Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: older 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 Are Some Reasons to Play Older Games?

Posted on by Viljami

First it has to be said that there are many reasons to play also older, or to use the right term, retro games. In this blog post I am going to explain and give some reasons that I and many others still play so to say old games. While there are many reasons to still play these games there are also reasons to play the newest games instead.

There are many things that have advanced in gaming technology. Happenings are processed more quickly since there is more memory to be used. Also, we have seen larger games. They contain more details. They have more complex scenery. These worlds offer even larger areas to be explored. The artificial intelligence of other characters than the main character has been improving.

This of course has a huge effect on what is actually happening while a player plays a video game. The game processes more data. The input of the player is analyzed more thoroughly. Some old games offer some nice game design solutions and today many game developers can make use of what was already designed in a game maybe even thirty or forty years ago. While technology has advanced also we have to remember some of these good solutions that old games had and still have.

One reason to go back to older games is of course the nostalgic feel that you get while playing a game that you have some memories with. You clearly remember the first time you started playing a game. You get the first reaction that you had and it reminds you of the feel that you had back then. The game hasn’t changed but your situation does have. The last time I had this kind of feeling was while I was playing Sonic Origins Plus. I got caught into nostalgic feel when I started playing the first Sonic The Hedgehog game. It was a huge game and also a huge character for Sega, The year that I first played this game was, I think, 1993. It brings back so many memories.

What about the way that we get to play retro games? It is a huge advantage to older game if it is easy to play it. I am talking of course about the importance of backwards compatibility. I have this way that I organize all my games. I keep these games in these two shelves that I am actually able to play with any console I have. I keep my other games in a storage. I do this because I think it is not so reasonable to keep games visible that I am not even able to play. Sometimes I like to demonstrate a game for someone visiting our home and sometimes a visitor picks up some game that he or she would like to play. And of course I myself can pick any game that I would like to play.

If you want to play retro games you have two different ways to do it. These ways are using original hardware or using an emulator. There has been a lot of conversation about emulation. I am not going to talk about so much of is emulating even legal or anything else like that. Lets just say that it is an option. Some think it is totally illegal and in a way it is. On the other hand preserving older games can be very valuable. After all we have to some way keep in touch with our video game history.

I have many gaming consoles in my setup. One part of my gaming setup has been already for some years these cool mini consoles. There have been mini consoles available for devices like PlayStation 1, NES, SNES and Mega Drive along with systems like C-64. You could of course just download an emulator for your PC and play these games but… Is it legit or legal? After all you are paying for something very interesting and valuable right here. The problem is that there just isn’t a mini console available made from all gaming systems. For example we are currently missing original Xbox and Sega Dreamcast mini console.

We talk on and on about what is the right way to play our retro games. I think the most important issue is that there has to be a connection between the old world of video games and the new world of video games. We have to somehow document our past. There are just so many games that game designers can take influences from. I think that it is a value for a game designer to know a lot about games. Of course if you know good games you can also design good games, right? You know the logic and what appeals to gamers.

Think about John Romero, one of makers of the classic FPS game, Doom. I mean, he started with playing old games in arcades. He played hundreds of hours of Pacman. He also had influences from Dungeons and Dragons, NES, SNES and Mega Drive games. And look what id Software did with Doom. It definitely revolutionized the way that we consume video games even today. Some games of this same era are Diablo and NHL 94.

So, it might not be possible to play every retro game. Do we have what it takes to document our video game history? Who has the power and responsibility to pass on these important lessons to our younger generation that doesn’t recognize all these older games? There can definitely be something to learn form them. While modern systems have the most power they also need the design. That’s where older games come into play.