Intensive Gaming Diary

The Logo of PlayStation Is So Cool

Posted on January 5, 2024 by Viljami

Let’s start with the logo of PlayStation. It is time to start blogging again after a short break. Why we’re at it I might just say: “Happy New Year”! It’s the first post of the year 2024. We are going to talk about Sony PlayStation and especially the logo of it.

I started to admire how the logo looks. It forms the letters “P” and “S” that, of course, stand for “PlayStation”: This particular picture is of the smaller console named PSOne. It is my only PS1 that I currently have. I also have PS2 but it isn’t working currently. Of course, you can use emulatorsa and I have also Duck Station on my PC for these PS1 needs.

Where do we continue? We can admire the long list of games, I think there are several thousands of them, the cool looks of the controller and its superb controllability or the amazing graphics. It was back then the coolest gaming console that delivered us games like Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo.

Later some more powerful consoles have taken the place of PS1 as the number one console but it still gives me a nice and warm feeling when I boot up a game or another inside this system. The design is in every way amazing. I mean, do you recall the intro that the console gives when you start it? There is the logo, once again, and this unseparable sound or a piece of music and then you are told which area the console is from (is it Europe or America or some other region).

Playing with PS1 was like listening to rock music. It was for many the introduction to 3D capable graphics and also to sound. It could deliver CD quality audio. The controller was the most advenced thing in the field at the time. Some have done this better later but PS1 was the first. You might say that DreamCast is the best console ever but that’s just like comparing rock music to jazz – everyone has their own preference.

PlayStation had at first a standard controller. It was later updated to DualShock that had tumble effect and also two thums that made controlling the happenings and interacting with the game more comfortable. As I said many have built on after PS1 was dominant. Few have come close to what PS1 gave to us gamers.

I alreaday mentioned some games. Here’s a list of some of my favorites: Crash Bandicoot, Spyro The Dragon, Spider-Man, Colin McRae Rally, Legacy of Kain – Soul Reaver, Abe’s Oddysee, Fear Effect, Final Fantasy VII and many more. You can find a better listing from Google or Bing or Yahoo. You can even ask about it from some sort of a AI tool. We are living the year 2024 you know!

What I also like about PS1 is that the games weren’t, with some exceptions like FFVII, that long. I remember playing almost every game I had to completion. I have to mention also Tony Hawks Pro Skater here since I almost forgot it already. Am I too excited while I am writing this. It might be so.

I encourage you to do your research on this topic and take your facts even further. I think we had a very interesting and also inspiring topic here to discuss about. It was the first of the year but there are still many more posts coming to this blog this year and even after that. So, stay tuned and keep enjoying your games!

This Is a Very Bad Game

Posted on December 30, 2023 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!

What Is Abandonware?

Posted on December 13, 2023 by Viljami

Have you heard about abandonware? Does it actually mean that you can just copy abandonware and can it be in some way profitable for the original developer of the game? In this blog post we are trying to get a thorough answer to these questions.

There are many websites that provide some old games that you can download and install them to your PC. Many games are or can be played on a modern personal computer with a modern operating system. There are games also available for emulators. Some games require a special software application like DOSBox. So it is possibly to play old DOS games with a new PC.

The case of abandonware concerns console game and computer games. Some game companies, like Nintendo, like to stick with their old copyrights and try to ban and make copying old, or retro, games totally illegal. They are acting like this even when clearly there is not a clear option for them to collect a price for this kind of a game that is already some tens of years old.

Some companies publsih remakes. Some companies totally abandon their game. This is where the term gets its true meaning from. What then means public domain? Could games be released in public domain? This means that you could re-publish a game of this kind and even take some parts of the game and make a new game out of it with paying nothing for the original developer.

What would it mean if we had all old games in a public domain? We wouldn’t have to pay for our retro games. There would be more websites sharing these games. There would be a lot of exploration and even research done by playing these games and getting to understand their content.

There are many games currently classified as abvandonware right now. You can find a deeply involved website titled “My Abandonware” that provides ten of thousands of games for you to download. You can download games like Silent Hill 2 or Need For Speed Most Wanted for free. If there is a game that is currently in any form commercially avaialble this is mentioned and it isn’t possible to download it as a free copy but there might be a demo version available.

I have written here in this blog earlier that we are having difficulties of maintaining and keeping old games, I am talking about games that are 20 years old or even older than that, available. Are we supposed to just forget these games? I thinkthey have high value even if nobody has a way to buy them.

What should we do? Should we make every 20 year old game totall free? Should we allow some other parties to make more good remakes out of all these old games? Could large companies like Nintendo provide more opportunities to buy and maintain a collection of old and retro games?

We are having this business that is very profitable for game shops. You buy a physical copy of an old game and the price is very high. You keep the game for years. Of course you have the original gaming system. But what happens when the game gets so old and the divece you are playing on has become broken? Do we just delete this stuff and move on? I think we should think more about maintaining old games and trying to remember also in the future what they are all about.

Basically a game ends up as abandonware because the original owner of this game doesn’t find a way to make the game somehow profitable again. Every game can be profitable when it gets released. After many years the owner doesn’t care about the game and so it becomes abandsonware. There is an issue also with the copyright. It is hard to make a remake out of a gaem that is abandonware. This is why public domain would be a consideration.