Retro Archives - Page 4 of 64 - Intensive Gaming Diary

Physical, Digital or Something Else?

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Viljami

Physical game cartridges and later discs (CDs, DVDs and so on) was how games were sold way before video games were available as downloads from internet. Internet came to be during 1990s and it was only in 2000s when game consoles started to be connected to it. First there were consoles like PS2 and Xbox that could be connected to internet. Later it came a norm that discs only held parts of the game and you actually had to download some parts of the game. This is also how many games were patched or updated even after they had been released.

The progress towards faster networks and downloading games has been a slow one. However just some days ago Sony announced that it will discontinue physical game discs in the year 2028. This makes a gamer think about the release of PlayStation 6 and the matter that it probably won’t have a disc drive at all. We have seen this kind of progression already in PCs. Steam and other software web shops have provided us the games that we play today and this has been the norm for already several years. You can buy yourself an internal or external DVD or Bluray drive for your PC and this can make you some trouble and you have to pay for it.

If we go from the beginning to end and inspect how have games been delivered to customers through times beginning from 1980s when Nintendo, or NES, was first released. Now, Nintendo wasn’t the first home console but it was the most successful console in the 1980s with some competition from Sega’s consoles. Back then games were delivered as electronic cartridges that you actually inserted into your video game console. The space that a game like this takes is only some tens or hundreds of kilobytes.

After cartridges we moved forward as the technology progressed to compact discs. First we saw CD-ROMs that could hold maybe 700 megabytes of information. So, the amount of information was 700 000 kilobytes when NES could onyl deal with games of maybe 100 kilobytes. So, the amount of data became 7000 times bigger when games began to be delivered as CD-ROMs. Later the technology progressed and we moved to first DVDs and then to Blurays and later to 4K discs. So, now Sony announced that the progression of discs is going to end in 2028.

It is very easy to rip PlayStation 1 and 2 games. You only need a regular CD-/DVD-drive. I am myself using an external one. I do buy physical game discs for both of these systems. I just want to always rip the game disc from the media I have purchased so I am not limited to use only the physical disc. This way I can play the game on a PC and on an emulator. So I mainly use emulation for PlayStation 1 and 2 retro gaming. I do have in my setup a PS1. I mainly use it for some games that have multiple discs so the swapping of discs is smoother. It might be possible to use emulation also with multi-disc games but to today I haven’t found a way to solve this matter.

So, actually the game disc can and maybe even should be ripped to a digital format. When you rip the disc it becomes an image of the disc that you can burn to a disc or utilize it to play the game that it holds. It takes only about 15 minutes for my computer to rip the disc and then I am moving the image to the PC that has Batocera as its operating system that is connected to my home’s network. That way the disc isn’t required but it is a sign that you actually do own the game and it is not just downloaded from internet as a pirated copy.

Is it pirating if you just copy a game that you don’t own? I think it can be considered as something like that. Now when games might become fully digital the matter of who actually owns a game is becoming more unclear. Actually instead of huge shelves in our homes that hold some game discs and cartridges should now become digital libraries of games that you can install and uninstall. But what happens if the system that holds this digital library becomes somehow unavailable? The matter that you own a physical copy of a game makes sure that you do own it even if some web service game library platform becomes obsolete. And this seems to be the biggest part of the debate that has already been risen. Here were my thoughts about this matter. I think it is now time to stop and think about this a bit. Maybe I form some opinion about this later. You, my dear reader, can also think about this and maybe have a conversation with some gamer like you.

Some Turtles Stuff

Posted on June 28, 2026 by Viljami

I was playing today a fairly new Turtles game called Splintered Fate for Nintendo Switch. I was playing it on my Switch 2. Just recently I have also bought the Turtles movie trilogy in 4K. I also had the Cowabunga collection that features plenty of Turtles games from the past. I am a big fan of Turtles. Of course I have been a fan since I was a child.

So the trilogy includes the original movies that were made back in the beginning of the 1990s. I like to own this collection. Having these movies as 4K is very nice as an experience. When I was a kid I was so young that I wasn’t able to go to see the first two movies in a cinema but the third one I at least got to see. I am watching these movies with my 4K television and Xbox Series X. I did also get a sort of a discount. Currently the trilogy does cost about 76 euros. Also I have to remind that these movies don’t have Finnish subtitles. I liked to tell you about this in case you my dear reader are from Finland or from any other non-English country and are wondering about this matter. I didn’t actually find any difficulties with the level of English I have currently.

The Cowabunga Collection features many retro games from systems like NES, SNES, Game Boy, Mega Drive / Genesis and also from arcade. It is kind of nice to have the disc and also the cover case. Although I wouldn’t mind if I only had this collection as a digital edition. Also many of these games are already available for me to play on my retro computer that happens to be my Raspberry Pi 5 that runs Recalbox. But if you like to get into some retro style of Turtles games and happen to also see this collection available I can definitely recommend it.

What about the Switch game – Splintered Fate? I am actually still playing this one and I have only spent a bit over two hours playing it. It is cool how they have made the game as a Turtles themed one. The game reminds me a lot about Hades. I used to play Hades about a year or two ago. Also there was Hades II released just some moments ago. There is a lot of repetition. I think that it would have been nice to see a deeper story evolving during the game but the game actually isn’t a bad one.

This tiny collection is just a part of my huge collection of video games and movies. I wanted in this blog post to display it to you my dear readers and tell you about my passion towards Turtles. I know I have some other collectibles also but I think a huge part of them are still in my parents house where I lived my childhood in back in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. I did have Turtles action figures, some comic magazines and also a board game. I also had a pair of running shoes themed with Turtles but I think they aren’t anymore in any condition at all. Actually I think we threw them eventually away as is usual with old clothes.

Some of this Turtles stuff is related to my childhood closely. I sometimes like to reminisce about all this stuff. It brings me so many memories. I used to watch Turtles cartoons especially on weekend mornings. We used to wake up with my brother because we were used to waking up since we were in school every weekday morning as is usual in where I live.

So, Splintered Fate is a decent video game. Cowabunga Collection offers a lot of nostalgia. Turtles 4K Trilogy offers you the collection of these original movies. If you are interested in this stuff just look around in your favorite shop of games and see if they have these available. Splintered Fate is also available for PC and PS5 and Xbox Series S/X as is also The Cowabunga Collection and they are both released as a digital and also a physical copy. There was my take on Turtles for this time.

Thousands of Games – How to Choose What to Play?

Posted on June 14, 2026 by Viljami

There are thousands of games, new and retro, out there. How can you even try to choose which ones are worth your while? We are going to go through this matter in this blog post. I am trying to give you some perspective once again. This fact has been in my mind lately. I just recently got to see one particular game that was somewhat interesting. It was a NES game and it was a Turtles game also. The game was “Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles 2 – The Arcade Game”.

I started playing. I figured that many Turtles games, especially some of them from that 16-bit era, are really nice games. This was a game from the 8-bit era. When you are playing video games on a NES you’ll always get these limited options on how to control the main character in the game since there are only so few buttons. This seems to be the baseline when you are playing NES. There’s nothing new here. Nintendo actually corrected this matter with their release of SNES.

But what I realized was that the game was actually a bad one. I didn’t feel like trying to even think about trying to beat it. You only get to try to hit an enemy and jump with also some movement involved and that’s how the game tries to build up a challenge. The graphics are poor and while music is nice for a NES game it cannot compete with some games like this on some newer systems. I stopped playing the game, I had spent maybe half an hour playing it.

This is the reality. Every game that has been released isn’t going to be a good game. You do want to think about what games you are going to be playing. Finishing a video game does take usually ten hours or maybe even some tens of hours. Some games can give you hundreds of hours of time to play. I have spent several hundreds of hours playing NBA 2K games. Also if you are into role-playing-games you get to spent almost certainly some hundred hours while playing them. How do you make the choice of what to play after you finish a game? Does every game have to be a great one if you are going to play it for a long period of time?

We can approach this matter in a certain way. There have been thousands of games released since the beginning of the era of video games. There have been many games available in arcades. Also home consoles and personal computers have lots of games. If there are thousands of games how many of them are still today good choices to choose a game that you actually want to play? You can try to find some games that are appreciated in the gaming community. This includes games that have received good reviews and games that are recommended to you by other gamers. Maybe they are your friends online or in real life.

What about “hidden gems”. There are some games that aren’t so well known but are still offering you some value if you choose to play a game like this. These games can also be recommended by someone. Also you can by yourself try to find games that interest you. This is where it comes as a handy fact that games almost always have a genre of some kind that you can think about while trying to choose what to play. You can be interested in a genre and find a new game to play.

How many games are there actually? First matter that comes to my mind is that PS1 and PS2 have both over 10 000 games in their game library. I think NES has maybe 900 games. Sega Mega Drive has about 1000 games in its game library. There is a huge amount of games available for PC and also for any modern game console. This amount of games is also increasing all the time. You get a sense of this fact that there are loads of games available.

I don’t really know how many good games there are out there. I mean those games that really are going to interest you so that you want to try to beat them. If we think about NES and all of those games that were released for it I think there are just maybe from 10 to 20 games that can actually give you a nice experience in the year 2026. Of course it depends on what games you like to play. Also you have to remember the nostalgia. Games that you played in your days of your youth can bring you joy if you decide that you still want to play them.

Older games aren’t necessarily games that you should play. In overall they are poorer in graphics, audio matters and also in their basic design. Sometimes it is better to choose a remake of the game. This can offer improvements in many ways. Older systems do offer nostalgia and some perspective of how games used to be. Just be a bit cautious when considering about getting into some of these games.