Waiting for Forza Motorsport 8

Forza Horizon 5 was released in the fall of last year. I didn’t pick it up for some reason. Maybe I was so much into playing Diablo II Resurrected and Call of Duty – Vanguard. And to speak about it I’m not really such a fan of Forza Horizon series. I have to say that I am more into Forza Motorsport.

So there’s a new Forza Motorsport getting released soon. It is speculated that se might see it in the end of this year. However the final release date hasn’t been told. I have some knowledge of the first and also of the third game of this racing series. Actually, as you have probably seen from this posts featured image, I picked up, again, Forza Motorsport 3 and started playing it.

It is a very nice game. The graphics are a bit rude as you compare them to later games like Gran Turismo 7 on PS4. You have to consider how old Xbox 360 really is. It was released already in 2005. So we cannot compare it directly to these newer consoles. But if you put graphics aside you will find this game to be a nice and very playable. I am somewhat familiar also to the first Forza Motorsport game that was released in 2005. I don’t currently own a working original Xbox but you can however play this game with Xbox 360 because it has a backwards compatibility. Every original Xbox title doesn’t however work. I usually check a list from Wikipedia to see if a game is compatible. You can find it fast from your favorite search engine if you are interested.

I really like racing games. You might have noticed this. I first got into Gran Turismo and it was my first really realistic racing game. I played it a lot. Later I picked up some other racing games. At a time I had a keen interest in Need for Speed Shift one and two that I played with my PS3. That was maybe in 2010 or 2011. Back then I didn’t play so much retro games. And now, some years later, I found Gran Turismo again. I really didn’t like Gran Turismo 5. And of course I have to mention Colin McRae Rally series that progressed to Dirt series later. I think Dirt 3 and 4 were really good. I have some history also in Dirt Rally 1 and 2.0. Who doesn’t remember Richard Burns Rally? You have to really try it although it is already a bit old racing game.

So here we are. We are waiting for the next game in a series of racing games released for Xbox consoles. I think I will have some space left in my Xbox Series S for the new Forza Motorsport 8. I don’t know who won the race of these racing games. It is obvious that there is a competition between Xbox and PlayStation. I kind of finished Gran Turismo 7. I played it for about 40 hours. As there is some time I have to think if I should try finishing the third Forza Motorsport game. I have also played a bit Flatout 2 whic was develop by Bugbear which is a Finnish game company. You might want to check a game called Rally Trophy. I end this post by saying that Gran Turismo 4 was also a really good racing game.

Doom 64

Today was a day off since it’s Saturday. So in the morning I picked my Xbox Series S controller and figured that I would play a bit Doom 64. I have purchased this some time ago. I have played it and also advanced a bit. I am currently in level 21 out of 28 levels.

If you are interested in classic Doom this might be the best Doom version for you. It has this certain retro feel to it. So Doom 64 was first released for Nintendo 64 and that’s where the name comes from. This game has currently a price of 5 euros. So I encourage you to try this game. There really aren’t any ifs in this matter. I can recommend this for every type of a gamer.

The original Doom was released back in 1993 by Id Software. The graphics were mind blowing for its time. Playing the game can first seem a bit confined but you get the hang of things quickly. There are several different weapons in Doom. My favorite is shotgun but you can also shoot enemies with a rocket launcher, machine gun or plasma gun. You really cannot aim vertically and you can not jump. You can however in Doom 64 set running to automatic.

Shooting enemies is only one aspect of Doom 64. You have to solve some puzzles in somewhat complex levels. Sometimes you have to find a key card to open a door. In the end of the level you get some statistics about how many enemies you eliminated, how long it took to get through the level and how many secrets you found. The level of difficulty can be adjusted considerably.

I really like the Android app that Xbox provides. This featured screenshot was very easy to take and it was also easy to add it from to this blog post. So Microsoft has made things easy for me. Currently I have spent a bit over 9 hours playing this game.

There really isn’t so much in this topic. This is a great game. I think the quality-price ratio is very correct here. You also don’t have to take this game so seriously. I recommend if you think you are going to get this game to relax and explore it thoroughly. There are many thing different here compared to modern games which at times seem maybe a bit boring. This game was released in the days when we could witness a great progression in games we were playing. The era of 3D modeled games was only beginning back then.

How Has Learning Computer Science Changed?

I was reading this book about JavaScript programming as I thought came to my mind. The book was dealing how you can launch a new web browser window  and how you can do it in JavaScript. I started thinking a bit about this.

I have always programmed something on top of a heavy operating system like Windows 10 or Ubuntu Linux. I am able to create a new window inside a web browser. I am able to produce code that can manipulate the contents of a web page inside the browser. What about the machine level functionality? How computer works inside?

I came to think about this for a second. Earlier, like back in the 80s, computer hobbyists had a computer that they could program a bit simpler and deeper with. It was Commodore 64. This device was partly an electronic device and partly a early personal computer. You could learn programming in BASIC or you could, if you had the talent and will to learn, program in assembler.

Assembler means that you are talking to the machine as close as possible. You get to temper with how the machine uses memory and so on. Commodore 64 was a perfect device for someone to learn skills like programming.

Today we don’t have such hardware. We do have complicated systems running complicated operating systems. You might get yourself a Raspberry Pi but that isn’t the same thing. I recently watched a documentary that was dealing with this issue. Back in 1990s there were people going to study Computer Science in universities. Nearly all of them had some background with C-64. Now there just isn’t a good enough source that you could basically learn and build on to learn some more about this field.

Things in computer technology have been progressing. It has become more and more difficult to learn the basics. It is also required for you to learn more about frameworks and software that runs on these complex systems. But you must remember that there is always the user in this field also. That’s where you can learn a lot.