Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: ps2

Xbox Series X Has a Nice Backwards Compatibility (But Far From Full)

Posted on by Viljami

My Xbox 360 has been suffering. It doesn’t read game discs anymore. Otherwise it is fully functional. I tried opening it a bit through the disc unit as was insturcted on an official guideline I found from internet. I read from the guide that you should first power the device off, remove all cables and then try to push the wheel of the disc unit so that it opens up a bit. This was instructed to do with paper clip that has been straightened. Then you should bloww some compressed air to it.

I did mangae to do this and it fixed the problem. I was able to start a game once again. Then some weeks went by. I wasn’t playing anything with my Xbox 360. I played my other game conmsoles. As you might know Xbox 360 has a backwards compatiblity with original Xbox games. 463 games out of all 996 published are backwards compatible. We can make a quick calculation and find out that this makes 46,5 % of all games that were published for original Xbox.

If you think about PS3 and PS4 and their backwards compatibility you can propably figure how differently Microsoft and Sony deal with this issue. PS4 wasn’t at any moment backwards compatible at all. This pissed off some people. You were able to play PS1 games on PS3. Some PS3 models you are able to play also PS2 games with. PS5 however has limited backwards compatibility for PS4 games.

Xbox Series X, the latest Xbox, is fully compatible with older Xbox consoles’s games. However every game is not supported. There are 63 original Xbox games out of 996 and 633 out of 2155 Xbox 360 games compatible with the latest Xbox console. Xbox Series S doesn’t even have a disc drive so apparently it doesn’t support older consoles’s game discs. All Xbox One games are compatible with Series X.

With this information available I decided to remove my oddly acting Xbox 360 from my current setup. This meant actually that I had to remove also tens of games from my lineup. I like to keep every game that I am able to play with any console in my setup in this huge shelf. I had to remove many Xbox and Xbox 360 games.

I have now only six original Xbox games left in that shelf. The picture related to this post shows my current games that I am able to play with my Xbox Series X. I didn’t count the games that I removed so carefully. I think I set aside maybe 70 games in total. I had to put games like Halo 1 and 2, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4 and many others to storage. These were games that I haven’t had time to get into thoroughly.

I would like to be able to play every game that has ever been released for any Xbox system. This is just the way that things go. You are updating your setup and getting into some new or retro consoles. You don’t actually play every game that you own. Some games and systems you just have to set aside at least for a while. Xbox 360 is an old gaming console. It was first released in 2005. I bought my Xbox 360 as a used copy. This was about six years ago. So maybe it was time for me to move on.

Games do get old. Systems do get old. There are many games that you just can’t play, buy or enjoy in any way no more. I think there should be something that could be done to this issue of great games just disappearing somewhere. We seem to be still moving so fast forward that we can easily completely forget a nice old game.

I don’t know the exact answer to this question. Will there be in the future some websites or collectins of old games. Are we going to be able to finally play these games with an emulator? Would it be nice to have a museum that could hold many old games? I know that there are already some websites that are dedicated to old Commodre 64 games. They have archived thousands of games which are also available as downloads.

There cetainly is some knowledge about gaming that also I as a gamer have been able to develop in myself. From the moment when I first gazed at a video game in some arcade I have been curious to find out more about games. I went as far as studying the field. I dreamed I would be able to make a game or something similar. And I think I am not alone with my knowledge and I think this is an interesting topic all in all.

PS2 Games That Are Still Worth Playing Today

Posted on by Viljami

I have many PS2 games. I wanted to pick some of these games that I do still enjoy playing. Here in this image there are three games. They are Gran Turismo 4, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and Resident Evil Code Veronica. Yesterday I wanted, first, play Gran Turismo 2 on my PS2. I’ve owned that game for a long time but haven’t had time to get into it. I even removed some saved games from my PS1 memory card. As soon as I started the game I just couldn’t stand these awkward 2000s PS1 graphics. It was too muddy for me. So, I turned to Gran Turismo 4.

I wrote about Gran Turismo 4 earlier. It is definitely a great game for someone that loves racing and cars even in a technical point of view. So I started playing. I finished A International license which opened up some new competitions for me. I also drove some races with one of my favorite cars – Dodge Viper. I really enjoy Gran Turismo 4. I have only completed a bit over 12 percentage of the game. I have to say it has been fun playing this game. Graphics aren’t as nice as in some newer games in Gran Turismo series.

“Which Gran Turismo is best?”, one might ask? I really enjoyed the first game in the series. That was of course over 20 years ago. I think there have been many improvements in graphics and also on some other perspectives also. I liked the sixth game and also enjoyed the latest that was Gran Turismo 7. I have played third and fifth but I didn’t like them so much. This is of course my opinion and you can think however you want. All in all it is a great and realistic racing game series.

What about these two other games? There certainly isn’t a debate about if THPS 3 is a good game. I think I heard someone mentioning that it is among one of the best games of all time. That isn’t a light statement. It might be the best THPS game ever released. First Tony Hawk Pro Skater was and is a good game. The second comes very close but I think there isn’t a game in this series that can really beat the third THPS game. The graphics were as good as can be. They were definitely better than the graphics of the first two THPS games that were released for PS1.

Why did I pick Resident Evil Code Veronica? It’s just this traditional style of Resident Evil game with some upgraded and good looking graphics. It is still a traditional RE game and not something that we would play in first person view on a more modern hardware. It might be the last traditional survival horror game in this series of great games. Maybe there is something reminding me of those times in some Resident Evil Revelations games that were more recently released.

I am not satisfied about every PS2 game that I have acquired. I have recently bought Forbidden Siren, Ecco the Dolphin and Ratchet & Clank. Guess what? I didn’t really get into those. I just hadn’t enough time to learn to play them well. Also I am a bit sad about how PS2 games look on my 4K television. I know I should get a decent HDMI converter but I don’t know if it would make my mind any easier. Dual Shock 2 controller hardly makes things any easier for me, also.

There are some verry good games for PS2 that you might want to play even today. I am not so sure if you should get this system. I think it is also possible to play these games as emulation. There is so much about PS2 that I love. But there is also a lot about it that I hate. I never had PS2 when it was the latest system. It reminds me of an era of the past. It reminds me of watching movies as DVDs. Is that an experience I don’t want to forget?

It might be a time for me to move on and enjoy more about modern games. I have PS4, Nintendo Switch, PC and Xbox Series X. PS2 might still remain as a system that I play sometimes. I just think it isn’t worth spending days on. It did enable a break for me in my streak of playing NBA2K23. NBA is just basketball and if you know anything about me and basketball you will understand why it keeps getting my interest so heavily. Did you see just a week ago as Finland played against Lithuania in Tampere. Did you see Lauri Markkanen? He is that Finnish basketball player that really made an impact on that game that was played. There were 13 000 people watching the game at the stadium.

The Biggest Differences Between PS2 and PS3

Posted on by Viljami

I’ve played, maybe the last month or so, mainly PS3 and PS2 games. PS2 was released in 2000 and PS3 was in stores 2007 (in Europe). Between these seven years we saw a very strong development and advancement in technical aspects when it comes to video game consoles and the technology they use. Not only did these newer games look better. They also felt better. So also the way that games were made, how the menus felt like and looked like and how controls felt like advanced. I am going to now dive deeply into these differences between these two very popular video game consoles.

PS2 sold more than PS3. There were 153 million units sold of PS2 while PS3 sold 80 million units. I had to look up these numbers and they are only directional. While looking at only the sales numbers you cannot truly determine which one of these two consoles is better. And I think I am not going to go into this debate of which one would be better. We are going to just find out how things developed and how these two individual consoles differ from each other.

First of all we have to consider how PS3s technology is more advanced than PS2s. PS3 had a hard drive. My hard drive can hold 320 GB. There were different models and they differed from each other a bit. One PS3 model was also backwards compatible with PS2 games. All PS3 models had backwards compatibility to PS1 games. PS2 didn’t have a hard drive and you had to have a memory card for saved games. This memory card had 8 MB of space. We have also seen memory cards as big as 128 MB also. I just have had some bad experiences of these third party memory cards and I have had my saved game data corrupted. I haven’t had any problems with Sony’s own memory cards.

While PS2 could handle already some pretty neat 3D models PS3 was way more powerful when it comes to 3D models and the ability to display graphics. You can firmly figure the difference between the sharpness of the picture that these two consoles provided if you think that PS2 had a solid DVD support while PS3 had a support for Bluray discs. There were some technical aspects related to this graphical matter but I am not going to go so deeply into it.

Hardware in PS3 was in every other way more powerful. We are talking about several tens of times. It was a very big technical advancement. How were controllers different? With PS2 you had a very nice controller. It was connected with the same type of connector that was used with the first PlayStation. PS3 had a wireless controller. You could, like I always do, connect it with a wire so you wouldn’t run out of battery at all. PS3 had USB connectivity also. The wireless connection was established with Bluetooth technology. The names of these controllers were Dual Shock 2 and Dual Shock 3. They look very same when you look at them. By the way, I have lately been playing my PS3 with that controller that is also in the featured image of this blog post. It is Spartan Oplon and it is also compatible with PC.

What about the backwards compatibility of these two consoles? Sony was already making their policy of backwards compatibility with their decision to not support PS2 games on PS3. As you might know PS4 didn’t have a backwards compatibility at all. So even PS3 games couldn’t be played with PS4. Today, also you might know, PS5 supports also games of PS4. I am not going to talk about Xbox backwards compatibility here. It is more wide but it also has its flaws. As an issue backwards compatibility is technical and complex. I must say that emulation has advanced lately. This is nice as you can achieve a very good emulation of PS2 and also today PS3.

I think you cannot strictly say if one of these two consoles is better. Neither was it my point right here in this blog post. If this blog post that I am writing has some deeper level (as my writings sometimes have) it could be that the technology of video games made a huge step between the release of these two video game systems. I have concluded here some main points for you to think about. I have to also mention one more point. Where game design and gameplay come these were also advancing quickly between 2000 and 2007. We saw some steep advancements in this area also. Actually this advancement was so huge that it makes me think that games have come a long way. And I like PS3 games. Heck. I might like them even more than PS2 games.