Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Best Friend of an Old Game Cartridge

Posted on by Viljami

You might recognise this issue. You have a game cartridge and it seems it doesn’t work. It probably is from some console that’s older than your PlayStation. It might be even produced for Nintendo 64. The graphics are usually blurry or the game doesn’t load at all. Hold on. I have a perfect fix for you.

Let’s talk a bit about basic practical electronics. You might know a metal called copper. Do you know how it works in electronic devices and why it is used a lot? Let me try to explain this. I promise it won’t be boring. I am actually very interested in things like how copper works in these devices we use every day.

Copper conducts electricity very nicely. There are also some other metals, like gold and silver, that also conduct electricity very fluently but of course, they are so much more expensive that copper is better to be used. Copper also conducts nicely heat. There are also heat sinks made out of copper for this reason.

So the connectors in your game cartridge are made out of copper. This material has also a tendency to wear out a bit. There is also a phenomenom called oxidation. This happens when over a long period of time you have some copper, like in those connectors, that reacts with oxygen in air. This makes the connection of all of the interfaces to get weaker which produces these issues.

Do you need a electrician to get your physical copies of your games to work? No you don’t. I first encountered this issue when one of these Mega Drive game cartridges wasn’t working. It might not be easy to detect if the copper in the connectors is oxidised. I then purchased this small spray can that is called “PRF 6-68”. It was recommended for cleaning electronic connectors. It didn’t cost so much.

You have to be a bit careful when using this stuff for cleaning electrical connectors. It evaporates quickly. You just basically spray it to your target and then you have to have some kind of cloth, maybe a soft one, that you can try to rub the copper so that the oxidised part wears off. It’s not a good idea to breath in a lot of this stuff. So try to avoid this and also be careful with this. It’s not something you could let small kids to handle.

Using this spray to clean the connectors of a game cartridge has saved many of these retro games that I have bought and that first seemed not to work. Just remember to be careful. It doesn’t hurt for you get some deeper information about this product. And if you are interested in physics or chemistry behind this be free to search from your favorite search engine. I have given you some of my knowledge here but while this is not a science blog I am leaving this a bit open for you to find out.

Game & Watch – How Nintendo Got In to Video Game Business

Posted on by Viljami

I watched a video on YouTube about how Nintendo got the idea of producing original Game & Watch devices. I will link the video to the bottom of this blog post. That video inspired me to write this post.

You might not know what Nintendo Game & Watch device is. It reminds a calculator a bit. The idea was born when Gunpei Yokoi, the designer of Game & Watch, and later Game Boy, saw a man traveling in train. The man had a pocket calculator. He was looking very bored and seemed to tap randomly some numbers in his calculator.

Yokoi visioned that Game & Watch would be somewhat a tool to avoid boredom during for example long train trips. Nintendo needed some help to come up with a product like this. So, the design would rely strongly to the technology of pocket calculators. The device had a LCD screen. It was powered with batteries and it featured a D-Pad and some other buttons to control the game.

This was all accomplished in a world that wasn’t yet conquered by Nintendo Entertainment System. We had maybe some Atari 2600’s or something like that in our living rooms but the world and also Nintendo were very different from what it became in the 1980s later.

Game & Watch became very popular. There were several products released by Nintendo between years 1980 to 1991. Of course there was recently two Game & Watch consoles released. I got myself a Zelda one. The other Game & Watch had Super Mario games on it.

I can tell you a bit about my Zelda Game & Watch console. I think it cost about 70 euros. It came with Zelda games that were originally released for NES and Game Boy. It can be charged with a USB-C-cable and it has a good battery. You can see how the game can be controlled from the picture above this blog post.

That Certain Randomness

Posted on by Viljami

There is this certain randomness in video games. There is fast learning involved especially when you start playing some game. Games are usually easy to pick up but hard to master. That gives you a feeling that you want to play this game some more. You learn a lot. How much does your skill develop when you are playing? It seems to develop a lot. That isn’t although the only thing your success in playing the game depends. It also has a lot to do with good luck. We can name this element “certain randomness”.

This idea became clear to me as I was one day playing again Need For Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered. I had to catch at least 5 racers as a police officer. The task seemed hard. I kept failing and failing. After trying as hard as I could I got lucky. There were several bad guys captured. It didn’t have so much to do with my skills as it had to do with pure luck.

You might be familiar with randomness in programming. While it is debatable if the random number generated is actually random or not there is a nice way to generate a random number between certain values that can be defined in almost every programming language. At least this is possible in Java and Python. How I first got to know this type of numerical behavior was as I had to deal with a Java application that had to generate a value of a dice getting tossed. You basically had to generate a number between one and six and do it as randomly as possible so that it would describe in the source code how a dice would act in real life.

If you know anything about dices and how are they used in games like Yatzy or some roleplaying game you can figure that their role is to create this random feature that gives you a nice feel when you are playing. It gives you an element of luck. For example if dice gives you 1, 2 or 3 your hit of axe has hit and if it gives you 4,5 or 6 you have missed. You can also define the enemy’s body part that was hit and define the amount of damage caused. A common way to use dices in board games is how many times you can move your character. You get to move the character the amount of times that the dices value is showing.

Playing video games is not only about your skills or your reaction time. It would be very boring to play games that only required skill and would have nothing to do with luck. But if everything in a game is random that isn’t satisfying also. Take poker for example. It is nice to play a game or two of poker. Would you play poker for three hours? Would you enjoy the game if there were no money involved? Of course the answer to these two questions are both “no”. Poker is such a game of luck, isn’t it?

I think the best games are the games that mix randomness smoothly to the skills needed to succeed. If you succeed all the time doing exactly the same thing it gets quickly boring. You want challenge. And you want some surprises. Nowadays video games are getting more complex. This makes things more interesting to us players and I think for also game designers. While you can mix things up by making them abstract and random you always don’t even have to. That’s because games are more complicated than this. You can watch the statistics, like how many kills you have in a shooting game, and make these figures random but in this case the number of kills depends also about the players skills and this forms the players performance. Some things can be simple and random while others can just be thought to be like that.

Anyways. Thanks for reading, again! I am going to continue to have my couple days of since it’s the mid summer party here in Finland. I am probably going to play, make music and read some books. We already had a small meeting with a friend. I have also something more to tell you about our game that we hope to have for sale soon. See you next time!