Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: PC

Old School Rally

Posted on by Viljami

Old School Rally is something for you if you like games like Colin McRae Rally and Colin McRae Rally 2.0 that were originally published for the first PlayStation. The driving feel is very much like in those classic retro games. You get actually to control your rally car using just your plain original gamepad. This seemed to be the norm way back. The gamers actually didn’t have so many driving wheels and pedals. The graphics weren’t as realsitic but yet these games just had something special in them.

I bought my copy of Old School Rally for Nintendo Switch for a bit over 30 euros. It think the precise price was 32 euros. It is a physical copy. The game is also available for PS5 also as a physical game and also for Steam as, of course, a digital copy of the game. With this same purchase I bought Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection. I tried briefly also this compilation of some earlier Mortal Kombat games. It was fun to play the first MK game like it was meant to be played in an Arcade. I got as far as trying to beat Goro. Then I had to give up for that session. Maybe I’ll try again later.

Old School Rally is really nice to play if you are familiar with CMR PS1 games. There are some differences. The cars aren’t official ones. They are fictive manufacturers and models. You also don’t get to fiddle with car settings actually at all. The damage that the car takes does affect the controllability of the car. If you damage your car greatly the driving becomes more difficult although not impossible. Car has breaking and steering functions although I don’t get to see under the hood so much and I think it isn’t actually required. My notes here are based solely on plaiyng this game. I haven’t seen the source code. This isn’t an open source release after all.

Breaking seems to be the critical fact when it comes to how you can handle your car. It isn’t, in my opinion, as accurate as was with CMR games. You also don’t get to fix how the breaks work. Other abilities of the car are the ability to accelerate and also the highest speed you can reach. Also, there aren’t any other competitors. There isn’t a series to compete in. Instead you get a record time that you have to beat on each stage.

Graphics are a bit fuzzy but I think they work just fine considering the clear comparison to CMR games. Actually, if you think about it, the CMR games are already almost 30 years old. This fact brings for me and also for a lot of other older gamers a huge amount of nostalgia. There is actually a lot to play in Old School Rally. I did spent over ten hours playing the campaign of this rally game. The How Long To Beat website states that it takes eight hours to finish Old School Rally.

I could share some tips for a beginner. Try not to completely wreck your car. Try to break in time with the corners. Don’t break too late or too slightly. Figure out which car to buy or not to buy. If you totally wreck your car during a stage consider retiring from the event and starting over. You can easily end up with a broken car trying to desperately beat the record time. This can be almost impossible. At times I found myself in this loop of repeating a stage. The driving is in Old School Rally more difficult with a broken car.

Finding The Right Difficulty Level

Posted on by Viljami

At times it can be hard to find the right difficulty level. Especially when you are trying to find an interesting new game to play. Some games are basically harder than others. Some offer many types of difficulty level. Some are just way easier to play than some others. Also the matter that you have actually played a type of a certain game can make it harder or easier for you to get into a game.

Basically most games are trying to get you hooked. They are easy to get into but hard to master. This does apply to most video games but maybe not every one of them since there are many ways to approach this matter of difficulty level and adjusting it just so that it fits your playing skills. Of course you will learn a lot especially when you are starting to play a game.

If we consider a game like Dark Souls you are constantly trying to beat a part of the game. It is a hard game. And it takes many times and a lot of repeating to try to master the game. Some games approach this difficulty issue in a somewhat different way. We can actually talk about something like a learning curve. If a game has a steep learning curve it takes a lot of time to get into. Some games have a gentle learning curve so that it is easier to start getting into this kind of a game.

You can talk about learning curves while having a conversation about any type of a thing you are trying to learn. I think I first discovered it while I was still studying my computer science degree. We were dealing with some PHP programming frameworks and you could say that one framework would have a steep learning curve while some other might have a more gentle learning curve. There were options, we were discussing about what framework we should use for a project, like Laravel, Symfony and CodeIgniter. We actually went with Symfony after all and that was the tool we were using in that project back in 2015.

Actually programming and writing have many things in common. I find writing to be a lot easier. I guess it really is a matter of how much time you do spend practicing your actual skills. I have always enjoyed thinking about design issues while developing software of any sort. Of course are talking right now about hobby projects in programming or maybe some projects that a student of this field would come across while studying. I am not a person that really actually enjoys writing  software. As you might have figured, already, I do enjoy writing and I do enjoy it a lot. You can say that it is easy and it comes naturally for me.

If you check the featured image of this blog post you can see my new keyboard. This keyboard is “Ducky One 3 TKL RGB”. It didn’t cost so much as I bought from a “black friday” sale deal. I like this keyboard and it looks cool also. I usually do play with a game pad while I play on my Windows 11 PC. I use my new keyboard mainly for writing blog posts or any social media content. I am also active in some discussion forums. This is currently not so popular but I somewhat enjoy staying active on that front also.

Lets get back to where we started. We were talking about how to choose a difficulty level. Many games are designed in a way that you first start with some difficulty level and then you advance and eventually you get to a state in which you are trying to beat the game and try to finish it so you can move on to the next game that you have in your gaming backlog. It can add a great value to a game if it is possible to play it over again with a tougher difficulty level. This actually makes you want to spend some more time with playing this certain game.

It can be at times tough to try to find a game that you can really spend tens, or maybe even hundreds, of hours playing. You go from actually trying to learn the basics of some game to just concentrating on it. Then one day you check the timer of that game and you might be a bit surprised to find actually how much time you have spent. This is actually a state that I like to call something like a “flow” state. You just forget everything else and keep playing for some hours forgetting all the matters that do sometimes bother your mind.

I myself have been trying to find something nice to play this week. I started with these games I mentioned in the last blog post and the game that I chose to play was God of War (PS4). I started with the easiest difficulty level but soon found it to be too easy. I figured that this game wasn’t a right game for this moment. So, I went to my PS2 library and chose to play Flatout 2. I played it for about five hours. I actually started also playing Zelda – Tears of the Kingdom but I got stuck in the beginning and gave up. Yesterday I picked up WRC 7. I played it also today on my Windows 11 PC.

So, it can at times be hard to find a game that offers you as a gamer a proper challenge and you get to adjust also your chosen game’s difficulty level. Lets hope everyone finds a nice game this weekend that they can really enjoy! We will get back to some gaming content next time I decide it is a time for a new update or just when I feel like writing some more content to this blog.

Some Features of Optical Discs

Posted on by Viljami

Some time, not so long ago, we used to use optical discs way more and in a different way compared to how it is today. I have recently been playing lots of PS2 games using an emulator. I have these PS2 games in their original form. That is on these game discs. That copy of Metal Gear Solid 2 also has a documentary film also on another DVD. DVDs aren’t also so popular anymore. We are used to streaming our video content. If you prefer physical copies you can buy movies on Bluray or 4K.

Some things have changed. We do buy games, sometimes, as physical copies on optical discs. When we do we use the disc to install the game. Part of the installation process is handled through internet connection. Back in the days, in the early 2000s, we had game consoles like PS2 and GameCube. They utilized optical discs in a different way.

If we inspect our PS2 video game console we can see that it doesn’t have a hard drive at all. So games are basically on optical discs. It is the disc that holds almost all the data. There are memory cards used that can store the save files. These memory cards could hold only 8 MB of storage. GameCube is very much like PS2 in this way. It did handle smaller optical discs and it also had to use memory cards. Lets mention Dreamcast here, also.

What about the original Xbox? It actually had a hard drive. This makes playing a game like Max Payne a bit more of a pleasure since loading games from same save spot can make the game very repetitive. That’s why I find playing Max Payne on the original Xbox than on a PS2 console my preferred way to enjoy Remedy Entertainments masterpiece more enjoyable. I think it is best played on PC. But you probably get the point here.

So, the games were played from DVDs. This made the disc very valuable. If it had a scratch the game would stop playing. Sometimes the console you were playing on did break so that you couldn’t play it anymore since it couldn’t read optical discs anymore at all. There are ways to fix consoles, all right, but just let me say this. I have found it way more pleasurable to install an emulation system on a PC with a dedicaded operating system and just ripping my PS2 games to some .iso-files and playing them again and again, fully functioning, from a fast SSD hard drive. You basically have to rip your PS2s BIOS and also the games to enjoy gaming this way. After all it is very easy to rip a PS2 game. You just have to use an external DVD drive and some software application, like ImgBurn, that is also freely available.

We have went through lots of changes. The gaming has evolved a lot. If you think that we used to have games taking some space, like 4,7 GB. We are actually now in a place where a game can definitely take tens, or even several tens, of times the space we were used to back in the days. We went from large HDDs to SSDs. We went from slow internet connections to modern and very fast connections offered while using Steam or Xbox Store or some other web service. This makes me wonder where do we go next.

Today hard drives are faster and can hold even more space than they already used to. I have for example two 2 TB SSDs on my personal desktop computer. That is enough to hold some games. You don’t have to install every game you buy because you probably don’t play tens of games at the same time. There are more games available than ever. You probably play something from three to six games at a time. When you think that you don’t want to focus on a game you can uninstall it and keep your save files and continue playing after some time when you think that you want to install the game again.

We are actually doing something reasonal with buying games as digital copies. We are reducing the amount of carbage in this world. You can debate on that DVDs, these opticla discs, are something that you can hold on to for several tens, maybe even hundreds, of years. Buying a video game console or a PC without an optical disc drive is becoming also popular. You can save some money.

There are many facts here that you can debate on. In my opinion there are just facts against facts. There is no right or wrong answer. In this blog post I told you my perspective on optical discs and how and what they used to be compared to what is the situation right now. You can make your own opinions based on everything I have said here. I am going to enjoy some more time with Gran Turismo 4 since I started playing it again. I have played it for well over 18 hours. I think it takes over 70 hours to complete. I have lots of playing to do.