Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: news

Hogwarts Legacy

Posted on by Viljami

I spent about two weeks playing Hogwarts Legacy for Xbox Series X. This game has received several good, or maybe excellent, reviews. It is not the newest game since it was released in 2023. So, it is about two years old. This also means that you can get it with a cheap price. You definitely don’t have to pay 80 euros for it today.

Hogwarts Legacy is a role-playing-game with lots of action included. The basic gameplay operates on completing quests, finding new areas through map and also fighting against enemies with many spells. You also get some gear from time to time. You get to upgrade your gear and also your skills.

The open-world environment is fun to explore. You face some enemies while you are finding these new places. You can also sort of “unlock” waypoints so you can travel to these locations just by selecting them from a map and clicking the button.

The game gives you full statistics of how much of the game have you completed. There are different areas of these challenges like how much of you have explored, battled and how many quests you have completed.

It took for about 40 hours to finish the game. There are several difficulty levels to choose from. They actually make the battles harder. Hogwarts Legacy offers a lot to play even after you have finished the main quests. You can develop your character and explore even more.

The graphics, or visual, are very nice in Hogwarts Legacy and so is the music. The world is the world of Harry Potter. I have to say also that I am not so familiar, actually not at all, on Harry Potter. This might be the first game that is placed in the world of Harry Potter that I have finished. Nor do I have memories of any books or movies. Still while I was playing it didn’t really bother me so much.

It is nice to see a game where battles are structured to just swinging your wand instead of shooting with a gun or fighting with a melee weapon (like an axe or something. I did enjoy this game. It really isn’t still something that I would like to spend more time on. As I am writing this I have just begun playing the newest Dead Space. I am trying to really play these games and they have been in my game shelf already for a good amount of time.

I am also waiting to get my hands on the Nintendo Switch 2. So, I really don’t have many reasons to go and play some Xbox Series X titles. I am already waiting for some new Switch 2 titles to play. I bought the version of Switch 2 that has Mario Kart World bundled. I would have liked to buy some other game for the first game of the console but this is now the game I have to start my journey with Switch 2. The console seems already really promising.

I also read that there is a new handheld Xbox console coming. It is interesting to see how huge game console companies are moving towards handheld gaming. It hasn’t been a long time since we were first introduced to Steam Deck. There might be something new coming from Valve, also. And of course we have all our Windows 11 handheld PCs already in the markets and selling very nicely.

Do we see something new in a form of an operating system from Valve in the near future? We will have to wait and see. I am very interested in seeing how Linux can operate with some applications that are usually utilized with a Windows PC. We have already seen how PC games bought through Steam can already function on a Linux operating system. They seem to work fine.

Playing Some Gran Turismo 4 (Again)

Posted on by Viljami

I am playing Gran Turismo 4 once again. This game is in my opinion the best one in the series. Not to say that there would be any really bad games in this racing game series. I was thinking about writing a ranking about how I think Gran Turismo series’s games are compared to each other. While I think Gran Turismo 4 is the best I think the first game and also GT 7 were also very good games. It has to be mentioned that the first game deserves some credit about its innovative approach to racing. That game was the one that sparked the series into its way to success.

I have played, since I recently started playing it from the beginning, for about 14 hours. I am always complaining about retro hardware breaking down so now I am going with PCSX2, the PS2 emulator for PC Linux/Mac/Windows. I do have also the original game that can be ripped from DVD with a computer and an optical DVD disc drive. Actually, I recently bought myself also an external Bluray drive and I am hoping to get to rip some PS3 games also. I might write about that also later in a new blog post. Lets just see how my plans are going to be developing.

I am playing this game with a game pad. I am using an Xbox controller because it is so cleverly compatible with my current PC setup. I am running a Windows 10 with 16 GB of RAM and a neat GPU that has 8 GB of video memory. I do have also a SSD that can hold 2 TB of data. I think for modern gaming 1 TB would be enough. The weakest link in my setup might be my personal computers processor/CPU. So, its quite clear that I am also going to have to upgrade my computer later this year. I also have some news about my screen/monitor. I finally upgraded to a screen that has a 4K resolution and is also a bit bigger. The size is 28 inches. Compared to my old Full HD 22 inch display this one is clearly better.

I am hoping to get to play some more new games with a new Windows 11 PC. I have already bought Final Fantasy XVI and Starfield from Steam but my hardware is too poor in performance for me to play them currently. So, I have bought these two games but never even installed them. I am also very interested in getting into the new Silent Hill 2 remake that has received a lot of good reviews. I hope I will get to update my PC in about 2 months. The move to Windows 11 from Windows 10 is going to be scheduled to October. So, for me, this is the final deadline for the upgrade.

This week we also finally got some news from Nintendo concerning the release of Switch 2. The price is going to be 470 euros and 510 euros when you buy one game bundled. This game is going to be Mario Kart World. It is already possible to make an order at least here in Finland. The actual release will be 5th of June this year. I am waiting to get my hands on the new console. I am probably going to get at least Hades 2 and maybe the new Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 when it gets released in July.

What more do I have to say about Gran Turismo 4? It was originally released for PS2 in 2005. The graphics are just amazing and I think that they even hold up against today’s racing games. It is very nice to play Gran Turismo 4 with a 4K display and some graphics settings tweak and the screen just screams as the beautiful graphics are getting displayed. There hundreds of real cars that need some updating and tweaking of settings. You can start with buying a transmission that can be set up to get a better acceleration for your vehicle while your top speed does drop. You can have yourself a strategy about different tracks that different types of corners and parts where you are just driving full speed ahead. You have to play some tracks several times to gain some credits so you can advance and buy a new car. You also have some missions to complete to get a proper driving license. Winning series’s of races is being rewarded with a car also.

Some Other Gaming Blogs and News Feeds

Posted on by Viljami

Gaming is a popular topic. So there are lots of posts on many different gaming news feeds and blogs. This blog post is going to give you a view of some of my favorite sources of information that I use to be aware of the most current news concerning playing video games. Here we go!

There are many sources of information. Sometimes I watch a YouTube video and sometimes I find something interesting from Instagram or Facebook. This text is handling only blogs and other news sources. I am going to explain what is RSS feed and what is my favorite Feed Reader. I am going to give you some names and titles but I keep straight links out of this blog post. I am giving you an advice of where to find information but I think this blog is still your number one source. Why would I want you to move from my blog to another with a direct link?

I usually find my information from Feedly. You can get to know this powerful tool too. Just type feedly dot com and you will get to the login page. You can login with Google or Facebook or you can create your own username and password for feedly. You can search for different RSS feeds. Just to the menu that is on the left and select “Follow Websites…”. You can then add your favorite blogs that you discover. There is also a web app of feedly available.

Using feedly to read all your RSS feeds is my recommendation but it isn’t the only option available. You can track and search your feeds from anywhere on the web and just copy the link to their RSS feeds and add them to any RSS feed reader. I give some good suggestions of some of the blogs I follow. Some of these are in Finnish so I only give you ideas of blogs that I follow that are in English.

Mega Visions is a nice blog and also a website of a magazine. I don’t have a subscription but it is possible to get this magazine as a digital or a paper copy. Mega Visions provides news concerning especially SEGA games. Another feed I have in my list is a site called SEGA-16. It also concentrates on SEGA games as the heading title clearly indicates. I have also an interesting feed that I follow called The Psychology of Video Games. I also follow The Video Game Critic and VG247 which are very valuable resources for a gamer that wants to keep up to date with latest information.

The list goes on. I think I have also some feeds I follow on Facebook but lets get our listing from feedly to end. I follow also blogs: VGJUNK, that has stopped writing new posts but their older posts are readable, Wired.com gaming blog and RetroCollect. From Facebook some good sources are: Nintendo Life, PC Gamer, Indie Retro News, GT Planet and Gamerant. You can find more as you explore the contents and make searches through Facebook, Google and Feedly.

So I just gave you some, but not all, my sources. I definitely follow besides these lots of magazines written also in Finnish. I think there isn’t any direct magazine or blog that would give you all the information you need. So I think you must follow many different sources and make yourself a collection of RSS feeds or maybe links that you collect to some format. It makes it easier to follows the news that are most important to you. This was the post this time. I hope you learned something and got something out of reading this blog post.