PC Archives - Intensive Gaming Diary

What Kind of a Video Game Shopper I Am?

Posted on July 31, 2026 by Viljami

In this blog post I am going to describe what kind of a video game shopper I am. What games, devices and/or consoles I do buy? I make purchases often from different web shops and also sometimes from actual physically existing stores and I also sometimes buy games from flea markets that are located near where I live.

I got some inspiration from a recent purchase of some PS2 games. You can see the titles that I purchased in the featured image of this blog post. I did buy seven PS2 games and also one PS1 game that was a bit cheaper one since it was in a mediocre condition. It didn’t have the front cover and also the box was a bit damaged. Although the disc was in a good condition. That game is not visible in the image but I can tell you that the game was Ridge Racer Revolution. That game alone cost me nine euros.

I buy sometimes used PS2 and PS1 games. I currently don’t have a working PS2 in my setup. I do have a PSOne console that works just fine. I mainly use it when I do want to play something on a real hardware. It is nice to play some games that need several discs with it. After I have bought a PS1 or PS2 game I rip it with an external DVD drive to an ISO file and then transfer it to my retro computer. I have a Batocera setup and also Recalbox for Raspberry Pi 5. I use Recalbox for PS1 games and a bit more powerful PC for Batocera with which I play my PS2 games.

I have a medium sized collection of Sega Mega Drive games. I have only some tens of games that many of are the ones I already owned back in my youth. I did have also some PS1 games and a console that I unfortunately sold just before getting into studying into high school. I am still a bit confused about selling all that stuff. Back then I though I wouldn’t play games and I was thinking more towards my studying. I was thinking very differently back then because now I seem to still love playing video games and also retro games.

To describe me as a video game shopper a bit more thoroughly I should tell you that I do buy new games also. I have also a PS4 for which I own maybe one hundred games. I really haven’t properly counted them. I also have a collection of games for PS3. The newest consoles I own are Switch 2 and Xbox Series X. I also play some games on my Windows PC. Sometimes I play DOS games and I do have a small collection of big box games. So, I do buy new games and also PC big box games. Sometimes I even buy a game that is in its CD case only.

I bought a GameCube some years ago. I have some tens of games for it. I really actually play GameCube games today on an emulator. That goes with Xbox and Xbox 360 games also. I have owned an original Xbox and also a Xbox 360 but they eventually broke down and I decided to remove them from my setup. Luckily today there are good emulators for these consoles on a Windows PC that you can play many good games on.

Flea markets are fun places where you can find almost anything. I just recently found for example Need for Speed Payback for Xbox One for a cheap price of about six or five euros. Aside of being a video game shopper I also buy movies as DVDs, Blurays and 4K discs. I also like buying books from flea markets for a cheap price.

I like to buy some cheap games. As prices of retro games are going up I am going to try to keep the games that I own to myself and buy some more cheap games. I am not a person that would buy games that cost hundreds of euros. There is also a place in my hearth for emulation and game roms. If you are somewhat like me I can recommend to you a good website that holds many game roms and that site is called “Vimm’s Lair”. You can probably find it from your favorite search engine online.

Waiting for Forza Horizon 6

Posted on May 14, 2026 by Viljami

Forza Horizon 6 will be released 19th of May this year (2026). It will be available at the launch for PC and Xbox Series S/X. There have been some very unofficial discussions about this game getting released also for other mainstream gaming consoles. This just seems to be the viewpoint today. There might be such things as exclusive releases soon as every PlayStation title seems to be getting released for PC and now also for Xbox.

So, what I have been up to lately, one might ask. Mainly I have been working and keeping myself busy in that way. There seems to be less time for video games as I get older. However I have played some games and this blog post deals with that part of my life now. I have played Crash Bandicoot 4, Doom – Dark Ages, Half-Life 2 and also more and lately Dirt 5 which seems to be a nice racing game to start to get ready for Forza Horizon 6.

Dirt 5 was originally released in 2020. It isn’t the newest game that has been developed by Codemasters but it still remains as a part of this legendary series of racing games that might even been started by Colin McRae Rally already back in the end of the 90s. There have been many great games in this series. I especially want to mention Colin McRae Rally 2.0 and Colin McRae Dirt 2. Those might be the best games out of this series.

Dirt 5 has a lot to offer. I have already spent a bit over 7 hours playing it. You get to drive with several different vehicles and there are several types of driving you will get involved in during playing. There are many camera options to choose from. You can set the camera to the surface of the road or then set it to display the whole car from the back. I chose to set the camera so that I can see the whole car I am driving. This makes it somewhat easy to play Dirt 5. You do have to control the vehicle precisely. I have played this game with a game controller. I really don’t know how a driving wheel and pedals would make the game seem to feel like.

Dirt 5 is a nice racing game in overall. It is almost unfair to make a comparison between the earlier games in this series because they are just so good as racing games. If we put it into this perspective Dirt 5 is a good game. There might have been some issues early when the game was released but I think that in 2026 this game is still a fun one to play. It has received the “metascore” of 79 out of 100 on Metacritic.

I originally picked up Dirt 5 just some weeks before the upcoming release of Forza Horizon 6. It currently has a price tag of 21 euros on the Xbox store. So, it is a cheap game that can help you to better deal with waiting for Forza Horizon 6. This time I bought a game as a digital copy. Although I decided to order Forza Horizon 6 as a physical copy. There will be a long installation process since the game takes a bit over 130 GB of space from my Xbox Series X. Do remember that there is also a PC version available.

With having already made the purchase I am waiting to get my hands on the new Forza game at next Tuesday. Today I am having a day off and I am currently enjoying it an drinking some coffee while I type this post that you are soon able to read. I really have nothing else to say right now. So, until next time my dear readers.

Some Problems With Corrupted Memory Card

Posted on April 10, 2026 by Viljami

I have had some problems with my Raspberry Pi 5 and its memory card. I have Recalbox installed on my Raspberry Pi. The problems started when I turned the power off from the button that this Raspberry Pi 5 has while it was running a game. This corrupted my memory card. Luckily it was quite easy to fix this problem once I got to understand what should I do to fix this matter.

So, the problem was that Raspberry Pi 5 wasn’t starting. The screen wasn’t detected and my television didn’t display anything. I had to search for some guidance which is nowadays easy. You just have to use a search engine that also preferably has a mode in which you can utilize some AI power. I first thought that I would try to run some commands directly from SSH connection. I tried to run this Linux command (“fsck”) but I couldn’t get it to work. I would have needed to unmount the memory card first and then I would’ve had to run that command.

I didn’t feel so confident trying to unmount the memory card. Luckily the filesystem that Recalbox uses is compatible with Windows. I found out that it would be possible to run a Windows command (“chkdsk”). The filesystem of a boot partition in my memory card was FAT32 and the other partition had a exFAT filesystem. I first only repaired the FAT32 partition. I obviously had removed the memory card and inserted it in my Windows PC. Now I inserted the card back to my Raspberry Pi. Of course it didn’t load. However there was a picture.

What I had to do was to also repair the larger partition of this memory card that had the exFAT filesystem. So, after I had repaired both of these partitions, the Recalbox system now started just as it did before the memory card became corrupted. So, the problem was eventually fixed.

The memory card of a Raspberry Pi is quite vulnerable and it can get corrupted easily if you switch the power off in a wrong way. You can also access your Recalbox system by opening a web browser on a computer that is connected to your apartments nertwork and going to address: “recalbox.local”. This enables you to for example restart and shut down your Recalbox system.

I recommend to use for storing your roms and bios files some other way than just a memory card. I have a 512GB USB stick that stores currenlty all my data that is used in Recalbox. This is just huge enough for some older game roms like PS1, Mega Drive and NES just to give you an idea. I have another device that I run some newer retro games, like GameCube and original Xbox, that has a bit more power and also more storage space. A Raspberry Pi 5 isn’t so powerful that you could run for example Xbox games on it. My other device doesn’t however run Xbox 360 or PS3 games. This would require a bit more power.

So, my usage of Raspberry Pi 5 continues. I have been waiting some more news also about Valve’s Steam Machine. It would be a considerable part of my setup in the future. It would provide some power for playing retro games with emulation. We just have to wait for the announcement of price and release date. I am also dreaming about purchasing a PS5 console to empower my gaming setup even more.

The problem has now been fixed. Recalbox for Raspberry Pi 5 uses these two types of filesystems that are very much compatible also with Windows along with the compatiblity with Linux systems. It was eventually easy to fix this issue. Everything now works with this device as it did already some time ago.