Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: PC

Rainbow Six

Posted on by Viljami

Rainbow Six is a book written by Tom Clancy. It was published in 1998. There were also several video games made based on this book. My favorite game from this series is Rogue Spear. I have also played Rainbow Six 3 – Raven Shield. The latest game in this series was released in 2022.

This book is a long one to read. It took me several weeks to get through it. There were almost 900 pages that were written with a small font. Tom Clancy is a clever and very good writer. He manages to keep you strained throughout the whole reading experience of this book. I have recently read also Power Plays by Tom Clancy.

If we discuss about the games I can tell you that they are kind of first person shooter types but you have several soldiers for you to control. There are many strategic points that you must take in account. You get to chose the teams and plan your actions. There are many ways to complete the missions. You have to be precise with your shooting and everything that happens around you.

The weapons and also other gear are being described very clearly. The precision with the action is very needed. You can also enjoy multiplayer mode if you want to. I think one good game to start from in getting into Rainbow Six would be Rainbow Six Siege that was released in 2015 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and also for PC.

Rainbow Six is only one part of this whole group of tactical and war-related video games. There also do exist games like Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, Endwar, H.A.W.X. and The Division. All of these games are inspired by these books that Tom Clancy wrote. Sadly, Tom Clancy died in 2013. These games still live on and many from these games mentioned above are still getting sequels and updates. So, the legacy of Tom Clancy still lives strong.

Rainbow Six was a nice book to read. I wouldn’t have picked it for me to read if it wouldn’t had anything to do with video games. I think that this book was although very long to read. I think it was something like reading The Lord of the Rings book or maybe some book from Stephen King. I usually read books that take me about one week to finish and I read mostly non-fictive books.

Today Rainbow Six and every game in the series has a lot of meaning for me. I still have Rogue Spear as a big box standing on my game shelf. I actually have two cases but only one of them still holds the disc. I had the original box but the CD was missing. So, what I did was I bought another copy from a local Finnish game shop as it was luckily available for purchase.

Tom Clancy has written many books throughout his career. His first book was “The Hunt for Red October” and it was released in 1984. Many of his works were also made into cinematic movies. The movies were directed by John Mc Tiernan, Philip Noyce and also Robert Lieberman. His style of writing was very suitable for also movies and games. This whole load of material can be somewhat categorized as having everything to do with warfare.

You can find more information about Tom Clancy from websites like Wikipedia. There is all-in-all a lot of information available. You can even use a search engine to search for this information. I think artificial intelligence would have also something to say about this writer. I just wanted to express how I felt about the book and also my relationship to these video games. I can recommend this book if you like thrilling moments and closely detailed action just take my advice when I tell you that the book can take some time to read.

Point and Click (Adventure) Games

Posted on by Viljami

The idea for today’s blog post originated as I got to play a remake of Lucas Arts classic point and click adventure game Day of the Tentacle. I have only played so little of this game and I don’t really have enough experience from it that I could tell you anything else about this game. Lets just say that it is still something worth to experiment with even today.

Instead of writing you about just one game I decided today to tell you about point and click games in general. There are loads of great games if you end up enjoying this type of games. This whole genre was at its time something that the latest hardware could support. This era was dominant way before we got used to playing in these interactive three-dimensional environments.

To understand point and click games we have to talk about how they evolved in such a direction. Where did this genre actually come from? The first thing, when it comes to adventure games, were text-based games. First adventure games were like this – you actually had to type in every move you could make in the game. Sierra leveled the game up so you could move around. Some years after point and click games became very popular. You could just click and point what you were trying to do in this game. It was a new way that you could interact with a video game. Of course you used your mouse to perform these operations.

Adventure games, and so also point and click games, involve a lot of discussion between the characters in which you have to make choices. There is also a lot of items that you have to collect and use with other items to solve different problems. You often have a score that tells you something about how you are progressing in the game.

Many adventure games in the 1980s were brought to you by a gaming company called Sierra. The strongest adventure game in the end of 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s was Lucas Arts. It brought us games like Maniac Manson, several Monkey Island games and many more. Sierra had also some point and click titles like the Space Quest series. I think the third one was somewhat a point and click adventure game. As Lucas Arts developed their user interface to suit point and click playing style also Sierra had to level up their games.

Day of the Tentacle is full of humoristic scenes, conversations, interaction and puzzle solving. It is promised a steady five hours of playing time that is described by “How Long To Beat” website. I have only completed a small amount, under 10 percentages, of this game but I think it was worth its price. The game is available today for Xbox Series S/X as a digital copy. I think there are versions for some other devices also. The price is today about 15 euros but the price might come down a bit if there is a huge sale or something like that. I paid only three euros of this game during a sale opportunity.

Some other classic worth-to-mention point and click games are Sam and Max series, Indiana Jones adventure games, Full Throttle and The Dig. Sierra has also some adventure games that have to be mentioned: Police Quest series and Space Quest series, Leisure Suit Larry games and also King’s Quest series.

Some other notorious point and click games are Clock Tower series and Discworld series. You can probably find more from your favorite sources of information be it a search engine, an actual physical book about the subject (my favorite is Juho Kuorikoski’s book (“Suuret seikkailupelit – tietokonepelien klassikot) about adventure games in general) and maybe you could try asking an AI tool for more information. This tiny blog post seems to be too small for a more detailed description. This was my post this time. I hope you enjoyed. See you next time!

About Sega Dreamcast

Posted on by Viljami

Sega Dreamcast was released 1998 in Japan and 1999 in North America and Europe. Its game library consists of about 600 games. This is considerably lower than all games that were released to PS2, a console of the same era and console generation, that had several thousands of games in its game library.

Some other gaming consoles of this generation were Nintendo GameCube, Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation 2. So, Dreamcast was competing with these giants. This was an era in which we saw definitely more games released than we have in todays world of gaming. It has to said that the competition was tough. PS2 sold most consoles and had the most games in its library while Xbox and GameCube sold well but not as much as PS2. In 2001 Dreamcast was discontinued. It didn’t sell well.

Today Dreamcast is considered to be a definite gem as a retro gaming console. You can get the original console for about 200 euros. It is also possible to play it by emulating Dreamcast on a system like Recalbox that you can run on a Raspberry Pi 5 or PC. Raspberry Pi 5 has enough power to run Dreamcast emulation while some older Rasbperry Pi models might lack this power. We have to consider if this way of playing Dreamcast is actually legit or not. After all every Dreamcast game isn’t available.

I have solved this problem with buying this Dreamcast Collection for PC. I bought it a long time ago but it seems to be totally legal. This collection has four Dreamcast titles in it. While Sega quit manufacturing gaming consoles they still make video games for other systems. There are lots of good quality games still getting released by Sega. This tells something about their position as one of the most legendary game companies in the history of video games.

Sega’s history includes classic consoles like Mega Drive / Genesis, Master System and Saturn. However some of its products weren’t so successful. They did take a wrong direction with releasing 32X and Mega CD. They weren’t commercially successful which evidently lead to some financial problems that lead to discontinuation of Dreamcast.

What are some good games for Dreamcast? There are some role-playing-games like Skies of Arcadia and Grandia II, a boxing game, Ready 2 Rumble, many 2D fighting games, some 3D fighting games, like Virtua Fighter 3tb, Crazy Taxi, Sonic Adventure, Resident Evil – Code Veronica and many others. The game library is in its entirety a very solid and of good quality. I think that finding a bad game for Dreamcast is a difficult task to complete.

I do have some critic also about Dreamcast. The fact that the controller only has one analog stick makes playing first-person-shooters a bit clumsy. You have to map movement and aiming differently than you would with a better gamepad. Also when compared to some newer consoles Dreamcast lacks some power. But it has to be said that when considering it to be a retro console it handles its business very nicely.

It would be great to get something from Sega today that would be legit and also of good quality when it comes to retro gems like this one. There would definitely be many gamers that would like to buy a mini console, a remake or a completely new game from some of these classic titles. We have to see and wait for what the future holds for Sega fans.