Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: ps1

Why Am I a SEGA Person?

Posted on by Viljami

Sega was my key to this whole video gaming hobby. I think it was 1993 when I got my Sega Mega Drive. I played a lot of it. This was of course making me not to play so much NES, SNES and even later Nintendo 64 and GameCube. Lately I have tried to catch up on Nintendo’s retro stuff. I have even studied some Game Boy games.

Nothing created such a rage inside me than a Mega Drive game that I was trying to beat. You can say that Mega Drive games are a bit repetitive in their nature so you had to be perfect on a try and if you failed you had to start all over again until you eventually would run out of lives and after that continues. Yeah. We didn’t have lots of memory for saved games back then.

Sega also made me to be angry to my mates that were playing some Streets of Rage 2 with me in collaboration mode. It became aggresive so suddenly. As I was playing with my brother we had many arguments. We were told that we took the game too seriously. We were separated and we both couldn’t play Mega Drive for that day anymore. This made me think even when I was a small ten-year-old child. And I didn’t take it so seriously. There was just something about how Sega made players a bit frustrated. I think that is some of the appeal of this franchise.

After Sega my life with Nintendo’s gaming products was again pushed towards later times because it happened that I bought a Sony PlayStation in 1997. This of course made me distant also to Sega Saturn. I have only lately been again interested in it. As PlayStation had real 3D games I thought it would absolutely have so much more to offer compared to Saturn. This thinking has changed, maybe just this year, and I have been interested in Saturns games which aren’t actually so much 3D games but it has some very interesting titles that Sony doens’t have.

So these choices made me to play certain games. Today I understand that the variety of different and good or decent game titles are from many different consoles and every consoles have at least some good or decent games be it that many of the best games are released on certain systems. This makes me definitely interested in exclusives. And this interest hasn’t faded when it comes to modern consoles.

What I was essentially missing a lot as a child were mainly NES, SNES and Game Boy titles. Later I missed some Saturn titles and N64 and GameCube titles. I also didn’t ever get a Dreamcast. So what caught my attention was first Sega and then Sony. Did I follow Sony a lot? Maybe not. I never had a PS2. Can you think about this? I hardly can.

All in all we can say that there are for all of us these gaming consoles that brought us to the hobby or maybe to some to the profession. It is your own curiosity that makes you want to dig deep and try to discover some old games that you haven’t yet played. And this is also what makes video gaming interesting.

A Very Nice Hockey Game

Posted on by Viljami

You know how many sport games are, don’t you? The game stays almost like same and there is a release every year. So there aren’t big changes in the game every year. But something always changes if we compare these games closely or then compare a game that is ten years old to the most recent one. I thought that I would bring up a game from a bit over twenty years ago and tell all of you how it is as a hockey game.

There have been many good hockey games in the whole wide history of gaming. One of my favorites is NHL 94 for Mega Drive. I played also NHL 97 for PC for a while. NHL 94 was good but if you compare NHL 95, 96 or 97 to it you find that it’s basically the same game that is released for Mega Drive and there aren’t so many updates. NHL 97 for PC is offering already 3D graphics and the gameplay also has an appeal.

The latest hockey game that I got in my hands was NHL 2021 for PS4. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t get the difficulty level to something that would have been correct for me as a gamer. It was too easy and I scored almost everytime I made a shot and I won my opponent with ten goals every time or it was a bit too difficult and none of my shots would find their place. It was nice that the game had Patrik Laine and all other real and recent players in it. I couldn’t understand the gameplay completely.

I think many PS4 games have this issue that playing the game has been made a bit hard. I don’t know if this is a choice that has been made to make the games more appealing to eSport hobbyists and professionals. This can also be a thought only in my mind. You should definitely have your own opinion on this matter. There are propably games made for PS4 that are very playable and enjoyable. But in my opinion NHL 2021 isn’t a game that would inspire me a lot.

So why to play NHL 2000 for PlayStation 1? It’s appealing and inspiring game. You can definitely adjust the difficulty and I found that playing was the most enjoyable with second easiest difficulty level for me. I picked Mighty Ducks as my team since it had Teemu Selänne and also Paul Kariya. These both are fast players and their shot is very accurate. They both play in the first attack line of Anaheim.

As a hockey game NHL 2000 feels very nice to play. There is a lot of randomness. Situations change quickly. One of the best ways to score a goal is to have a breakaway. I have made lots of goals with Selänne or Kariya as they are fast. Another way to score is to give a pass and shoot the puck as a one-timer. It helps if you are closer to the goal and if you can make the goalie to move sideways there is a strong opportunity to score a goal.

One thing I hate about NHL 94 is that it offers only playoffs as a game mode. NHL 2000 has different kinds of seasons for you to pick. You can have a season of only a bit under 30 games, a season with about 60 games or a full season. Of course as is common you can adjust the play time and how often fights occur and also some other options for modifying rules of the game.

This is a hockey game for you if you don’t mind a bit retroish feel to the graphics and like fast, easy and enjoyable gameplay. There could maybe be more statistics, I don’t know. I am not the kind of a gamer that spends lots of time inspecting some deeper statistics  but it is nice to see how many goals the best scorer of my team has made, what is my goalies percentage of preventions or some other stats like this. This is definitely your game if you are into PS1 games all in all.

Some Games I Haven’t Had Time to Play

Posted on by Viljami

Here I introduce to you some games that I haven’t had time to play. I have made many purchases just the last year. There are many games that just keep piling on my shelf. And I mean that these are very good games. Some of them are old, but they are definitely gold. You could call them “retro”.

Take for example the first Grand Theft Auto that I have for Playstation 1. It’s a great game even with some retroish graphics on it. The concept was revolutionary. Basically you just run around completing missions, stealing and driving different cars and just getting points for destroying the environment.

I have to tell you something about GTA. It wasn’t at first meant to be the kind of a game it is. I think the developers were at first aiming for a regular driving game. In the midst of the development process someone had an idea and they actually changed the direction of gameplay completely.

That’s enough about GTA for this blog post. I have also some Xbox 360 titles here. I was curious about Condemned as it is a horror and I think it is a survival horror game. And I do like survival horror games. Take Resident Evil for example. I just love it!

Other Xbox 360 games in my list of the games I haven’t got time to play are Colin McRae Dirt 2, that is a solid and high quality rally game, and Rockstar’s legendary game Bully. Did you know that the idea for Bully came originally from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games. I think it was the third game, THPS 3, that featured this character that was actually called “Bully”. So, they built a whole new game around this idea.

I of course have some games for latest gaming consoles I have purchased. There is one Swithc game here on my list. It is Crash Bandicoot – It’s About Time that is the fourth game in this series. The first three games of this series were originally released for PS1. Sadly, I haven’t had time to play this one.

We have still four games that we haven’t dealt yet in this post. They are Xbox One or Xbox Series X games. Fallout 4 is definitely something that would demand my attention for tens or even hundreds of hours. I know it’s a fricking good game. Damn, I have to find time for it!

I recently bought Back 4 Blood for Xbox Series X. It got my attention when it was published. I was about to buy it then but another FPS came to my way. That was Call Of Duty Vanguard. I figured that I don’t want to get too games that are similar.

We have two games left. The first one is GTA – The Trilogy that has three GTA games on it. I wrote about how I made the decision to buy this game already in this blog in an earlier post. There also one big game that I haven’t had, once again, time to get into. That is Alien Isolation for Xbox One. It had actually a cheap price and I thought that it had some value for me as a game blogger and a gamer in general.

There you have it. The games I would like to play, the games I have to play. This is something to consider when browsing for new gaming purchases. Keep in mind what you already have and also that you won’t have time for every game.