Intensive Gaming Diary

Things to Explore in Gaming

Posted on May 26, 2023 by Viljami

Video games have already been here to entertain us for some time now. I haven’t had the opportunity to play every game of every era. You could say that I have been active from 1980 to this day. I haven’t seen everything in gaming. I hope to still see lots of more cool stuff be it old or new. If we think that first games were made back in the 60s there seems to be a lot to explore. But what are the most interesting games and platforms? What is important to know and what you can safely skip?

Lets think beyond home consoles. Things we had before Nintendo or even Atari 2600. Personal computers were also around in this moment and I will get to them later in this blog post. But the thing I want to write about here are games that we played in an arcade. Today there are things like MAME that enable us to play historically important video games we had in arcades some time ago. There’s lot to explore here and you start with your own PC just by getting an emulator. So, that’s one area to explore.

There are home console systems that I haven’t had a chance to own or even play on an emulator. Considering retro games there’s a certain way to get into these games that fascinates my mind. I have been thinking about buying a powerful and small in a physical size computer and installing an operating system to it that is dedicated to retro gaming. We already have Linux based operating systems like Lakka, Recalbox or Retropie. In this way I could explore systems like Neo Geo, Dreamcast, Atari Jaguar and Saturn and even more. There are some bad gaming systems also. Some of them are actually so bad that they are interesting. I recommend that you try them out first before buying a console like this.

What about some handheld consoles? For a long period of time I thought I could really play any handheld on my mobile phone. This is actually only part of the truth. I have found playing Gameboy games on SNES device with an adapter very satisfying. There are also adapter for GameCube that enables this same functionality. It is an expensive option. Nintendo has released many interesting handheld devices. I personally find Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS very interesting indeed. I could also get my hands on PSP or Vita that are Sony’s handheöd consoles.

There are also devices like Steam Deck that can bring you a solid gaming experience. I have read about new Asus device coming soon. It is called Asus ROG Ally and it costs 800 euros. IT is basically a computer that runs Windows 11. So, you can do also many other things with it. The thing I’m a bit concerned about is that the device provides only 2 hours of battery life. This means that you can only play games with it in runs of two hours. This, of course, isn’t an issue when you are playing this in your home. You can also hook it up to a television and use a Xbox Series S/X controller if you wish to do so.

There are also many new games and systems that I am interested about. You might have noticed already that we aren’t getting as many games ass we used to back in the days. There are however many good quality games that you can enjoy. This means that you have to follow the media a bit and keep yourself well informed. I can mention one game that is currently cvery promising. That game is Alan Wake 2. This will be released later this year.

I am also very interested in almost everything concerning Sega. I have already gathered a small collection of Master System games. My love for Sega begun in 1993 when I owned a Mega Drive. I find Sega CD, 32X and , well, actually every Sega console that was released after Master System, very interesting. I also have a good book about Sega that I enjoyed very much. I am always looking some more books to read about games.

There seems to still be a lot to explore. I have collected games now in some sort of meaningful way for about five or six years. I have played games longer than that but in 2017 I started to rally get this hobby going. I have my setup of nine game consoles and I have also some other devices that I can play video games on. I am trying to keep up with what’s going on in gaming globally. I have written posts for this blog since 2020. It is a really nice hobby and I think this blog has been a success at least in a way that it has attracted so many people here as visitors. Maybe I find some day some way to get also some income also from this website. That’s it. Thanks for reading!

Some More Hype for The GameCube Gaming Console

Posted on May 19, 2023 by Viljami

The game I have been playing lately is Medal of Honor – Frontline for GameCube. I managed to get a copy of this game and it’s a cheap purchase. If you consider the hype that surrounds GameCube nowadays the price for this game was low. I have seen many GC games sold for hundreds of euros. I am not going that way…at least not yet.

What do I think about the game? It’s a nice and kind of early first person shooter. There was a Medal of Honor released also at the same time for PC. They somehow wanted to separate the console version from PC version. This happened in 2002.

GameCube controller brings this games input a bit more sensitive. It is although far from perfect. If you compare this FPS game to what we see and feel today it is not even decent experience. But I am not a person that purely rates games and especially when they are retro games. You got to just give props to the makers. It has been over twenty years and a game that you can play today is valuable in this way in my opinion.

We can take Halo and compare it to Medal of Honor – Frontline. Where Halo wins is the smoothness of controlment. Just the way that your crosshair moves over the screen feels magical. I think Halo was the first FPS that actually worked very nicely in this matter.

I somehow still like the feel of this game because it just brings so many memories to my mind. If the controlling is a bit clumsy there are still elements in this game that I like.

I have many other games for GameCube. It’s a nice gaming console. The controller is unbeliavable especially when you consider that it’s over 20 years old. If you like retro gaming I can definitely recommend for you to get yourself a GameCube.

Web Page as a Medium

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Viljami

I have spent so much time learning to write and also express different ideas on a web page. There has always been this certain appeal for me to websites. It probably all began when I started getting into HTML in 1999 or 2000. So, that’s ages ago. But that is where it this interest started for me.

I was far from a professional. At first I didn’t even study anything related. At the time I was still a student in elementary school. This was even before I went to high school. It started as an interest and a hobby for me. I didn’t think that I would become some sort of professional in this exact field. But that actually happened a bit later. But lets just say that I was sort of free to do whatever I wanted at this time and I also found many interesting subjects in this time in my life. That was also a time when I got deeper into gaming.

So, there has always been an interest for me in designing and programming websites at least at some level. I am still not a seasoned professional. I am still taking those steps toward understanding this form of art and also a very strong medium. Because I think that’s what a web page really is – a medium. There are so many things you can express in a website. It might be a single page application but I myself started with static HTML. I soon got to CSS also.

I started building websites with simple HTML tables. I liked creating different types of interfaces and menus and also logos and headers. That was fun. I liked modifying images and changing how they were colored and represented in a web page. Soon it came to my understanding that tables weren’t a good way, anymore, to design a website. So I learned some newer techniques. I got far. I still stumbled as I encountered something like PHP, MySQL or JavaScript. I understood how powerful they could be but I wasn’t ready to move on to actual programming. I think that would have been too much for me to cope with as I was learning everything on my own with no teachers or other students or even a decent theory book.

I did learn more later. Today, I can create a static website. I still don’t know how to use React deeply and thoroughly. There is still lot to learn. Websites are now fully responsive and can be used with different kinds of tablets and phones and maybe even some other mobile devices. I think the medium is still there. You can write a book on a website. You can play a movie on it. There are several ways to draw content to the screen using your favorite web browser. You can create a game for others to play. And all this is achieved with a certain limit and you don’t have to actually install any other software than just your web browser.

There are many types of browsers available. Microsoft still has its own browser and it is currently called Microsoft Edge. Google has its own web browser. It’s called Chrome. You have also, the descendant of Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, which is very popular. Then there are browsers like Opera and Brave. Web browsers do gather information about you, the user, in form of cookies.

There are countless possibilities in what way you can deploy this medium. The content has to be in a form of HTML and it’s functionality is defined in JavaScript, be it as a framework or vanilla. You can also tune the look and view of your page with CSS. Together these, sort of, languages form a web page. This form is very different from what you have when you write a story. Then you are only using a tool like Word. You have a very limited way to control the content. Then you have complex ways to express your content with a pen or even a brush with a paper. This means actually drawing something. Creating a website is more technical and also more simple way to express some ideas you might have.

Websites keep interesting me a lot even today. I like fiddling around with digital photography and writing stuff. I like also the technical stuff. The programming side is very interesting. I think I have now a grasp of what can be achieved with a web page. I just have to grab myself and start working. There is lots to do and I have lots to achieve, still.