Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: Reviews

This Is a Very Bad Game

Posted on by Viljami

I rarely write to this blog about bad games. You know. No one wants to spend time playing a game that you really don’t enjoy. So, I am writing you about NHL 20 for Xbox One. I have  Xbox Series X so I played this game on it. Let me break my thoughts down right here.

How did I came to buying this game in the first place? I found it from flea market for a cheap price. It was only 5 euros. I know what is told about sports games. They are usually the same game that was released last year only with updates to the teams and rosters. This is exactly what this game is like. I am not a deep fan of hockey games. I know NHL 94, 97 and I have played NHL 2008 on PS2 some years ago. I also have NHL 21 for PS4. I partly got it because it included a new remake of NHL 94.

I don’t know a lot about hockey. At least not as much as I know about basketball. I do watch world championships every year but that’s basically it. I have never played hockey seriously. I do live in a country (Finland) that is very good in ice hockey. We have some good players like Mikko Rantanen and Patrik Laine and Laine is also on the cover of this game as you can tell.

I played this game a lot since I hoped that I would really learn to play it and finally spend some good time with it. This didn’t actually never get into that point. I ended up disappointed. I played this game for a bit over 20 hours. I wish I had read some reviews before I started playing. I think this game is a total waste of time. First things I did when I started playing was setting the difficulty level. I started playing with the second easiest difficulty level. I noticed that then this game was too easy. So I upped the level once. This was too hard of a difficulty setting for me. I also changed the button to “NHL 94 style” settings so I wouldn’t have to try to learn this new technique of controlling your shot for example. I had played some NHL 2008, as I mentioned, so the default controlling style wasn’t completely new to me.

This just wasn’t worth my time and effort. As you might have figured out I also spent many days and even weeks playing this game. I don’t know if the newest NHL game is any better. I guess you will have to find out somehow. But this NHL game, NHL 20, is not really a good piece of a game. I could have played something that would have given me some inspiration. I also haven’t wrote anything in some weeks to this blog.

I am skipping the rest of this game. 20 hours for this is long enough. I read form How Long To Beat that it takes about 44 hours to complete this game. That’s unfortunately too long of a time for me, at least. I did play a bit with Mikko Rantanen’s team Colorado Avalanche. I decided to stop playing when I got some more balance to my electronic wallet and this was also the time that discounts started in Xbox Store. I got myself some other games for also a very cheap price.

So, I got games like Dirt Rally 2.0 and Alan Wake II. These both have received very good reviews and I have also good experiences about Dirt Rally games. Immediately, when I started to play Dirt Rally 2.0 again I just felt so good playing it. The game was just way better than what NHL 20 did offer for me. This was the last point to my decision of not going to spend any more time on NHL 20.

NHL 20 isn’t a complete trash but I think you have many older and better NHL games available at the moment. Just give NHL 94 or NHL 97 a try. They are, of course a bit of retro games but you will definitely spend your time better this way. NBA2K series’s games are also very good and they have been that way for years. I don’t have really any experience about latest FIFA games or NFL games. Maybe that’s it for this time. Have a nice new year and may the year 2024 be something for you my dear reader!

A Great Movie for a Total Fan of Resident Evil Series

Posted on by Viljami

In this blog post I am taking a view to the movie Resident Evil – Welcome to Raccoon City. This movie was released in 2021. I am seeing this movie for the first time. I really don’t know if it was here in Finland in film theaters at all. At least every theater would have been closed anyway. So, I watched this movie as a 4K Ultra HD copy on my 55 inch telly with my Xbox Series X. In many ways this is related to playing video games. I am likely justified to write this here.

I am watching a movie on my Xbox Series X and it is about the strange incidents that happened in 1998 in Raccoon City. There is a company called Umbrella Corporation that has something fishy going on in this small city in USA. The movie is based on at least the first two games. You will have a benefit in a way for seeing this content if you have played Resident Evil 1 and 2 or maybe even the recent remake of RE2.

This movie is rated 5,2 out of 10 in imdb. It has received some criticism. Of course hopes have been very high. We have had movies based on this survival horror video game series which isn’t such a surprise, but these movies have been of low quality. Even Milla Jovovich wasn’t able to save them. I don’t like these movies at all. I hate to even having to mention anything about them.

How did I like the movie? Were there anything I would have liked to work a bit  differently? Well, it’s a nice package. It is causing me anxiety in a similar way that the games used to when I picked them up back in the 90s and even recently I have this gloomy feeling if I start to play them. My only possession remaining from these games is a copy of the original RE2 which I think is the best out of the first three games. Now we must remember that there have been remakes and also some more recent RE games made, like for example Resident Evil Village.

This movie centers around happenings in Raccoon City when the zombie apocalypse starts. There are characters like Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield. There aren’t any superstar actors which can be also a good thing. The movie opens these strange incidents a lot and it has more going on than what can be achieved what it comes to the main plot of the whole story that is being told through first three games. At least that’s how I felt. Even my wife enjoyed the film although she said that it was scary and caused a bit of anxiety for her. The movie is actually forbidden for age under 16.

I think this was a good movie. Although it was nothing compared to the Last of Us story that was brought to us also some time ago. I watched that thing on HBO. This RE movie was one of my first films that I got as a 4K disc. These things are expensive, you know? I paid 30 euros for this movie. It has also the Bluray version and it came in a steel book. I can definitely recommend this movie to you especially if you like RE.

 

I Finished Reading “Ready Player One”

Posted on by Viljami

So, as the title of this blog post tells you, I finished reading my copy of Ready Player One. It was originally published in 2011. My copy of this book is printed in 2018. This is the translation. I read this one in Finnish. I just wish that I would have read the original book in English. The translation isn’t bad. I just think there are so many terms in English “nerd slang” that you cannot directly translate to Finnish. They have done their best. I know this because there is a person mentioned in the first pages of the book. That person is Jyrki J. J. Kasvi. Or at least was because, sadly, he passed away some years ago.

This book offers a story and lots of references to 70s, 80s and 90s video game related content. This includes games, music and movies. When I am reading this material, I feel very much like a real nerd. I can feel the writers, who is, actually, Ernest Cline, passion, so to say, about every movie and game that he mentions in the book. You probably get who this book is targeted for. It is a fun read. All this talk about Atari 2600 makes it also a bit funny. It just shows how much this console mattered to the author of the book.

The book has a bit over 500 pages. On these last pages there is an advertisement about Cline’s new book called Armada. It is said that it will be available in 2018. I didn’t actually buy this paper back book as a new copy. I bought it from flea market. It might have been from recycling center. I don’t remember clearly.

The story takes place in year 2045. People are really into virtual reality gaming. There is a huge video game called OASIS. It was developed by a now deceased game designer James Halliday. He left a quest inside the game. There is a huge reward promised to that person that can solve the mystery. There is also a large company called IOI that is doing its best to get their hands on this award. The book takes you through of how the main character, Wade Watts, deals with this challenge.

This book has been very popular. There is also a movie made out of it. With all this hype around the book I found it to be a nice read. And of course it is related to the subject of my dearest hobby – collecting and playing video and computer games.