adventure Archives - Intensive Gaming Diary

Stray (Switch)

Posted on April 6, 2026 by Viljami

The next game that I wanted to play was Stray. I first played it on my PC as I bought it from Steam. As I might have told before I am identifying myself as a “couch gamer”. So, this means that I just had to buy the game also for a console. I picked the Switch version since I have liked my Switch 2 very much and been playing on it. It was for me an easy decision to make. Why am I a couch gamer? I like to play my video games when I wake up and I have found out that I easily fall asleep in the morning if I am on my personal computer. Am I getting old or something? Lets just say that I today prefer console gaming.

So, I am a cat fan. This is because it was 2007 when my parents got a cat. Sadly the cat died just a few years ago. He was an old cat already. But this is the main reason that I almost instantly started to like this game. In Stray you are controlling a cat in a fantasy/sci-fi scenario. Basically the game is about finding a path to the next location by choosing where to run and/or jump next. There are some puzzles also included.

Graphics look nice. I also liked the soundtrack which features your typical electronic music that sounds very nice to my ear. If you know anything about my habits in the field of music production I think you find it not so surprising that I am actually thinking of maybe sampling some of this stuff because it sounds basically very good.

The game takes (according to HLTB website) about five hours to complete. This is a somewhat relief for me as I had to pause my journey into Final Fantasy VII Remake after I had played over six hours of it. I had to pause because I kept thinking that the game would take over 30 hours to finish. That might be too long for me. So, at this point five hours seems just enough.

I have spent almost 4 hours now playing Stray. The game isn’t the most newest one while it also is a very fresh one. It was released in 2024. I have to say that the game does look better on my PCs screen. If you like to keep your graphics sharp you might want to actually play the PC version. I don’t know how the Xbox Series X version would look like. Currently there isn’t a Switch 2 optimized version available. At least not as a physical copy. I do like to play most of my Switch and Switch 2 games as physical copies.

If you like cats and also realistic 3D graphics and adventure games with some mild puzzle game elements Stray is a game for you. For me it cost just some euros under 40 euros. I also bought Star Wars Dark Forces Remaster for Nintendo Switch at this same moment. I hope I get some time to play also this game. Just yesterday I gathered every Switch game I have bought recently and haven’t had, yet, time to even install and I came up with some 15 games. Very many of these games were actually still sealed. What can you say? I am buying lots of video games at this moment.

There are still all the games for PS3 and also some games for PS2 that are still in a “not-yet-played” condition. The latest PS3 title I played was Need for Speed Most Wanted. I almost ended up writing a blog post about it. I played it for over 15 hours. It is a good game but not so straightforward as I would have wished for. There is a lot of goods luck involved in the game-play is what I basically mean.

Getting Into Final Fantasy Origins

Posted on January 10, 2025 by Viljami

There have been many Final Fantasy games released throughout history. Some of them are spin-offs. If we consider the main line of Final Fantasy games and think about its definitive roots you simply cannot forget the first two games that were originally released for NES and/or SNES.

So, you want to play these two games? You have several options. I, myself, went with the Final Fantasy Origins that was released for PS1 in 2003. That seems pretty late for a PlayStation 1 game don’t you think?

What are the other options? Well, you can go with the “pixel remaster” collection that I have been considering also buying. This collection includes all first six Final Fantasy games from I to VI. So these are remakes of these games that graphically seem like some SNES games. Or, at least they come near to that. They are remasters after all.

One option for a hardcore Final Fantasy fan is to go with the original NES version of the first game in this RPG series. Graphically it isn’t as nice as the SNES version of the game. The first game of this RPG series wasn’t published originally in Europe at all and also North America got to see Final Fantasy with a delay of several years.

Final Fantasy as a video game series didn’t get a justified beginning in the PAL region firstly at all but this all changed when in 1997 we got to see also in Europe the seventh FF game to be released for PS1. After FFVII conquered almost every gamers hearth it was acceptable for the gamers in Europe also to see some earlier releases of this famous game series. After all we saw every game that were already a pretty big thing in other parts of the world to get released for PS1 and after that we saw even more games for newer gaming consoles.

This one blog post is too short for us to properly discuss about Final Fantasy as a game series. Instead I am going to write tot you about how I felt getting into the first game of the series. I bought the copy of this game already some months ago. It might be already a year ago or so. I just haven’t had the time to play it, yet.

I was familiar already with FF1 as a NES game. I have tried my hand playing it. This PS1 release includes two games FF I and FF II. It isn’t the most priciest retro game but it isn’t also the cheapest. The way I started to play it was to actually rip these two discs as rom files. After that I transferred these files through Ethernet to the Raspberry Pi 5 based Recalbox. I like to play nowadays my PS1 games this way as it is easier. I do have the hardware, of course, also. It is just easier because you don’t have to mess so much with memory cards or minding of the disc getting scuffed.

The game itself is an adventure type of game meaning you can have conversations and you are trying to obtain some objects that will guide you in your quest. The actual battles are turn-based and they occur at random moments. You have to be in a zone that gives you these occurrences. There are some areas where you don’t have the battles. They are kind of turned off.

The game is also about character development. In the beginning you get to choose four characters with some different character classes. I for example created a group of two Fighters, a White Mage and a Black Mage. I decided to go with a team like this. As you might know I think that there must be someone in the team that can also heal other members and itself also. Fighters are good for fighting and they get powerful combat weapons and armor while Mages can have very powerful attack spells also. It is one point to spot a weakness in monster that are trying to attack you.

Final Fantasy games usually take a long time to finish. I think FF I takes about 16 hours to complete while the second one takes about 22 hours. I think playing Final Fantasy Origins is a good way to deepen your knowledge even more about this RPG that might just be the series that brought these kinds of video games to Europe in the first place.

The Importance of a Plot

Posted on September 2, 2022 by Viljami

If you think about games and gaming and what it comes to games having a strong inner story, a plot, you can have many opinions. There are two extremes. Some might think that there should be sort of interactivity and action in games and that a plot is just something that doesn’t have such an importance.

This of course depends a lot about what kind of a game you are experiencing. If you have a shooter, maybe a first person shooter, you don’t necessarily want to follow something that is comparable to a story or line that walks you throuhg the game. You are happy to just shoot everything that moves, right?

What about adventure games? Here the plot has more meaning. Also in advneture games the dialogue and conversations bring a lot to the content. You also have some puzzles to solve. You have objects to pick up and use in some situations. That’s how adventure games work.

Can you think about a role playing game wihtout a plot? I hardly can. But of course in a role playing game you are also very interested how your main character or characters develop. Usually there are also choices made inside the game that vary how the story keeps moving on. Some games have a solid story line while others might have various events launched by a decision that the player has made.

If you want an example of a storydriven role playing game I would have to bring up Fallout and Fallout 2. These games had a deep and interesting story that also formed based on the desicions that the player makes.

So is strory or a plot important to you as a player? If we compare games to other mediums like books and movies we can think that games differ from them in that that they have this interactivity in them. Player can move a character or characters and make decisions that make an impact. You could hardly think of a movie that has no plot at all. But if you think about a classic game like Doom you could do fine wihtout understanding it’s story line.

Some games give a plot a lot of importance. Some games give us a slight idea of what is going on and deliver some action instead. Some games, maybe some simple games, might not have a plot at all. There are as many games as there are types of players. And we can say that that is many indeed.