Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: PC

Won The Championship, Finally

Posted on by Viljami

First of all, I have to say that I have played this game a lot. I am talking about NBA2K22. This was my fourth full season that I played with my player. I have worked with this game for about 140 hours. That’s a long time for a sports game. But you know how NBA2K games tend to be. So, it’s not a big surprise.

My player is a small forward. I have had in previous NBA2K games a player that was a shooting guard. I have also tried to play as a point guard and also as a center. I don’t really remember if I have already created a power forward. My main skill as this player was scoring. I wasn’t so good at shooting three-pointers. Well, I was decent, after all. I didn’t also have so much height. This made me not to get so many rebounds even if I was positioned well to grab the ball.

I really like NBA2K series. I previously finished, some years ago, NBA2K14. This was the one that I finished as a shooting guard. I have played also several other NBA2K games with PS4, Switch, PS3 and now with my PC. This game brings the most realistic and entertaining basketball out of, I think, all basketball games released, ever. Well, I have to say that NBA Jam holds a special place in my hearth.

As an addition I too have a background in playing basketball. I played for seven years in a competitive level. We had a good team. Eventually things got very serious. It was also tough to study in high school. I had very tight schedule. It also doesn’t pay your bills if you only play basketball. So after many glorious, so to say, years in a hobby, I decided to quit playing basketball. I haven’t played in a team since then. And it’s been over 20 years since I quit. But, I do have some knowledge and you can say that I am a big fan of basketball in many ways. I even have had some plans to make a basketball simulation strategy game but that would be another topic for another blog post, I think.

I have a Xbox One Elite Pad and I played this time this game with my PC.  I am a bit dissatisfied with my current display. My computer has a powerful graphics processor and it gives a clear 4K picture. It would give if I had a sharper screen. Why am I still playing with a Full HD display? The main reason is that my work station fits only a 22 inch screen. And the other is the price. You might have to spend several hundreds of euros for a 4K display. I think it is soon time for me to buy a new Xbox Series S/X controller for my PC. I am going to buy a regular controller instead of a new Elite pad. I might write something about it in the future.

So I kind of completed my journey inside NBA2K22. Actually, I have already bought NBA2K23. So things are looking like I am going to play some more basketball, soon. I have thought about also some other games that I would like to get into. I have thought about starting to play Space Quest series and especially the third one in the series. I finished Space Quest II back in the day. This is the only Space Quest I have finished. It would make sense and it would be very interesting.

One Nice Retro Rally Game

Posted on by Viljami

Yesterday, after a typical working day, I found myself playing, again, this classic rally game. The game is titled Rally Trophy. It was released in 2001 only for Microsoft Windows . So, this means it can be played with a PC that has Windows. I did buy this game back in the day. I don’t think it’s available anymore. And I don’t know if it’s really necessary to buy it. I of course have it in my PC game collection and I even have it as an actual physical game disc.

This game was brought to us, gamer persons, by a Finnish game company named Bugbear. I remember when I get to realize back in the day that this game was actually developed in my home country. I made a search through internet and found the e-mail address of the company. I was excited but I don’t remember did I actually send them any e-mail message or not. There were some game companies here in Finland and I felt this need to be a game designer even back when I was only a teenager going to high school. So, I don’t remember if I did or did not send them my resume when I was looking for a job later in my life. I did send an application to Remedy and that I can remember clearly.

Not so many people have the actual skill to work as a game developer. Be it a programmer or a 3D modeler or maybe even a software tester. You have to have some experience under your belt and some projects that you can show your skills with. Today there are lots of people that have just been graduated and cannot find a job anywhere. They will end up to getting any job that they can get. And that’s the way it goes. But not back in 2001 when some very skillful game programmers could show their level of skill. I think many people got their skills back in the 80s and with a Commodore 64. It was a way to get to know the hardware and also the software.

Rally Trophy is a nice driving game. It isn’t actually an arcade type of a game. Although the driving technique isn’t hard to learn it is a bit different if you compare it to some other driving game of this particular era. There are some vehicles for you to choose from. I took a Ford mainly because it was the most powerful one. It has a horse power of 140. The driving means in this game very much trying to keep your speed above 100 km per hour all the time. There’s not a lot room for braking or accelerating. Somehow I still find this driving style satisfying. It brings a unique feel to this game.

I played this game with a Windows 10 PC and with my Xbox One Elite controller. I had to run some patches and also a fix to get this game to work. I was actually able to configure my game pad after all. The game has a maximum resolution of 1920×1080. I think that graphics of this game still look very nice. A bit retro styled but nice. It was at first hard to try to play the game. I banged my head with these first four stages of the first rally for maybe two hours. That was yesterday. Today I started playing again. I played for some time and I managed to finish every rally in the top six and the season ended and I placed third in the season.

There are some cars to unlock but I didn’t care to figure out further how to do this. I think this was it for me for this game. If you wish to play this classic there is some information available if you do a search on your favorite search engine. I also advice to go to a website named My Abandonware where you can find lots of games including the one I was just writing to you about.

What It Takes to Create Own Video Game?

Posted on by Viljami

What it actually takes to create your own video game? Does it take hard work or maybe talent? Well, that depends also on how high you set yor goal. It isn’t so hard to create a text adventure game. For me, the hardest parts are concerning programming and graphics. I have created some minor prototypes and an actual working text-based adventure game.

How did I make my game? I programmed it with Java. If you program some other type of game, like a simple platformer with some basic graphics, you are basically creating a never ending while-loop, inside your code, that will refresh the screen like maybe sixty times in a second. The code updates the screen all the time. It also records every rerlevant key presses and updates the objects that seem for the player to be moving on the actual screen.

This is the basis of a simple game. You can also create event or command based games. This is what I did with my small text adventure game. The game reads your command, like “look around”, and then gives you some new output in a form of text. And the whole text adventure game happens on a command prompt inside your own program or game or what ever you are running your code with.

So, what do you need to do when you actually create a new game. There’s lots of things to work on. You need a simple plot and some kind of a scenery. You need to know how the player of your game can interact with the software, or computer, when the player plays the game.

There are also more areas of knowledge that are needed. You have to come up with whole world of music and sound, graphics, controls and storyline. Making your own game is technically demanding. You have to know your computer and how it works. You know, a good painter doesn’t necessarily know how to make good-looking video game graphics. You might need a voice actor or maybe even three or four of them.

Making a video game is demanding. But it is very rewarding if you can actually make a game that people like to play. Some people might be more interested in finding out how did you come up with your game. That can concern programming, creating the music, writing the plot or dialogue of the game or some other area.

If you still want to make a game on your own, remember to not to set the aim too high. And this is propably a good advice especially when you are just starting out. Remember to try to collaborate with other people that have some of these skills I have mentioned in this blog post. If you feel like it, you can share your source code with other developers. There are also lots of information available online. There are materials and tips for you to use before you try to make everything by yourself.

There’s a saying in Finnish that goes “kukaan ei ole seppä syntyessään”. I am not going to try to translate that. But this means that you have to take your time to learn the craft. I hope you got some new ideas from this blog post. We were moving on some game desing principles here in this blog post. Maybe I will write something about actually playing some video games the next time. We will see that.