Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: ps2

Some Valuable Games I Own

Posted on by Viljami

I own some valuable games. I had to check some web shops prices and also some actual price charts to see how much value these games actually have. It seems to be that every one of these three games is sold for a bit over 100 euros currently. They might individually cost as much as 130 euros. If I could get 300 euros for selling these three games it has to be a difficult decision to make. I like all these games. I also haven’t really had the opportunity to play them through properly. So, if you ask me, I am not going to sell them.

How much did I pay for these valuable games? I remember buying Silent Hill 3 for 15 euros back in 2016. It has been ten years and now the price is sky high. I do remember buying Alice – Madness Returns as a new game for something like 60 euros. The price has nearly doubled. You know I had to get Splatterhouse for PS3 (I love Splatterhouse 2 on Mega Drive). I don’t actually remember if it cost me 40 or 60 euros as a new game. Price chart tells me that the copy is now worth 140 euros. This is the price of a set that holds the manual and is in good condition in overall.

Of course these prices cannot be compared directly. You have to consider some inflation. All of these games have been in my collection for a decent while already. I have bought the PS3 games that are present here maybe 15 years ago or something like that. Silent Hill 3 for PS2 was bought after I got myself a PS2 and started to collect also for PS2. I rarely simply collect games. I do buy them because I want to play them. After I have played a game through I might want to keep it in my collection. Also, I have a huge “backlog” and there are tens of games that I just haven’t yet had time to get into.

The point here might be that you never know how valuable your collectible items actually are. You have to check and see the prices that these games are currently being sold. “Who buys all these games today for such a high price” one might ask. I think the answer is simply collectors. Game collecting is a very common hobby today. People are drawn to games since they were in touch with video games since childhood.

I have to admit that I am a bit surprised about this high price that my valuable games actually now have. It seems to be a good example of a case of when early bird actually does get the worm. But as you might already have figured out – I am not doing this for money. It feels nice that something like my video game collection does have a value in money. However this is a somewhat a hard value. So, I think for now I am going to hold on to my valuable games.

I remember how frustrated I was maybe ten years ago when I was just starting to get into some PS1 gaming again. The value of my old and now already sold game collection of PS1 games would have had a huge value in money also. I sold my PS1 console, memory cards (I think I had two of them) and all my games (this means maybe 30 games in total) and also two controllers for only maybe 120 euros. They were worth so much more in money or in some other way also.

I am concluding this blog post with some reasonable thoughts. I don’t remember who said it but there is a common saying related to this matter. It goes something like this: “Money can’t buy love”. This is what I am thinking about. If I get money working then I get to spend my money the way I like. But I don’t really like to sell something that has a deeper value to me personally. That, I think, is something that money really cannot buy.

My Latest Game Purchase

Posted on by Viljami

My latest game purchase, that I collected from the mail locker just yesterday, includes two PS2 games and four PS3 games. I bought Midnight Club 3 – DUB Edition (PS2), Sonic Heroes (PS2), Bayonetta (PS3), Spiderman 3 (PS3), Aliens vs. Predator (PS3) and Need for Speed – Most Wanted (PS3). They did cost me 109 euros with shipping included. I am waiting to have a chance to get into these new purchases. I am going to have to knock on wood while I’m saying that I am glad that my PS3 still works. It has served already over 16 years in my video game setup. I have faced some issues with hardware earlier. I have two broken PS2 consoles, a broken original Xbox and also an Xbox 360 console that doesn’t work.

Somehow these consoles don’t seem to last forever. I am also not so good at maintaining or repairing stuff like these consoles. I think they actually aren’t even meant to last for tens of years. That is the main reason why I am trusting more and more on emulation. So, I am going to rip these two PS2 games that I just bought and play them with an emulator. I have two different devices that I am running emulation on. One is a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM. It is running Recalbox. I use it to emulate mainly Sega Mega Drive, SNES, NES, PS1 and also some more exciting consoles while I use another device (a desktop PC) that runs Batocera to play PS2 and some other consoles that require a bit more power.

So, there are two racing games included with my latest game purchase. Midnight Club 3 is a classic racing game. There is really no words necessary for the introduction of a game that belongs to Need for Speed series of video games. This title is labled with “Most Wanted”. It think it will be eventually a good game that might take some hours to get into. Usually I have somewhat liked almost every Need for Speed game that I’ve played.

Why did I pick up Bayonetta? I heard a word or two about it as I was reading a book that desrcibes different video game characters. Bayonetta is a strong female character and it seemed an interesting game and I wanted to purhcase it. I am going to try to find some time to get into this game. I also bought Sonic Heroes because Sonic games just rock. I also bought Spiderman 3. I think there are very few bad games that feature Spiderman. So, why not give it a try. The last game in my latest game purhcase that I haven’t yet mention in this paragraph of this blog post is Aliens vs. Predator. It must be a decent first person shooter.

I made this purchase because I found these games interesting. The price was also cheap. I mean I got these six games for a price lower than what it would have been for two new games. Actually I think you couldn’t buy two new games with 110 euros. It might be possible if the games wouldn’t be brand new releases. I am content with yhis game purchase. I am waiting to get to enjoy also these new games.

I have been lately still playing Gran Turismo 3. It takes some time to finish it. I have spent already over 15 hours on playing GT3. The game might take a bit over 40 hours to finish. Also I have a confession to make. I haven’t, yet dived into plaiyng the new Resident Evil game Resident Evil Requiem. I have read that it is a very good game. I am waiting to get into playing it also soon.

Some Features of Optical Discs

Posted on by Viljami

Some time, not so long ago, we used to use optical discs way more and in a different way compared to how it is today. I have recently been playing lots of PS2 games using an emulator. I have these PS2 games in their original form. That is on these game discs. That copy of Metal Gear Solid 2 also has a documentary film also on another DVD. DVDs aren’t also so popular anymore. We are used to streaming our video content. If you prefer physical copies you can buy movies on Bluray or 4K.

Some things have changed. We do buy games, sometimes, as physical copies on optical discs. When we do we use the disc to install the game. Part of the installation process is handled through internet connection. Back in the days, in the early 2000s, we had game consoles like PS2 and GameCube. They utilized optical discs in a different way.

If we inspect our PS2 video game console we can see that it doesn’t have a hard drive at all. So games are basically on optical discs. It is the disc that holds almost all the data. There are memory cards used that can store the save files. These memory cards could hold only 8 MB of storage. GameCube is very much like PS2 in this way. It did handle smaller optical discs and it also had to use memory cards. Lets mention Dreamcast here, also.

What about the original Xbox? It actually had a hard drive. This makes playing a game like Max Payne a bit more of a pleasure since loading games from same save spot can make the game very repetitive. That’s why I find playing Max Payne on the original Xbox than on a PS2 console my preferred way to enjoy Remedy Entertainments masterpiece more enjoyable. I think it is best played on PC. But you probably get the point here.

So, the games were played from DVDs. This made the disc very valuable. If it had a scratch the game would stop playing. Sometimes the console you were playing on did break so that you couldn’t play it anymore since it couldn’t read optical discs anymore at all. There are ways to fix consoles, all right, but just let me say this. I have found it way more pleasurable to install an emulation system on a PC with a dedicaded operating system and just ripping my PS2 games to some .iso-files and playing them again and again, fully functioning, from a fast SSD hard drive. You basically have to rip your PS2s BIOS and also the games to enjoy gaming this way. After all it is very easy to rip a PS2 game. You just have to use an external DVD drive and some software application, like ImgBurn, that is also freely available.

We have went through lots of changes. The gaming has evolved a lot. If you think that we used to have games taking some space, like 4,7 GB. We are actually now in a place where a game can definitely take tens, or even several tens, of times the space we were used to back in the days. We went from large HDDs to SSDs. We went from slow internet connections to modern and very fast connections offered while using Steam or Xbox Store or some other web service. This makes me wonder where do we go next.

Today hard drives are faster and can hold even more space than they already used to. I have for example two 2 TB SSDs on my personal desktop computer. That is enough to hold some games. You don’t have to install every game you buy because you probably don’t play tens of games at the same time. There are more games available than ever. You probably play something from three to six games at a time. When you think that you don’t want to focus on a game you can uninstall it and keep your save files and continue playing after some time when you think that you want to install the game again.

We are actually doing something reasonal with buying games as digital copies. We are reducing the amount of carbage in this world. You can debate on that DVDs, these opticla discs, are something that you can hold on to for several tens, maybe even hundreds, of years. Buying a video game console or a PC without an optical disc drive is becoming also popular. You can save some money.

There are many facts here that you can debate on. In my opinion there are just facts against facts. There is no right or wrong answer. In this blog post I told you my perspective on optical discs and how and what they used to be compared to what is the situation right now. You can make your own opinions based on everything I have said here. I am going to enjoy some more time with Gran Turismo 4 since I started playing it again. I have played it for well over 18 hours. I think it takes over 70 hours to complete. I have lots of playing to do.