Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

A Nice Gaming Magazine

Posted on by Viljami

I have subscribed a gaming magazine. Oh my. Since I have a day off today, because it is the national independence day here in Finland, I decided to continue writing to this blog. I have been thinking about getting a subscription of some game related magazine. There aren’t so many available here in my home country. So it was this time easy to pick which one to order. I thought about getting a foreign magazine named Retro Gamer but I found out that it was discontinued and I was not able to order it.

The price was cheap. Much cheaper than what it costs if you buy these magazine as individual copies. “Pelaaja” is the name of this gaming magazine. It is written in Finnish. “Pelaaja” can be translated to “Player”. What a nice name, don’t you think? Pelaaja has been published monthly for about twenty years already. There have been many other video magazines but none of them seem to last so long in this field. Oh, and there is a competitor here in Finland. It is a magazine called “Pelit” which if translated means “Games”. So we have very nice and simple names for out magazines here.

I made a subscription now for a year. I was glad that this issue dropped to my post box yesterday. I don’t have to go to the store to see if there is a new issue available. For a years subscription I get ten issues and two fully digital issues. It’s a nice deal. I am not going to advertise here so I won’t tell where I ordered it. It was about 80 euros per year. If you get a permanent subscription you probably will get it cheaper also.

One issue of this magazine costs 10,90 euros. As you can figure, it is a nice deal. In this December’s issue there are stories about the new God of War, WRC Generations, the new Cod and also stories about many other subjects. I have to make clear that it is completely written in Finnish. I don’t know so many English video game magazines. But I decided that it was time to give Pelaaja a go.

So this blog post was again a piece of my thoughts and it shows something about my private life also. I am glad that so many of you are currently enjoying reading this blog. I hope you also follow me on Instagram. I have also a Facebook page for this blog but it is not so popular. I think that’s the story for today.

Who Is This Guy (Super Mario)?

Posted on by Viljami

What’s the game you start to play when you want a nice platform game and you don’t mind if it is a bit retro? Of course you play Super Mario Bros or Super Mario Land or Super Mario Bros 3 or the New Super Mario. Whatever your choice is one thing is certain – there are lots of options here. That’s basically because there seems to be no limit to how many and how varying game titles have been released in this video game characters lifetime.

The featured image of this blog post is the cover of a book about how Nintendo and Mario “conquered” USA. Of course this character made its way into the minds of all gamer’s across the whole wide world. Super Mario was chosen to be the main character that represented the whole Nintendo as a company. There are lots of games and also some other material in which Super Mario has been used.

But who is this guy actually? We get to understand that he’s a plumber. He has a brother named Luigi. I think he’s a plumber too. Mario has the tendency to try to be a hero and he is always trying to save the princess. Mario is a bit softer than Sega’s mascot Sonic. Basically Mario is a product of the beginning of 80s while Sonic seems to be from the end of 80s and also from the beginning of 90s.

Of course all the real hardcore retro gamers know that Crash Bandicoot took the title of the most fascinating video game mascot back in the 90s. But you have to realize that Mario was the first of them. Nintendo was the brand that made gaming great again after Atari had effed up the whole game with it’s foolish strategy on releasing poor quality video games. Basically, back then, Atari just got too greedy.

And only Nintendo is able to come up with this kind of material. At the same time it seems a bit naive and childish but do you know what kinds of mushrooms he actually is able to consume? A mushroom that looks like Amanita Muscaria and makes him to grow. Wow! How did that happen and how did it happen so fast. Maybe there is something more to it than we at first can observe. Maybe parents should look after their children despite the fact that Nintendo seems to be so settled with its in game content.

Super Mario remains as a character that is a bit mysterious. You don’t get to talk with him in deep conversations. You might remember him from your childhood. Is he the one that is responsible for luring all these people in to video gaming? There haven’t been so many interviews or story lines in games that would have described his personality. Yet you definitely recognize his voice as he says “It’s me…Mario!”.

Why are things this way? Maybe it has everything to do with how under developed video games were. We had two dimensional pixel graphics and the audio quality was poor. There just weren’t enough space for this character to form some kind of a more progressed image in our minds. I think this is also a strength for him. He is kind of abstract figure. He was made to be simple and easy to approach. So Mario is at the same time very simple and also very attractive in a mind of a determined retro gamer.

THPS 4 on GameCube

Posted on by Viljami

I can definitely say that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is close to my hearth. I have been involved with playing it since the first game came out in the late 90s for PlayStation. THPS series has many games and they have been released for several different gaming consoles and also on PC. So there are lots of systems that you can play THPS games on. That also means there are different ways to control the character inside the game.

It goes almost without saying that I am used to playing some THPS with a PlayStation game pad. About two years ago I wrote a blog post here in this blog about how the THPS 1 + 2 HD remake felt like on PS4. Of course the way how you could use a modern DualShock 4 controller was amazing. I was very pleased with this pair of remakes. The graphics were also very nice. I felt like these games really respected the original games.

This time however I played THPS 4 that was released for GameCube. If you take a PS1 controller and compare it to a GameCube controller you start to see all these differences. But when you get to playing the controller feels almost the same. There are some differences. There are also many similarities. Basically there is a group of four buttons on the right. There is also only one trigger button on the right side and also on the left side.

I really like playing THPS 4 on GameCube. I also like very much of this era of gaming. THPS was released for GameCube in 2002. There is a certain appeal to the games of this time. There were more games released and while the graphics weren’t anything you could really compare to today’s games they still make an impact to me as a retro game hobbyist. I like the feel that GameCube’s controller gives.

I am very happy that I decided to buy this game some time ago. It gave me some value and I mean something else than financial value. Tony Hawk once said that THPS games cannot get you to learn actual skateboarding but they can give you an idea of how skateboarding feels like. I am also content about having some free time to get into this game.

I have currently completed, I think, 22 percentage of the game. I get to spend some hours playing this game during last weekend. I have also played some WRC Generations on my Xbox Series X. It seems to be a decent rally game. So, maybe I write something about it the next time!