Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: racing

All PS3 Racing Games (That I Own)

Posted on by Viljami

Today I started first playing a game for PlayStation 3. This game was Castlevania – Lords of Shadow. I played for some time. I had an idea of a new blog post about some of my favorite games for PS3. I thought about racing games because these are my favorite type of games. I remember many good games that can be said to be in this category.

First I thought that I would like to introduce all my driving games for PS3. I started picking up these games. Suddenly I understood that there were many titles that weren’t so good. I didn’t spend time with them so much. Some titles I had bought from flee markets and I haven’t played them at all. So there is a wide variety of games introduced here. I decided to write a paragraph of every driving or racing game that I currently own. So, here we go.

First in this pile of racing games is Test Drive Unlimited 2. I remember that I was excited about this game when I first got it. Test Drive is a classic and retro type of a game that was released for PC back in the day. However, I didn’t enjoy this game so much. I was actually a bit short of money and I thought twice about even buying this game.

Next we have Dirt 3. It is the third game in a series of Colin McRae Rally Dirt games. This is a very good rally game. I played it for so many hours. I also got my first experience of a setup that I used a racing wheel and pedals. This game I can definitely recommend.

Then there’s Ridge Racer 7. I am sorry for the picture is a bit dark and I can actually barely see the title of the game in this picture. This game is more of an arcade racing game but don’t let that fool you. There’s lots of stuff in there if you play this game. The feel of driving is very different than in any other racing game.

Need for Speed – Undercover is one these games that I’ve found from flee market. Actually I think I have never even launched this game with my PS3. I think it is a typical NFS game that get released so so often. So I don’t have a much to say about this.

Gran Turismo 5 is the first Gran Turismo game that was released for PS3. I played this for some time but I didn’t like it that much. It is a decent game but I think Gran Turismo 6 and 7 are better and of course Gran Turismo 4 might be the best out of all games in the series.

Colin McRae Dirt is a very nice rally game. I think Dirt 3 is still better. I just liked it more. Dirt 3 has also a very nice soundtrack. There is also a second Dirt game for PS3 but I only have it for Xbox 360 and not for PS3.

I really liked Burnout 3 Takedown. So I was anxious to buy this new Burnout game back in the day. And this game was Burnout Paradise. It has a funny soundtrack. That’s where the title of the game comes from. It had a huge open world of diffeerent kinds of roads and goals. I didn’t play this game so much.

Need for Speed Shift is a game that I was practically addicted to back in 2010 and 2011 when this game was actually the best racing, at least in my opinion, game that was available. Very nice game. In can definitely recommend this one if you like this genre.

F1 2011 was sort of an update to F1 2010. I never played this game. I didn’t buy it when it was actually first released. I got it many years later from flee market for very cheap price. Might be a good game. I don’t have anything more to say about it. Maybe I have some day time to get into it. Well, there are some newer F1 titles available so I will probably not.

This is a bit longer post than what I usually write. But it’s a nice subject. So, lets move on to the next game of this pile of racing games. And it is Shift 2 Unleashed. It is a sequel to the first Shift game. I found this game to be very enjoyable. And you can figure why I went and bought this sequel. Because I of course liked the first game so much.

F1 2010 begun a series of high quality F1 games. It was a decent game. I just didn’t play it all the way through. It offers a variety of difficulty. I tried this game also with wheel and pedals. This is a nice game. I can recommend it if you are into this genre and platform.

Last, and maybe the least, heh, is a game titled Formula One – Championship Edition. I think this cost me three euros. So, what the heck…why wouldn’t I pick this up. I remember that the disc was in a decent condition. Otherwise I wouldn’t have bought this one. And…I never have played this game.

There you go. We just went through all racing games for PS3 that I currently own. And, I almost forgot one game. That is Gran Turismo 6. I just played this recently so it wasn’t directly on my shelf. It is a very good game and you should play it.

One Nice Retro Rally Game

Posted on by Viljami

Yesterday, after a typical working day, I found myself playing, again, this classic rally game. The game is titled Rally Trophy. It was released in 2001 only for Microsoft Windows . So, this means it can be played with a PC that has Windows. I did buy this game back in the day. I don’t think it’s available anymore. And I don’t know if it’s really necessary to buy it. I of course have it in my PC game collection and I even have it as an actual physical game disc.

This game was brought to us, gamer persons, by a Finnish game company named Bugbear. I remember when I get to realize back in the day that this game was actually developed in my home country. I made a search through internet and found the e-mail address of the company. I was excited but I don’t remember did I actually send them any e-mail message or not. There were some game companies here in Finland and I felt this need to be a game designer even back when I was only a teenager going to high school. So, I don’t remember if I did or did not send them my resume when I was looking for a job later in my life. I did send an application to Remedy and that I can remember clearly.

Not so many people have the actual skill to work as a game developer. Be it a programmer or a 3D modeler or maybe even a software tester. You have to have some experience under your belt and some projects that you can show your skills with. Today there are lots of people that have just been graduated and cannot find a job anywhere. They will end up to getting any job that they can get. And that’s the way it goes. But not back in 2001 when some very skillful game programmers could show their level of skill. I think many people got their skills back in the 80s and with a Commodore 64. It was a way to get to know the hardware and also the software.

Rally Trophy is a nice driving game. It isn’t actually an arcade type of a game. Although the driving technique isn’t hard to learn it is a bit different if you compare it to some other driving game of this particular era. There are some vehicles for you to choose from. I took a Ford mainly because it was the most powerful one. It has a horse power of 140. The driving means in this game very much trying to keep your speed above 100 km per hour all the time. There’s not a lot room for braking or accelerating. Somehow I still find this driving style satisfying. It brings a unique feel to this game.

I played this game with a Windows 10 PC and with my Xbox One Elite controller. I had to run some patches and also a fix to get this game to work. I was actually able to configure my game pad after all. The game has a maximum resolution of 1920×1080. I think that graphics of this game still look very nice. A bit retro styled but nice. It was at first hard to try to play the game. I banged my head with these first four stages of the first rally for maybe two hours. That was yesterday. Today I started playing again. I played for some time and I managed to finish every rally in the top six and the season ended and I placed third in the season.

There are some cars to unlock but I didn’t care to figure out further how to do this. I think this was it for me for this game. If you wish to play this classic there is some information available if you do a search on your favorite search engine. I also advice to go to a website named My Abandonware where you can find lots of games including the one I was just writing to you about.

Is Gran Turismo 4 The Greatest Racing Game of All Time?

Posted on by Viljami

Although I have still not finished Resident Evil Village I picked up Gran Turismo 4. I have thought about playing GT4 for a while now. It is said to be maybe the best game in the series and it is definitely a very good racing game. It is definitely the best racing game for PlayStation 2.

Another very good racing and actually a rally game of this era is Richard Burns Rally. It was for propably a decade the most realistic racing simulation to be found. It was released also for PC and original Xbox while Gran Turismo 4 was released for PlayStation 2 with exclusive righs. Richard Burns Rally lost its spot as the best rally simulator since there were newer games released in this genre. I can mention titles like Dirt Rally and its sequel Dirt Rally 2.0 just to name some games.

I am playing GT4 with a game pad. The game supports also many tpyes of driving wheels. It would be nice to play it this way. I do have a driving wheel  but I am too lazy to try to learn using it. I would also like to have a decent driving chair. I currently don’t have one. But the game supports driving wheels and why not pedals also.

In Gran Turismo 4 you start with no license and also no car. You have only 10 000 credits. I started with getting a driving license. The first license and also the easiest to get is B license. There are several other driving licenses that give you access to competititons.

You have to upgrade your car if you wish to get some credits. Then you can upgrade your car more and maybe after a while you get a new more powerful car. Sometimes the game gets a bit repetitive because you have to compete in same chllenge for many times to get enough credits so you can make some progress. This can be dull at times.

Gran Turismo 4 has hundreds of cars. Getting a good car can be hard at times. You have to buy some upgrades to get to fiddle with your cars settings. The first thing I got to adjust was the transmission. You can set your car to have a high maximum speed with a lower acceleration level or the other way around. So, you can also make your car accelerate fast which then lowers the maximum speed. This can be handy in tracks that have lots of slow corners and not so much straights.

Graphics are a bit dated. Controls defnitely aren’t. There could be more decent music tracks in the soundtrack. I am talking about these nice tracks that we had in the first Gran Turismo. If you are thinking if you should return to the first game we can consider that if you haven’t played Gran Turismo 1 or 4 at all I think the fourth game would be a good way to start getting into Gran Turismo. I also liked very much the latest game of this series, Gran Turismo 7, that was released last year for PS4 and PS5.