Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: PC

What Have I Been Playing Recently

Posted on by Viljami

I realized yesterday that it has been already a bit over two weeks from my latest post to this blog. I have been busy with work, game designing and I have also met some friends. I have also played. Actually I have played a lot. I just haven’t had time to sit down and write about it.

Yesterday I also for the first time checked from Steam how many hours I have put in NBA 2K22. I am playing it with PC as you probably figured out from that last sentence where I mentioned Steam. I have played this game for 90 hours.  already described my progression in this game in the last post to this blog.

A while ago I stopped playing Gran Turismo 7. I played it maybe 40 hours. As you can figure I have played a lot this year already. After this I figured I should get into some driving games for PS4. I saw a nice discount so I bought Wreckfest and Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered. I also got F1 2021.

Hot Pursuit is a remasterd version of the game that was released in 2010. There were also some NFS games published earlier and they were also called Hot Pursuit. The comncept here is clear. You decide which side of the law you are on. So you can choose to be a police or a racer.

I have already enjoyed playing this racing game for about 30 hours. At first I was a bit disappointed. I thought the game wasn’t realistic. Driving the same circuit for 50 times seemed very repetitive to me. And you didn’t progress much. I had played as a racer so I decided to try playing as a police.

Playing Need For Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered as a police is very fun. You basically try to drive as fast as you can, bust some racers and utilize means like using a spike strip, helicopter or road block to capture some racers. This play mode saves my experience. As NFS Hot Pursuit Remastered is not a realistic or enjoyable as a racing game it can be a nice experience as a game.

As it figures there’s too few hours for me to play every good game, be it a racing one or not. So I haven’t even opened Wreckfest or F1 2021. I have just been too busy lately. These games aren’t even the newest ones. As my dreams of getting myself a Xbox Series X seem to fade I have started to think about expanding my Series S’s memory. I just don’t know if there’s anything good and new to play.

Picking up what to play next is very common issue for me as a gamer. Thank you for reading. I try to write some more. I have a holiday of two weeks coming soon so maybe I catch you then. Maybe a bit earlier. Let’s find out!

What the Heck is MAME (and Why Should I Care)?

Posted on by Viljami

You might remember video games like they were in the 1980s or 1990s or even earlier. Games were mainly played in arcades. You had a device that looked like a large cabinet that had on one side a large screen and some controls like joystick and some buttons. You might have some other controls also, like a wheel and pedals or maybe a light gun that you could point to the screen. I mean, who doesn’t recognize a character like Pacman or a game as familiar to you as Pong. Do you know Asteroids? These all were first playable back in the days in arcades.

If you are a young person you probably haven’t been to a real arcade. This experience however left a permanent mark in my memories. It might have been the pizza restaurant that had a Pacman game in it. It might have been the supermarket that had Street Fighter II in it. It might have been one of those gas stations our family visited as we were driving to country side to meet the rest of the family. It definitely happened when I was in a realm actual arcade playing some Mortal Kombat with some friends. As a kid from the 80s I couldn’t have missed this.

Even if you have never been in an arcade you can still find some really nice games to play that were originally made to be played in an arcade. We actually have an open source application called MAME that is short from “Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator”. You can install it to a Linux or Windows PC. For you to play a game you also need a rom file. As you can expect I cannot post a link here to any rom file because of these legal issues. But you can look up some videos about MAME from YouTube or you can also search for games to see what kind of games it is possible to play on MAME.

There are problems if you really want to play games with an emulator like this. Capcom released some time ago a Home Arcade console that featured 16 games and some controls for two players. It can be connected to a display with HDMI. I am actually a bit reflective because there are so few commercial products available. And MAME could be a good personal project for someone looking to build something out of a basic PC with a custom made controller interface. Imagine if you had a gaming cabinet somewhere i n your hoime that you could play several of these games originally made for gaming arcades. That would be cool!

As time has progressed we have seen the rise of home gaming consoles taking the main role in our living rooms. We are getting more and more hardware that is meant to be placed in our apartments. If you are into emulators why not try also MAME. I am definitely going to get to this a bit more. I remember so many wonderful games from my past. It might be a good time to consider buying some more controllers that are capable of bringing the experience for you. Consider a joystick for fighting games, a racing wheel for driving or maybe even a light gun for shooting. Just remember this thing about light guns – they don’t work with modern displays so be careful not to mix these technical things.

You can definitely try to search for more content on this topic. I found good information from Google and also from YouTube. I think Bing or some other search engine can provide you also with some articles. I mentioned some titles in this post. There are so many games that you can play on MAME that  you have to go and see for yourself for the gems. So go ahead. Maybe you find something that you haven’t played before and that you really like.

How Has Learning Computer Science Changed?

Posted on by Viljami

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.