Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: how

What to Play Next?

Posted on by Viljami

I have to face it – I have a huge amount of games in my backlog. I have both physical and digital copies of many games that I haven’t had an opportunity to get into and to play. This is something to discuss about because there are some clearances in some of those game shops right now. I have to bring up Steam. There was recently a query in Pelaaja (a Finnish gaming magazine) about are people actually excited about ongoing clearances. The results were a bit mixed. A lot of people though their backlog is already huge and that they wouldn’t have a chance to play any of these new games that were on sale.

This is somewhat a problem. There are currently so many games that you have to really give a thought about what game you are going to buy next and what game would you play next. At the same time game buyers are looking more and more how games are rated. There is a lot of money involved. This brings it harder and harder to actually spontaneously pick a game that would suit your taste as good as possible.

It’s not that we wouldn’t have any good new games. This year there has already been many hit games released. We have seen titles like Gran Turismo 7 and Elden Ring already this year. I have to also include one thought to this monologue. There are too many games trying to be everything a game can be. I mean that these games are trying to be more than good in just one genre. This turns games into mega games that have everything. I don’t know if this is healthy for gaming scene. At the same time we are seeing more attempts to bring these mega hit games to the audience. Every big player in the game is trying to make the next big hit. Maybe they should try to accomplish something more simpler and not to try to take such a huge bite.

I greatly enjoyed Gran Turismo 7 some months ago. I played it over 30 hours. Other games that I have recently played a lot are NBA 2K22 and Diablo II Resurrected. How many games like this does a regular gamer need yearly? I am good with two to three titles that take a lot of time to complete. So I’m satisfied with 2-3 games yearly that take up something like 30 or 40 hours to complete. I am not able to play every game, and not even every good game, that gets released. As games try to provide everything for everybody this is very problematic. Actually I am satisfied in a good driving game or two, a good sports game, like FIFA or NBA, and maybe an adventure game or some other game that has also some action game features and maybe a goof first person shooter and all this in about a year. That would make my gaming needs for new games satisfied.

What about retro games? I am talking about older games. For these I prefer to pick some interesting titles as new games that I haven’t yet played. Sometimes these games are legendary and sometimes they are just rare and good. Price of retro games has gone up in recent years. But it is good to read reviews and recommendations from YouTube and also from some good news feeds and blogs. I think there is no reason to buy a lot of old games. It’s better to pick the good ones that you really want in your collection. Some games I pick because they give me nostalgia and I have something in my memory about them.

It’s nice to have kind of an network of influential persons, like bloggers, that can share something, be it a picture or a review or just a comment, about games that they like. I personally like reading reviews the most. I don’t like to always look just for the score that game receives. I like to really get an idea of what kind of a game it would be and what kind of an experience it brings. I enjoy also watching videos from YouTube about hunting games from flea markets. There are people that make their living like this. They buy some games cheap and sell them for a bit higher price.

All in all collecting games is a great hobby. I am a bit worried about gathering too many games to my backlog and that I am not able to play all of them. So I have to make compromises all the time. But I can’t help it. There just are too many games out there. I hope I have time to get into at least some of them.

Thinking About Strategy in Colin McRae Rally 2.0

Posted on by Viljami

There are basically two ways to think about your car settings in Colin McRae Rally 2.0. You can concentrate on driving and copy the best settings from a strategy guide (which is actually available through internet for free) or you can actually test your car with different settings and change them to your own liking. Testing your car to find a good setting can take time. In this text I would like to describe how these settings take impact on your car in this game. I will tell you what each setting will do. So let’s get to it!

There are different settings in this game for tires. Basically you have slick tires that are good for stages that are mainly driven on tarmac. Spikes are good for ice. There are also settings for wet and dry mud and wet and dry gravel. So yo have to choose your tires based on how the surface of the road is. This is pretty simple. You just choose a right tires for each type of road surface.

There are however some settings that aren’t so clear on what they have effect on. Well, actually “gearbox” isn’t so complicated. You can set your acceleration to maximum level but then you loose some top speed. And you can also set your top speed to maximum and you will lose some acceleration. Good acceleration is nice for stages that have many corners and high top speed is better on stages that have long straight parts. That makes sense doesn’t it.

“Suspension” can be adjusted to soft setting on stages that are bumpy or that have many jumps. When driving on flat stages and also stages that have tarmac on their road it is recommended to adjust suspension to hard. You can also adjust your breaks and power of your car to have a tendency to under or over steer. And finally the last setting you have to worry about, that is called “Steering” tells you how sensitively you can steer your car. It can react fast or it can react a bit slower to how you turn your driving wheel (or press the buttons if you are playing this game with a game pad).

If you don’t like to fiddle with the settings and you want to just drive here’s a link to the strategy guide of Colin McRae Rally 2.0.

Let’s do some math…

Posted on by Viljami

Playing can be very time consuming. I started wondering how many hours have I actually spent playing. How much of my time, or even my life, I have spent enjoying video games. Would it be months? Or years? Why don’t we do some calculations on this.

How many hours is there in a month? One month has 30 days which have 24 hours each. So there is 720 hours in one month. One year has 365 times 24 hours. That means one year has 8760 hours. We can approach this problem by thinking how many games have you completed so we can calculate an approximation of how many months or even years you, the player, has spent playing.

To complete a modern role playing game would require maybe 100 hours. For a shorter action game it would mean that it takes about 15 hours to complete. These games are much shorter than RPGs. Driving games would take propably about 15 hours also. Games like Fallout 4, Final Fantasy series’s games and other games like this take a bit longer to complete.

I think we shouldn’t try to calculate precisely the amount of hours but we can figure out an estimation. In one full month I would play Final Fantasy VII about seven times through. That’s a whole lot of playing. In one year I could play again Final Fantasy VII thorugh over 85 times. This would be a ridiculous amount of time to spend playing.

So the time I have spent playing, in my lifetime, might be somewhere between maybe months or even one year. But I don’t think many gamers come close to maybe two or three years. So these calculations can give you an idea of how much of your time you have actually spent playing in total. There however are much more boring and not so improving things you can spend your time. Playing games is a big part of my life. But you got to remember that there are more important things in life also…