Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: Retro

THPS 4 on GameCube

Posted on by Viljami

I can definitely say that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is close to my hearth. I have been involved with playing it since the first game came out in the late 90s for PlayStation. THPS series has many games and they have been released for several different gaming consoles and also on PC. So there are lots of systems that you can play THPS games on. That also means there are different ways to control the character inside the game.

It goes almost without saying that I am used to playing some THPS with a PlayStation game pad. About two years ago I wrote a blog post here in this blog about how the THPS 1 + 2 HD remake felt like on PS4. Of course the way how you could use a modern DualShock 4 controller was amazing. I was very pleased with this pair of remakes. The graphics were also very nice. I felt like these games really respected the original games.

This time however I played THPS 4 that was released for GameCube. If you take a PS1 controller and compare it to a GameCube controller you start to see all these differences. But when you get to playing the controller feels almost the same. There are some differences. There are also many similarities. Basically there is a group of four buttons on the right. There is also only one trigger button on the right side and also on the left side.

I really like playing THPS 4 on GameCube. I also like very much of this era of gaming. THPS was released for GameCube in 2002. There is a certain appeal to the games of this time. There were more games released and while the graphics weren’t anything you could really compare to today’s games they still make an impact to me as a retro game hobbyist. I like the feel that GameCube’s controller gives.

I am very happy that I decided to buy this game some time ago. It gave me some value and I mean something else than financial value. Tony Hawk once said that THPS games cannot get you to learn actual skateboarding but they can give you an idea of how skateboarding feels like. I am also content about having some free time to get into this game.

I have currently completed, I think, 22 percentage of the game. I get to spend some hours playing this game during last weekend. I have also played some WRC Generations on my Xbox Series X. It seems to be a decent rally game. So, maybe I write something about it the next time!

Recent Game Purchases

Posted on by Viljami

I saw some amazing games on one nice game shop. Some of them could be considered retro games but also a PS3 game and an Xbox 360 game caught my eye. I made the order and it only took two days for the package to arrive. Just yesterday I got to pick the package.

So I ordered five games. The first two caught my attention as they were GameCube games. I have a strong effort in collecting as many and preferably good and actually playable games in this small but steadily growing collection of GameCube games. The two games were Mortal Kombat – Deadly Alliance and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4. That Mortal Kombat game has a grade 81 / 100 on Metacritic while THPS 4 has 91 / 100.

I also got another NES game that I can now add to my collection. This was a role playing game called Gauntlet II. I really didn’t know a whole lot about this game before I bought it. But it didn’t make me miserable at all and this had everything to do with it being so cheap. It cost me only 25 euros. And it was in a decent condition. It was loose but that’s how I like my NES games. I don’t actually like so much of the packaging of NES games…for some reason that I cannot explain clearly.

I also got, for very cheap of course, a game for PS3 and a game for Xbox 360. The PS3 one was Castlevania – Lords of Shadow. I have played Castlevania games from 1980s and this game in my thinking is based on these older games. I think it is an attempt to offer some high quality graphics and game play for the fans and maybe even for someone that doesn’t even have any idea about these original games.

The last game that I got yesterday is a Need For Speed game. The title is as presented completely “Need For Speed – The Run”. For this game I don’t have so high expectations. There are probably tens (probably not hundreds :D) of these NFS titles out there. I think some of them are really good and others are not so good. I finally decided to give this a try.

I got these games just yesterday so I haven’t yet had time to play them. As I have written here in this blog earlier – I have a huge backlog. The thing that I’m glad about is that I actually almost completed Burnout Takedown. I got now 88 percentage of it completed. I also got my hands dirty, oh boy, what a way to say it, and started playing, finally, Crash Bandicoot 4. And what it comes to completion I now have about 35 percentage of this game finished.

Right now, as you can probably imagine, I am just a little bit tired. I am, again, trying to stay active and bring you, my dear readers, some new content at a good pace. It has been a week or so since my last blog post. I wanted to give you something to read and think once again. I hope we see again soon!

A Very Nice Hockey Game

Posted on by Viljami

You know how many sport games are, don’t you? The game stays almost like same and there is a release every year. So there aren’t big changes in the game every year. But something always changes if we compare these games closely or then compare a game that is ten years old to the most recent one. I thought that I would bring up a game from a bit over twenty years ago and tell all of you how it is as a hockey game.

There have been many good hockey games in the whole wide history of gaming. One of my favorites is NHL 94 for Mega Drive. I played also NHL 97 for PC for a while. NHL 94 was good but if you compare NHL 95, 96 or 97 to it you find that it’s basically the same game that is released for Mega Drive and there aren’t so many updates. NHL 97 for PC is offering already 3D graphics and the gameplay also has an appeal.

The latest hockey game that I got in my hands was NHL 2021 for PS4. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t get the difficulty level to something that would have been correct for me as a gamer. It was too easy and I scored almost everytime I made a shot and I won my opponent with ten goals every time or it was a bit too difficult and none of my shots would find their place. It was nice that the game had Patrik Laine and all other real and recent players in it. I couldn’t understand the gameplay completely.

I think many PS4 games have this issue that playing the game has been made a bit hard. I don’t know if this is a choice that has been made to make the games more appealing to eSport hobbyists and professionals. This can also be a thought only in my mind. You should definitely have your own opinion on this matter. There are propably games made for PS4 that are very playable and enjoyable. But in my opinion NHL 2021 isn’t a game that would inspire me a lot.

So why to play NHL 2000 for PlayStation 1? It’s appealing and inspiring game. You can definitely adjust the difficulty and I found that playing was the most enjoyable with second easiest difficulty level for me. I picked Mighty Ducks as my team since it had Teemu Selänne and also Paul Kariya. These both are fast players and their shot is very accurate. They both play in the first attack line of Anaheim.

As a hockey game NHL 2000 feels very nice to play. There is a lot of randomness. Situations change quickly. One of the best ways to score a goal is to have a breakaway. I have made lots of goals with Selänne or Kariya as they are fast. Another way to score is to give a pass and shoot the puck as a one-timer. It helps if you are closer to the goal and if you can make the goalie to move sideways there is a strong opportunity to score a goal.

One thing I hate about NHL 94 is that it offers only playoffs as a game mode. NHL 2000 has different kinds of seasons for you to pick. You can have a season of only a bit under 30 games, a season with about 60 games or a full season. Of course as is common you can adjust the play time and how often fights occur and also some other options for modifying rules of the game.

This is a hockey game for you if you don’t mind a bit retroish feel to the graphics and like fast, easy and enjoyable gameplay. There could maybe be more statistics, I don’t know. I am not the kind of a gamer that spends lots of time inspecting some deeper statistics  but it is nice to see how many goals the best scorer of my team has made, what is my goalies percentage of preventions or some other stats like this. This is definitely your game if you are into PS1 games all in all.