Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: games

Some Very Enjoyable First Person Shooters of 90s and Early 2000s

Posted on by Viljami

It was just yesterday as I started to play an old classic FPS game. The game was Quake II. I have to say that there is going to be a remastered version of this game released this year. I am of course very interested in this game. Quake is just so legendary as a PC game.

As I started playing I although noticed some flaws. If you compare this to modern FPS games you are likely to find out that when you shoot an object the impact isn’t so realistic or accurate. There has been lots of improvement in realistic shooting games since this game was released. I also started to wonder if I can come up with some other FPS’s of this era. Quake II was released in 1997. It is released very early in the life of FPS games. We must remember that Half-Life was released in 1998.

I did get my thoughts to some 90s and early 2000s FPS’s. I actually have a copy of Kingpin, Red Faction and also Soldier of Fortune. I have finished Kingpin and Red Faction. I remember that I got stuck with Soldier of Fortune in some level as I played it with my Windows XP PC very many years ago. Today, I have also a retro PC. I should just install Soldier of Fortune some day and give it a one more try.

These games were released way before Call of Duty which transformed this genre to a new era. I first got to play the first Call of Duty back in 2006. I played it with my original Xbox. There are also many newer games like Battlefield and Doom and Doom Eternal. It is a bit sad that we haven’t seen a new Soldier of Fortune game after the third one flopped a bit. In its time Soldier of Fortune was as realistic as a shooter can be. You were even able to shoot your enemy’s leg off. This was a time when realism and brutality combined to form something new and also something a bit terrifying.

As has been stated many times we can say it one more time. Violence in video and computer games doesn’t directly produce violence in real life. I think this has been already proved scientifically. So there’s actually no debate on this matter anymore. There should be limitations of course. It might not be okay for a very young person to witness such a graphical violence. This everything was new to us back in the day. Of course we see this all the time. Graphics are improving and violence seems to still exist.

I can definitely recommend these three games. If you have them you are lucky. If you want to buy them on Steam or some other game store just go ahead. They also can tell you something about how PC gaming has evolved and continued to develop. There might be something else I should write here for you but I think I must stop here and wait for your response. I will keep writing these posts here now and then.

Should Retro Games Be Declared as Public Domain?

Posted on by Viljami

How popular are old NES or SNES games? Just think about how popular were NES Classic Mini and also the one that had tens of SNES games on it. I remember that I was working in a game shop as we had hundreds of customers that had ordered a NES mini. They had to wait moths to get one. This same happened with SNES mini. Although customers started to understand and not order a device that couldn’t even be delivered in a reasonable time.

This is exactly the matter when we are talking about the popularity of retro games. These games were released 30 or 40 years ago. They aren’t properly available to us gamers. Nintendo has made them available on their web service. That alone doesn’t make me want to pay for the subscription. You can get a console, maybe original NES or some other type of console, that you can play original games with. This however is expensive. You might have to pay 40 euros for a game. Some games are sold for hundreds or even thousands of euros.

Publishers seem to be holding on to these game titles. How does this make sense? If someone buys a used game from a game shop that is a private entrepreneur how does this give any more profit to the publisher of the game? There have been many sore comments on Facebook ads of this certain web shop that offers money for used retro titles. They pay you about fifty percentage or maybe even less than that for your rare games of the price they are actually selling it. This makes producing and downloading so called pirated copies of these games popular and tempting.

I just today read a story that was dealing with the ability to play old games that were released in 2010 or earlier. This is actually very hard. The writer was very concerned about older games just disappearing somewhere. These games are valuable in a certain way. Future game designers can learn a lot from old games. Someone might be willing to play these games. And many are having this certain appeal to these games now and also in the future.

What would be the solution? I think that certain games should be made a public domain. You could download them and share and even maybe modify them freely. We should have devices available that could convert the game cartridge to a rom file and they should be easily available. There could be devices dedicated to this in libraries or maybe in some other places. I have to tell you that we are already seeing all sorts of video games available in libraries already today.

So, to conclude, we should, in my opinion, share these old games and make them as widely available as possible. We already have these most important video game systems emulators available. Someone might support legalizing some mild drug. I am right now stating that I support the freeing of retro games. This is even today illegal. Who is this statute working for one might ask. I am not supporting or saying that you should break law. That is not the case. I am saying that we should change the law since it seems that old games are getting hard to play and to enjoy.

How Does The Business of Selling Used Video Games Work?

Posted on by Viljami

If you have been involved in gaming or playing or collecting video games for several years you might have faced the issue of not getting your money back from a game that you bought just some months ago. You are trying to trade the game and get a good price, right? Obviously this doesn’t work this way. Because the game shop you are dealing with has to make a living. You can get maybe 20 percentage of the money you paid for the game…if you buy a new game…with that money. Does this seem complicated or unfair? Let me explain this to you so we all can understand this issue better.

Of course if you are willing to sell the game yourself and directly to another collector or player you can get a decent amount of money out of the game. Game shops are facing the fact that they have to be profitable. There are lots of expenses. Shipping of products that are coming into the store, rent of the premise and or web services for a web shop and of course the subsistence of all of the workers. Now this is a business right here. You can make a living out of this. Easy it isn’t but possible it is (did that sound like Yoda from Star Wars?).

There are several companies here in my home land, Finland, that operate this type of business that I have described right here. They might have a shop, maybe even two or three shops, and of course a web shop. There are also many smaller shops that sell games here. You can also find some people that are interested in selling some of their game collections and we have platforms like Huuto dot net and Tori dot fi for someone who wants to sell any used stuff. And I must mention also re-use centers and flee markets whose prices are usually lower since they get the stuff they sell mainly for free. And this is where we get to people that take advantage of this and…it isn’t very nice as you can figure.

Where do you get games for a low price that you can sell to some collector? I know some people that have received an estate that has contained games. Usually there is a huge collection to be sold. And if you buy the whole stack you get it in a fair price, right? Now we are starting to figure this out. You can sell these games piece by piece. A game collector is someone that needs maybe one game or two or three games that he or she is missing from his/her collection. So you can sell a few game for a decent price and make a profit a bit by bit. This is the magic of selling used games. You buy a large batch and check the unique games prices and you will get a profit out of this.

What makes the used game’s price high or low? One important thing is the condition of the game. It can be a sealed copy. It can have a manual and all of the covers. Or maybe its a loose game with generic cover or no packaging at all. PC games can be packaged in so called “big boxes” that make them more valuable. And the condition of the box matters. It matters also how the labels look like and does the CD/DVD disc have scratches on it. Sometimes the condition of the game can be enhanced quite easily. I am not going into that so deeply.

Some games can also be rare ones. They might be so good that no one just wants to sell them. They can be rare in a way that they weren’t even so popular when they first got released. These types of games are just uncommon. Some games gained popularity and valuation only when some retro hobbyists noticed their true value. Some games are so amazing that they seem to define a whole gaming system. These types of games can be something like Super Mario for NES or Sonic for Mega Drive or something similar.

Should you sell your old games? This is a tough question. I regret selling my old PS1 back in the beginning of the 2000s. The system and all the games I had for it would have been so much more valuable for me today compared to the price that I got from them then. Like, I sold all of them for under 200 euros. If you consider only the money this is clearly a financial loss for me. And I would have liked to play these games still. I just didn’t seem to have such an interest for retro games back then. You have to consider how I got back into playing video games in 2006 when I got my original Xbox. And…it was 2017 when I started my plans for starting to collect older and retro gaming systems again.

For some years already I have been writing to this blog. It is very interesting. However this is only a way for me to express my thoughts. I am not currently getting anything financially from this. And so is the way also that game collectors necessarily don’t get anything from collecting games when it comes to money. Game shops do make profit. That is a good thing. Without them we wouldn’t have a place to trade and buy games.

What is it like to work in a game shop? Sometimes it is busy and sometimes there’s only a few customers. It can be a place to build your dreams and fantasies. It is definitely a technical job. I also got to write, of course, blog posts for the game shop that I worked in for six months. The biggest parts of my job were handling and shipping orders, responding to customer feedback and being a customers servant face-to-face and also in some other ways. It was a fun job. It was a busy job. And ultimately…it was barely profitable.