn’t compete even when it had a partner like Microsoft. Rest seems to be a history and it tells us of the success of Android and iOS mobile devices.

The roots of Nokias phone games are actually very deep. I have some personal experience about this also. Back in 1990s I had a Nokia 5110 that had “matopeli” that can be translated to “worm game”. It was a casual game that you could start playing while waiting for the bus for example. With N-Gage Nokia was actually targeting some more serious gamers.

N-Gage was an ambitious attempt from Nokia to get seriously into gaming business. You can think how interesting it would have been. The markets were growing all the time. We saw at the same time how Microsoft entered the competition with its Xbox gaming console.

N-Gage had its critical flaws. When you wanted to change the game you had to turn off the device and remove the battery. Only after that you could change the game cartridge. The way you actually talked to N-Gage was a bit akward. You had to place the phone sideways on your ear. Also, the screen was placed just like in every phone model and it had more height than width which was a different approach compared to other gaming devices of time.

Nokia was trying its hand in a new field. This wasn’t cool with other big gaming companies. There were lots of memes moving around where people were mocking N-Gage. It was difficult to enter the field of video gaming. There were some negotiations with Nintendo about some co-operation but this never lead to anything. Sega seemed also interested in supporting Nokia. There were huge game titles like Tony Hawks Pro Skater that were introduced for N-Gage, also.

While N-Gage seems to be a flop it did affect the gaming industry at least locally in Finland. They had resources and money that they brought to the industry. I must mention here also the best selling N-Gage game: Pathway to Glory. It received good scores from reviews of different internationally known video game magazines.

N-Gage wasn’t a huge success. It does have a small group of supporters. I am not sure if this book that I read, “Fantastinen floppi”, is available in English. So, its a bit akward that I am writing about this book here in this blog that I write to in English. However I thought that it would be cool just to tell you all about the book.

NES Games That Are Still Relevant in 2024

Posted on by Viljami

You might not spend so much time with NES games as you do with modern games that directly aim to keep you focused for tens or even hundreds of hours. This has everything to do with quickly advancing technology. Designing games goes forward also when the developers learn more and more and more hobbyists are starting to get into the world or playing video games. In this blog post I go through some NES games that are, in my opinion, still relevant today.

There are practically hundreds of games in the whole gaming library of NES. If you don’t have a clue what gaming console I am referring to I can tell you that NES comes from words Nintendo Entertainment System. It is a retro console that was introduced to us, gamers, in 1983. I have picked up these five games that I own. These all are very good games and I can definitely recommend them.

I have a Retro Trio console that plays NES, SNES and Mega Drive games. I can also use an adapter to play Master System or even Game Boy games. These adapters I have bought for a cheap price. I think I paid just under 40 euros for the Master System adapter and maybe 35 euros for the game boy adapter. It is very nice to play Game Boy games this way. The screen is very clear and bright compared to the screen of Game Boy or Game Boy color. There are some other ways also that you can play Game Boy games but lets not get carried away too much.

You can of course take your chance and use any NES emulator to play NES games on your PC. If you are going with this option I definitely recommend to get a replica of the original NES controller that you can attach with a USB cable. This brings the certain sense of authenticity to your NES games. These physical copies can be a bit pricey. They can cost anything from I think 15 euros to even 100 euros. Some rare games are even more expensive. So, I totally understand if you go the emulator way at least when you are just starting to get into NES games. The USB controller I mentioned earlier has a price tag of maybe 20 euros. I have never got into troubles with the compatibility and you can probably get it to work easily even if you use Linux.

You can sense that for example Super Mario Bros, that was released in 1988, has this certain lightness in the whole gaming experience. I mean the fact that it uses only so little memory. You can talk about randomly accessed memory or even hard disk. As I think you have witnessed NES doesn’t have a hard disk at all. You can use saved games in some games since they have an extra battery that enables long term memory usage. With emulators you can of course go around this and use saved states that come with your favorite NES emulator. So, this is one more reason to use software emulators instead of old retro hardware.

Graphics are two dimensional in these games. Sound is of course pretty terrible. If you are deeply into “chip tune” musical genre you might even like it that way. I personally think it is some kind of miracle how they could program the music for these games with all these limitations. Same goes to the overall design of these games. There are over 600 NES games that were released. These five are the ones that I have managed to grab. I have a total of maybe ten or twelve NES games in my collection. I did buy these all already some years ago. I can definitely say that I enjoy these games even if they are old and even if the time keeps moving forward. I think Nintendo did  agret job!