Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

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The Importance of a Plot

Posted on 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.

Characteristics of Sega Mega Drive Games

Posted on by Viljami

I was playing Shinobi III – Return of the Ninja Master as I started to focus on how the game is actually developed. I am sometimes, maybe subconsciously, starting to think how the game that I am playing is programmed or how the graphics are put together. I am not a professional game developer but I still find thinking about this very interesting. I started to realize that there are some characteristics of games that are developed for Sega Mega Drive.

Mega Drive, or Genesis, was released in the late 80s. It aimed to be a serious competitor for Nintendo Entertainment System. It also made it’s best to bring the experience of arcade to consumers living rooms. At this point the hardware performance of game consoles was beginning to be a lot closer to the level of arcade game machines. It was clear that Sega wanted Mega Drive to be more powerful than NES. Sega made this message clear by printing the text “16-Bit” to the surface of Mega Drive game console.

What kinds of games there were back in the day? Are they still worth playing ? We can start from the visual perspective. As Mega Drive had power, it produced very nice graphics if they were compared to the graphics that NES provided. I think SNES has a bit better graphics if you compare them to Mega Drive’s. But SNES was released way later than Mega Drive. The graphics are of course two dimensional as 3D modeled games weren’t yet available.

Mega Drive games are said to be repetitive. I think this is somewhat true. Many times you have to play the same part of the game over and over again until you finally succeed and get to progress. Mega Drive games can be a bit more violent than Nintendo games. You can understand this by thinking about hockey games that have or do not have fights. If you also compare Mortal Kombat games released for these systems there are some clear differences. Sega’s version has more blood on it.

Let’s talk about the gamepad a bit. As you think about how the controller looks you realize that it definitely was designed to be an improvement of NES controller. I mean, just look at it! It’s completely round. NES controller is so edgy and simple compared to Sega’s. There are three buttons, a start button and an axis button – nothing else. This makes this controller simple and easy to use. Although in some games it would be nice to have some more buttons. There are of course some more advanced gamepads available and this is only the one that originally came with the console.

Mega Drive games are addictive. You can play it’s games for hours. That’s just about how long you can spend playing Mega Drive. I think PlayStation later made it possible and even preferable to play the same game for tens of hours and it’s sequel, PS2, took it even further to this direction. Playing Mega Drive can cause you some serious raging. I think this has to do with the repetitiveness. Mega Drive was in late 80s and early 90s very affordable if you compare it to for example PC. In those days you had to spend a fortune if you wanted to buy a personal computer.

Game & Watch – How Nintendo Got In to Video Game Business

Posted on by Viljami

I watched a video on YouTube about how Nintendo got the idea of producing original Game & Watch devices. I will link the video to the bottom of this blog post. That video inspired me to write this post.

You might not know what Nintendo Game & Watch device is. It reminds a calculator a bit. The idea was born when Gunpei Yokoi, the designer of Game & Watch, and later Game Boy, saw a man traveling in train. The man had a pocket calculator. He was looking very bored and seemed to tap randomly some numbers in his calculator.

Yokoi visioned that Game & Watch would be somewhat a tool to avoid boredom during for example long train trips. Nintendo needed some help to come up with a product like this. So, the design would rely strongly to the technology of pocket calculators. The device had a LCD screen. It was powered with batteries and it featured a D-Pad and some other buttons to control the game.

This was all accomplished in a world that wasn’t yet conquered by Nintendo Entertainment System. We had maybe some Atari 2600’s or something like that in our living rooms but the world and also Nintendo were very different from what it became in the 1980s later.

Game & Watch became very popular. There were several products released by Nintendo between years 1980 to 1991. Of course there was recently two Game & Watch consoles released. I got myself a Zelda one. The other Game & Watch had Super Mario games on it.

I can tell you a bit about my Zelda Game & Watch console. I think it cost about 70 euros. It came with Zelda games that were originally released for NES and Game Boy. It can be charged with a USB-C-cable and it has a good battery. You can see how the game can be controlled from the picture above this blog post.