Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: psx

Some Undisputed Classics Released Again

Posted on by Viljami

There is no excuse for not knowing what these two amazing titles are: Asteroids and Space Invaders. These two games were very popular firstly in arcades back in the late 70s and early 80s. They were published by Activision and were later ported to consoles like Atari 2600.

You can only admire the quality of game design. As these games were meant to be played on machines that weren’t so powerful you had this certain style that you had to apply to the game. Another good game of that era is Arkanoid. Also Pong has to be mentioned here.

These games had only this one screen where the whole game took place. There were no scrolling screens like we could see later on in games like Nintendos Super Mario Bros, which came out a a bit later. There were also not so many colors as graphical capability was limited. I propably don’t have to mention anything about sound effects, music or audio at all. They were meaningless.

These games are classics. In twenty years designing games goes some steps further. This is unavoidable. The first PlayStation was capable of producing some very high quality graphics already. So it is comfortable to say that these games deserved to be re-made to a more modern system.

I bought these games for my PS1. I thought they are a fun addittion to my video game collection. They offer some re-designed graphics, sound effects, music and also methods to control the objects in the game.

The idea behind Asteroids is that you have a space ship that can shoot. Your mission is to cut a huge rock, asteroid, to small pieces by shooting it. You can turn your ship to any direction, like 360 degrees and give your ship a boost so it moves. It keeps moving, since we are in space, there is no gravity, to the direction that it has had a boost to unless you turn your ship to another direction and give it a boost again. The game ends if you hit a piece of an asteroid. You get to next level if you succeed in shooting the asteroid to tiny bits.

The other game here in this picture is Space Invaders. In this game you face a group of aliens. Your mission is to shoot all of them. So this is definitely a shooter. An alien disappears when you shoot it. You start from the bottom of the screen. You have some obstacles that you can use for cover if you like. Enemies keep moving towards you step by step. You win the level if you can shoot every alien enemy and you lose if they reach the botttom of the screen.

These games are not so expensive. I thought they were a fun addition to my collection. You can probably get one these like under 20 euros from your favorite retro game dealer. These kinds of classic games are an important part of gaming history. You can probably also find copios of these released for even newer systems. You can also try them out if you an emulator. I don’t know if it is possible to play these games’s original arcade version but maybe this would be possible in some kind of a gaming museum.

Also if you are into programming it could be a nice idea for a project to program a clone of Asteroids for example. You could use maybe JavaScript with some image editing software or something like that. Just keep in mind that while these games seem simple there is a lot going on in them and it isn’t an easy task to just remake one.

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.

The Original PlayStation Controller

Posted on by Viljami

So I bought Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2 about a week ago. I was going to play it with the PSOne console that I’ve had for about five years already. I got my PSOne from a flee market for a low price of fifteen euros. It has worked since the day I bought it. I’ve had no issues.

I had a cheap accessory controller for PSOne. I figured that I would need a gamepad that would be more accurate and that would feel better. I first checked some prices of DualShock controllers. DualShock 1, which was for PS1 originally, was sold for about 25 euros. I found DualShock 2 and it would cost from 35 to 40 euros. As you might already know DualShock 2 was the original controller for PS2.

I have a PS2 console also. It is currently broken. It was finally not able to read any of my game discs. I still have about fifty or sixty games for PS2. So I still have some controllers. I just didn’t yet know or remember if they were in a reasonable shape and could I use them with my PSOne.

As you might also know PS2 was backwards compatible with controllers of PS1. So these controllers work with PS1 and PS2 and of course PSOne can use also them. You can play PS1 games also with PS2. And to mention also PS3 can be used to play them.

Unfortunately my only DualShock 2 controller was a  bit broken. It had been for many years in storage. It didn’t fully recognize a press to the right on the controller. I had another controller which wasn’t original one. It felt a bit wack also. I had to buy a new Dual Shock 2. I thought it was worth it.

Only a week had gone since I had ordered my fresh and cool skateboarding game. I made a new order to the same store one more time. I just had to buy also some other games. I might write something about them later. I have tested the controller and it works very nice.