Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: ps5

Trying to Beat Ghost of Tsushima (PS4)

Posted on by Viljami

I have recently spent some hours playing Ghost of Tsushima on PS4. This game is actually a PlayStation exclusive game. It is also available for PC through Steam. Ghost of Tsushima was originally released in 2021. There is also a “Director’s Cut” version available that is a bit newer release.

To this day I haven’t bought PS5. This wasn’t actually a decision from me. I just happened to pick Xbox Series X instead of PS5. I have thought about buying a PS5 but really haven’t. And now when game console prices are very high I don’t feel like spending hundreds of euros to buy another console. And of course I have to say that I don’t have any room left in my gaming setup for a PS5.

So, I am playing some video games still on my PS4. Ghost of Tsushima is a great PS4 game. I have some games that I would very much like to play on PS4 but haven’t just had enough time. I have played Ghost of Tsushima for about 17 hours. The game takes about 25 hours to beat. It didn’t cost a whole lot. I bought it for 20 euros as a used copy from a local gaming shop.

I have been thinking about a topic that I would very much like to write some more about. That topic is buying and selling used video games. I think that at here in Finland we have a bit under ten gaming web shops that have been functional for several years. There is clearly a market here for used video games. I have thought about writing a whole blog post about this. I would also like to write about abandonware and copyrights. Maybe I’ll write a post about this later. Lets see and find out.

While Ghost of Tsushima offers some challenge it isn’t a brutally difficult game to play. There are also some difficulty adjustments that can give you some challenge if you need some. Also I think there is some replay value here if you want to play the game through with a higher difficulty level over again after you have beaten the game on a lower difficulty level. The story is very nice to follow. Also the scenery and the characters are interesting and can keep you concentrated while you advance through the game.

I did buy my PS4 back in 2014. I have to give some props for Sony for releasing such a good quality gaming console. I haven’t had any issues with the console. I did upgrade the storage HDD from a 500 GB to 2 TB HDD back in the day. I had to make this upgrade since 500 GB is such a low space for video games today. This operation was easy. I really don’t remember how much this HDD did cost. It wasn’t an expensive upgrade after all.

So, Ghost of Tsushima offers you melee and also some ranged fighting action. You also get to take down enemies in a sort of a stealth mode. There is a lot of strategy to consider in this game. The main character keeps getting some upgrades and you can unlock some special moves while you keep progressing in the game. The story is also an interesting one. You actually appear in this game as a samurai soldier. So, there are also some dialogs and you even have to make some choices while having these conversations between the characters.

I would prefer playing this game with a PS5 instead of a PS4. I prefer also playing video games from a sharp television screen while sitting on a sofa instead of sitting really close to the screen playing on a table of some sort. I am talking about PC gaming and that I don’t like it as much as console gaming. This can be a matter of taste and not so much something that I would like to have a debate on.

I have bought some more games. I hope to be able, soon, to write some more about my achievements in this matter. I am still waiting to get my hands on the new Onimusha gmae that was released last Friday. The new Metal Gear collection is also waiting for me on the list of what to play next. See you in another blog post. Lets hope that this will be sometime soon!

Old School Rally

Posted on by Viljami

Old School Rally is something for you if you like games like Colin McRae Rally and Colin McRae Rally 2.0 that were originally published for the first PlayStation. The driving feel is very much like in those classic retro games. You get actually to control your rally car using just your plain original gamepad. This seemed to be the norm way back. The gamers actually didn’t have so many driving wheels and pedals. The graphics weren’t as realsitic but yet these games just had something special in them.

I bought my copy of Old School Rally for Nintendo Switch for a bit over 30 euros. It think the precise price was 32 euros. It is a physical copy. The game is also available for PS5 also as a physical game and also for Steam as, of course, a digital copy of the game. With this same purchase I bought Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection. I tried briefly also this compilation of some earlier Mortal Kombat games. It was fun to play the first MK game like it was meant to be played in an Arcade. I got as far as trying to beat Goro. Then I had to give up for that session. Maybe I’ll try again later.

Old School Rally is really nice to play if you are familiar with CMR PS1 games. There are some differences. The cars aren’t official ones. They are fictive manufacturers and models. You also don’t get to fiddle with car settings actually at all. The damage that the car takes does affect the controllability of the car. If you damage your car greatly the driving becomes more difficult although not impossible. Car has breaking and steering functions although I don’t get to see under the hood so much and I think it isn’t actually required. My notes here are based solely on plaiyng this game. I haven’t seen the source code. This isn’t an open source release after all.

Breaking seems to be the critical fact when it comes to how you can handle your car. It isn’t, in my opinion, as accurate as was with CMR games. You also don’t get to fix how the breaks work. Other abilities of the car are the ability to accelerate and also the highest speed you can reach. Also, there aren’t any other competitors. There isn’t a series to compete in. Instead you get a record time that you have to beat on each stage.

Graphics are a bit fuzzy but I think they work just fine considering the clear comparison to CMR games. Actually, if you think about it, the CMR games are already almost 30 years old. This fact brings for me and also for a lot of other older gamers a huge amount of nostalgia. There is actually a lot to play in Old School Rally. I did spent over ten hours playing the campaign of this rally game. The How Long To Beat website states that it takes eight hours to finish Old School Rally.

I could share some tips for a beginner. Try not to completely wreck your car. Try to break in time with the corners. Don’t break too late or too slightly. Figure out which car to buy or not to buy. If you totally wreck your car during a stage consider retiring from the event and starting over. You can easily end up with a broken car trying to desperately beat the record time. This can be almost impossible. At times I found myself in this loop of repeating a stage. The driving is in Old School Rally more difficult with a broken car.

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.