Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: old games

Thousands of Games – How to Choose What to Play?

Posted on by Viljami

There are thousands of games, new and retro, out there. How can you even try to choose which ones are worth your while? We are going to go through this matter in this blog post. I am trying to give you some perspective once again. This fact has been in my mind lately. I just recently got to see one particular game that was somewhat interesting. It was a NES game and it was a Turtles game also. The game was “Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles 2 – The Arcade Game”.

I started playing. I figured that many Turtles games, especially some of them from that 16-bit era, are really nice games. This was a game from the 8-bit era. When you are playing video games on a NES you’ll always get these limited options on how to control the main character in the game since there are only so few buttons. This seems to be the baseline when you are playing NES. There’s nothing new here. Nintendo actually corrected this matter with their release of SNES.

But what I realized was that the game was actually a bad one. I didn’t feel like trying to even think about trying to beat it. You only get to try to hit an enemy and jump with also some movement involved and that’s how the game tries to build up a challenge. The graphics are poor and while music is nice for a NES game it cannot compete with some games like this on some newer systems. I stopped playing the game, I had spent maybe half an hour playing it.

This is the reality. Every game that has been released isn’t going to be a good game. You do want to think about what games you are going to be playing. Finishing a video game does take usually ten hours or maybe even some tens of hours. Some games can give you hundreds of hours of time to play. I have spent several hundreds of hours playing NBA 2K games. Also if you are into role-playing-games you get to spent almost certainly some hundred hours while playing them. How do you make the choice of what to play after you finish a game? Does every game have to be a great one if you are going to play it for a long period of time?

We can approach this matter in a certain way. There have been thousands of games released since the beginning of the era of video games. There have been many games available in arcades. Also home consoles and personal computers have lots of games. If there are thousands of games how many of them are still today good choices to choose a game that you actually want to play? You can try to find some games that are appreciated in the gaming community. This includes games that have received good reviews and games that are recommended to you by other gamers. Maybe they are your friends online or in real life.

What about “hidden gems”. There are some games that aren’t so well known but are still offering you some value if you choose to play a game like this. These games can also be recommended by someone. Also you can by yourself try to find games that interest you. This is where it comes as a handy fact that games almost always have a genre of some kind that you can think about while trying to choose what to play. You can be interested in a genre and find a new game to play.

How many games are there actually? First matter that comes to my mind is that PS1 and PS2 have both over 10 000 games in their game library. I think NES has maybe 900 games. Sega Mega Drive has about 1000 games in its game library. There is a huge amount of games available for PC and also for any modern game console. This amount of games is also increasing all the time. You get a sense of this fact that there are loads of games available.

I don’t really know how many good games there are out there. I mean those games that really are going to interest you so that you want to try to beat them. If we think about NES and all of those games that were released for it I think there are just maybe from 10 to 20 games that can actually give you a nice experience in the year 2026. Of course it depends on what games you like to play. Also you have to remember the nostalgia. Games that you played in your days of your youth can bring you joy if you decide that you still want to play them.

Older games aren’t necessarily games that you should play. In overall they are poorer in graphics, audio matters and also in their basic design. Sometimes it is better to choose a remake of the game. This can offer improvements in many ways. Older systems do offer nostalgia and some perspective of how games used to be. Just be a bit cautious when considering about getting into some of these games.

What Is Abandonware?

Posted on by Viljami

Have you heard about abandonware? Does it actually mean that you can just copy abandonware and can it be in some way profitable for the original developer of the game? In this blog post we are trying to get a thorough answer to these questions.

There are many websites that provide some old games that you can download and install them to your PC. Many games are or can be played on a modern personal computer with a modern operating system. There are games also available for emulators. Some games require a special software application like DOSBox. So it is possibly to play old DOS games with a new PC.

The case of abandonware concerns console game and computer games. Some game companies, like Nintendo, like to stick with their old copyrights and try to ban and make copying old, or retro, games totally illegal. They are acting like this even when clearly there is not a clear option for them to collect a price for this kind of a game that is already some tens of years old.

Some companies publsih remakes. Some companies totally abandon their game. This is where the term gets its true meaning from. What then means public domain? Could games be released in public domain? This means that you could re-publish a game of this kind and even take some parts of the game and make a new game out of it with paying nothing for the original developer.

What would it mean if we had all old games in a public domain? We wouldn’t have to pay for our retro games. There would be more websites sharing these games. There would be a lot of exploration and even research done by playing these games and getting to understand their content.

There are many games currently classified as abvandonware right now. You can find a deeply involved website titled “My Abandonware” that provides ten of thousands of games for you to download. You can download games like Silent Hill 2 or Need For Speed Most Wanted for free. If there is a game that is currently in any form commercially avaialble this is mentioned and it isn’t possible to download it as a free copy but there might be a demo version available.

I have written here in this blog earlier that we are having difficulties of maintaining and keeping old games, I am talking about games that are 20 years old or even older than that, available. Are we supposed to just forget these games? I thinkthey have high value even if nobody has a way to buy them.

What should we do? Should we make every 20 year old game totall free? Should we allow some other parties to make more good remakes out of all these old games? Could large companies like Nintendo provide more opportunities to buy and maintain a collection of old and retro games?

We are having this business that is very profitable for game shops. You buy a physical copy of an old game and the price is very high. You keep the game for years. Of course you have the original gaming system. But what happens when the game gets so old and the divece you are playing on has become broken? Do we just delete this stuff and move on? I think we should think more about maintaining old games and trying to remember also in the future what they are all about.

Basically a game ends up as abandonware because the original owner of this game doesn’t find a way to make the game somehow profitable again. Every game can be profitable when it gets released. After many years the owner doesn’t care about the game and so it becomes abandsonware. There is an issue also with the copyright. It is hard to make a remake out of a gaem that is abandonware. This is why public domain would be a consideration.

Concentrating More To Modern and Recent Instead of Retro Video Games

Posted on by Viljami

I have lots of games already for my Xbox Series X. The backlog is getting a bit heavy. I have given a though to my habit and hobby of collecting games. I started getting into retro games back in 2016. Since then prices of games that can be categorized as retro games has risen seriously. I have witnessed these prices to go up with games ending up 3 times more expensive than what they used to be.

Why has this happened one might start to figure. One thing about this issue is the rising popularity of collecting and playing video games. Both types of games are popular if we think about modern and retro. Modern games can be produced and delivered to almost as many players as there is a demand for. While we have witnessed some cases of games being produced too many for consumers to buy, I mean for example the ET Atari 2600 game, that the manufacturers have been left with several unsold copies in their hands. I think today this isn’t a big problem as also many customers buy their games as digital editions.

The people that used to play video games in the 80s and 90s are coming to an age that they have a bit more currency to spend to their dear hobby. Did you notice how quickly classic and mini consoles were completely sold out. The demand was huge. These are same consumers that are buying today most of games that are sold through different forms of delivery. Some are sold in digital stores that are available for players of PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo or PC.

Also it seems to be a common way to think that retro games should be bought instead of just downloading them and playing them directly on a gamers personal computer. There are of course many ways to achieve the emulation for these systems. People are spending lots of money to get their hands on some retro consoles. Some games are also very expensive. I have collided in some very heavy prices when I have gone through a gaming web shop. It seems like every interesting game has now got a double or even triple of a price compared to what these prices were back when I started collecting games.

There should be more options. There should be more devices that support older games or retro games. There should be ways to play these games on recent systems. We are in an era in which people are becoming a bit more technically knowledgeable than these last generations that were more into to games than into technology. Especially I see the 90s, maybe my generation, as a time that more players wanted to just play games instead of programming their own applications. You can think about how consumers of electronics were like back in the 70s or 80s. Things have changed a lot and are still constantly changing.

So it isn’t a thing for a young person and a hobbyist to build up a gaming system. At first you might want to buy a PC. Then you will need an operating system for it. I would prefer Lakka OS but there are also more options. So, this is a Linux operating system. It isn’t, today, legal to just download games as ROM files. You have to own the game that you download. That seems to be the rule of thumb here. While there are ways to convert your existing games to rom files I think this has been made too hard for an average consumer.

One option would be to make some or even all old games available to digital game shops. This has been already accomplished. Some retro games are sold and some you can get to play if you have an account that you have registered and payed for. Is this enough for gamers? I think there are ways to keep playing the most important games that exist but there should be more discussion on this issue. We might some day face a problem that we cannot play every game that we would like to. I think some games are just too big, important and interesting to just be left out of our options about what game to play next.

My point here is, my dear reader, that I have thought about these matters and I have decided to play mainly recently released games. I don’t yet know how long I am going to keep this up. Maybe til the end of year or something like that. I just think I have spent lots of money in retro games that aren’t bringing me actually anything worth experiencing as a video game addict. Games that I do play, have been playing and will keep playing from now on are especially these recent titles. I do have also an interest towards Xbox One games since they are backward compatible with Series X. I have played NBA2K23, Diablo IV and Far Cry 6. NBA2K23 seems to take forever to be even near of a completion of the game. So, there is a lot to play for me.

I am also waiting and looking to get FFXVI for my Series X. It is, to my knowledge, appearing to the Xbox store in December of this year. I also have a Nintendo Switch that is also my second newest gaming console after Series X. I am not finding PS4 so interesting at the moment. I kind of skipped Hogwarts Legacy. The next game I am waiting to get to play is probably Forza Motorsport. I don’t know if I am ready to play some Starfield. It is an interesting new game from developers of Skyrim. It is going to be released 6th of September this year.