Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Playing Some Dirt 4

Posted on by Viljami

I have been playing Dirt 4 a lot lately. I got to admit that I do like it as a rally game. It was released back in 2017. I have it for PS4, as a physical copy and also for PC. I have been playing it on my PC. The featured image is this time a screenshot of the rally of Sweden. I think the game feels better on PC. I am quite satisfied with my PDP controller. I have had some thoughts about buying this new controller that is actually Elite Pad 2. It would cost me something like 130 euros. I am considering still if I am going to buy it or not.

Codemasters is one heck of a rally game maker. There is some worries about what is going to happen now that Electronic Arts bought this game studio. This happened in 2021. Dirt 4 was released before that. There have been many good quality rally games released as games of Codemasters in 2010s. Back in the days when our retro games were newest games that existed Codemasters was delivering a heck of a quality. I got my introduction to rally video games as I played Colin McRae Rallly 2.0. I was actually first playing this and after some time I also just had to get my hands on the first game that was titled Colin McRae Rally.

Back in the 90s there were no serious competition for Codemasters. More recently there has been some competition in the form of a game series WRC. They have actually held the official game badge since they have had the rights to the license so they have been able to claim that they are the official rally game. I like also these new WRC games. I really got into them as late as 2020 when I bought WRC 9 for PC. Lately there have been games like WRC 8 for PS4 and WRC 10 and WRC Generations. I like these titles also.

Codemasters is responsible also of Dirt series. It started witb a game called Colin McRae Dirt and advanced into titles called Colin McRae: Dirt 2 and Dirt 3 and then again Dirt 4 and even Dirt 5, which in my opinion, slightly flopped as a video game. There is also Dirt Rally seiries that currently consists of two games. Dirt Rally games brings us gamers some simulation type of rally racing.

Dirt 4 is still a game you definitely would like to play. It has flashy graphics and even the soundtrack is bouncy. Driving feels somewhat challenging. Maybe not so realistic as in Dirt Rally. I like Dirt 4 a lot. One game that wasn’t mentioned, yet, is Richard Burns Rally. That is also a very good rally game. It is a bit old one but I can still recommend it to you if you don’t mind or if you are a retro fan.

Simulation vs. Reality

Posted on by Viljami

I was playing Dirt 4 as this idea entered my deeply focused mind. As you might know, as a gamer and reader of this blog, Dirt 4 is a rally game that has said to be somewhere in between a simulation and a totally arcade type of driving game. Of course I am once again playing with a game pad instead of a driving wheel. So, that makes it more of an arcade style of play. But what I actually wanted to represent and deal with this blog post is that how can playing something, be it simulation or not, to actually give you a perspective on how to approach a skill or some activity in real life and in reality?

Games can give you an idea of something, for example driving a car. This activity is not real driving. It is something a bit similar. Of course there are no risks. If you would really actually drive a car over 160 kilometers an hour on a road somewhere in the shore of lake Saimaa, Finland, you would have to really have some skills and know-how to even operate the car. There is this thought of driving and kind of a fantasy that are combined when you play a rally game.

Can playing games give you some skills that you can actually use in real life? Yes. Definitely. Sometimes these matters are technical details of the computer and what it does when you play one of your favorite games. I am many times thinking about technical and programming related matters when I am playing a game. I might think about how this particular game works, how it collects your input and keeps, sort of, count of the total progression of the player.

Sometimes, like when I play a basketball game, I start to think some matters that are related to real life basketball. There are lots of facts that you can connect to a video game. A game is always some sort of a representation of what it is trying to model. These models come from real life. Of course games can represent an idea of a game, also. There are types of games that you like to play and there are these genres that tell us about what kind of a game it is.

Playing games is an activity for mind but also for the body. This is why we have eSport events and it is completely understandable, today, that you can compete in playing games. Some games, like chess, are purely for mind and some games even test our nerves and reaction times. That is why some games you can compete in as a professional only if you are a young person.

There might be a way to think through your physical performance in some activity with playing a game about it first. If you think about basketball or driving you have to be able to explain to others what you are doing and how. For example, if you are a coach, you have this vision that no one in the team doesn’t have. You know how players in your team are feeling, what are their skills and you have also an approximation of how they will perform in the game that you are about to participate in soon.

It might be easier to make a game out of some sport than it would be to create a sport out of a game that doesn’t have anything to do with reality. Are we actually always modelling real life when we create a game? We definitely talk about games a lot. There is lots of going on in a game and in a real life. These all things kind of keep mixing up in our minds. Definitely games brings us a way to express things. Sometimes we mix reality with fantasy.

I am really into Java programming. This programming language has a lot to do with models that are made out of real life objects. It is called object oriented programming. If you are interested in this type of thinking I encourage you to seek more information. I don’t have a degree or a deep knowledge in psychology or philosophy. I still wanted to write about this matter. Maybe you got something out of this blog post. I will write a post again, soon.

About Modern PC Controllers

Posted on by Viljami

This blog post deals with controllers for PC. I have used these three different gamepads for gaming on Windows 10. I don’t know, exactly, how these controllers work in Linux gaming. So, that part is out of the context of this post. Let’s get to it!

There are three, mainly, three controllers I have used. They are Sony Dualshock 4, the controller of PS4, Microsoft Elite Pad, that is designed for Xbox One and, my latest addition, PDP Neon Carbon that is used, mainly, with Xbox Series S/X. All these gamepads can be used with Windows 10.

Dualshock 4 (the red controller in the image) needs an app so it can be used. That app is DS4Windows. This gamepad works very well with PC. Only thing that is really annoying is the mapping of buttons. As I have learned by my experience, Windows apps tend to map controllers as Xbox One or Xbox Series S/X controllers. This is a bit irritating. I think this issue can be solved. There are for example USB dongles that can be used as a solution. As I noticed this problem I had a quick fix for it already – I changed to my oldest gamepad that is Elite Pad (the one in the middle in the image).

Buttons have been configured correctly when you are using Xbox One’s gamepad. It is often taken care that a controller that can be used in a Xbox Series console will be compatible with Windows also. I think you can even take a Xbox 360 controller and plug it in so you can use it to play with a PC.

By the way, all these controllers I have been using have had a wired connection. I haven’t even tried to get bluetooth to work with these. Why would I do that? My desktop doesn’t even have a bluetooth itself. I use a bluetooth dongle for a wireless connection whenever there is a need for such. It also seems that all these three controllers have a USB-to-micro-USB connection. Even the third gamepad, that is meant for new Series X, also sports a micro-USB, instead of the most popular, USB-C. This however makes only a little difference. And basically all you need is a cable that has about a metre or one and a half metres of lenght.

So, I was very involved in this and I was using the Elite Pad. It is of a very good quality. It was expensive and it has served well over ten years of use. After all, it started to break down a bit. There was a part, that I think was originally glued to its place, that I had to remove. It was sticking out and the controller didn’t fit so nicely anymore. I decided to get a newer controller. Of course my thoughts were to buy a controller of Xbox Series X. I had some thoughts about DualSense, but since Xbox and Windows go well together, I decided to go for the Xbox on this one.

It first seemed that the replaicment would definitely be a combo of wired and wireless. It would be an Xbox Series X controller. I first thought that I would buy the official controller. I made my way to a store. I found out that they were actually out of these controllers. I noticed an optional model. It actually was this PDP Xbox Series X controller.

The controller was only 45 euros or so. So it was 20 euros cheaper than the official controller. When it comes to gaming this kind of a swing can be a gamechanger. And that’s how it was for me in this situation. I got the gamepad and went home as a happy duude.

First thing I noticed with this controller was that it doesn’t have a battery included. It is a wired controller. It has a functionality and you can remove the cord. This might seem useless but it actually makes sense in a way. You can replace the cord if you are on the move or if it gets damaged in some way. It is very light. The feel is awesome. I like this controller and I haven’t noticed anything to complain about. It is compatible with Windows 10 and you don’t necessarily need any app to use it in this way. There is some sort of an app avvailable as a donwload.

We can have a tiny summary here out of this blog post. I am very content on my new controller. It is a nice update to my old Elite Pad. I have to say that Elite Pad really served very well for its price of 130 euros. It has an option to load a battery in it. It also has some adjustments and a bit of weight for the controller to feel good. It was although time to move on with it. You can also try to use PlayStation controllers with a PC. Some games might feel better this way. I didn’t go through Linux or Mac gaming in this blog post but as you can probably figure there is a wholea other world in that way also.