Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: series

My Relationship to NBA 2K Series

Posted on by Viljami

I have played NBA 2K basketball games for a long time. The game I have played the most to this day is NBA 2K14. Since I have a background in playing real basketball I wanted to have a little fantasy on being a professional basketball player playing in NBA. I played in my youth six years in a competitive level and continued to play weekly for about a year after that. In NBA 2K14 I managed to max my abilities to a level of 99 and eventually won the championship with my team. I remember immediately stopping playing after I won the championship. I had played this game a lot. And that means also a lot in today’s standards. We are talking over 60 hours of playing here.

I have played NBA 2K with Switch Lite, PC, PS3 and PS4. When I first created a character from my fantasies I made it a point guard that was also able to shoot some three pointers. I definitely wanted the character to have good ball handling and passing skills and also to have some common cleverness on the court. I decided to make the player the same height as I am. That means he is six feet tall. So it’s just enough to play as a shooting guard or point guard.

As a sport game series NBA 2K has had a long run in releasing these games that have had a good quality. The game has evolved as the series has progressed. There has been a game released every year. I am a fan of this game series. That is definitely true. But I haven’t had the interest to buy this almost same game every year. So that’s why I don’t have every game that has been released in this series.

The latest NBA 2K game is a very good one. As I have read some reviews also I think other journalists or reviewers have had some issues with other content in this game besides the actual part of playing intensive basketball. Does the latest game try too much to be a game that has all kinds of features that aren’t actually needed? The players and teams are the current ones but that solely hardly is a good reason to buy the game. NBA has a solid and huge fan base even outside of North America. I mean that I’m from Finland and I still very much enjoy this game. And it’s good to see our own Lauri Markkanen in this game.

I have currently NBA 2K22 installed to my PC. My overall is now 92. I am playing the third season with Indiana Pacers. We have won 47 games this year already and we are strongly heading towards the playoffs. I think we have an opportunity to win the championship this season. I am currently at the top position inside the game when it comes to discussion about the Most Valuable Player or shortly MVP. I have enjoyed the game very much. I even ended up competing in the All-Stars slam dunk competition. This current character I am playing with is 6 feet and 5 inches tall. So I am playing as a small forward this time.

We are very likely going to see NBA 2K23 somewhere in the future. How long does this last? Will it be a good game also? Will you and I buy it? So many questions and so little time. We will find the answer some day. See you then!

What to Expect from Alan Wake 2

Posted on by Viljami

Remedy made it’s way to many gamer’s hearths with Max Payne trilogy. One good game by this company also is Alan Wake that was released in 2010 for Xbox 360 and PC. I managed to purchase this game for PC and it was some sort of collectors edition. I remember I bought it, as I have a habit to do, from clearance. It didn’t cost so much and I was very happy as this release came with some bonuses like soundtrack of the game and stickers and some fictive post cards that were supposedly sent from the location the game took place. I also bought for much less a used game for Xbox 360. I have also played this game through.

It is a good game. I enjoyed it. So it’s not surprising that Remedy has announced that it is working on a sequel. While survival horror keeps being popular the gamer’s are waiting for this new game now. Only a few months ago Alan Wake Remastered was released. So the product is a bit hyped already. There isn’t a release day announced yet. It might take until year 2023 for it to make its way to game shops and then to the hands of paying customers.

I have played many Remedy’s games and Max Payne one and two are my favorite ones. Alan Wake itself is something a bit different. While Max Payne brought you a shooting experience with “bullet time” and all this action and also it had a scheme inside it. And what makes me a fan of this game company is that it’s coming from Finland that happens to be my home country also.

Alan Wake is somewhat a horror game. A big part of the game is about using your flash light and surviving in this forest type of environment that reminds a bit of the forests here in Finland. The main character is a writer. You have to survive and get rid of these enemies that keep hunting you. These monsters hide in shadows and you can slow them down with some light. It took me over an hour to play it through. It was about two years ago that I finished Alan Wake. It would’ve been possible to play it again with a harder difficulty level or try to collect all items that are hidden in the game.

All in all Alan Wake is a steady and fresh brand of Remedy. You have to wait a bit more to see some game play video but there is a trailer somewhere in YouTube. I have heard some players talk about the new Alan Wake game and how it definitely needed a sequel. It took over ten years. We have to wait a bit to see exactly what kind of a game will it be. Will it be like the first game or will Remedy take to be more like traditional survival horror game like Silent Hill or Resident Evil.

Introduction to Halo

Posted on by Viljami

Halo was first released for the original Xbox back in 2001. It was also some years later released for PC. First person shooter fans had already seen some games of this genre released for consoles. As you can easily figure FPS games were first designed to be played with a keyboard and a mouse. Nintendo 64 already had a game or two that can be categorized to be first person shooters. One of these games is Golden Eye 007.

So Halo brought a strong feel of FPS gaming to the Xbox. I think it worked really well and I have enjoyed this game for a long time. The game play is structured so that it is easier to play with a controller of that generation of gaming consoles. You had to move with left thumb stick while you had to aim with the right thumb stick. You could fire with the shoulder button on the right. This was, for me especially, a strong and a positive experience as I had played Half Life and Return to Castle Wolfenstein with a PC setup using keyboard and mouse.

I have to say that I didn’t play Halo until it was about 2006 or so. As I have told in some of my earlier posts on this blog I had some other things going on in 2001. So I got my original Xbox in 2006 and it was about four years ago, 2017, when I started moving towards original Xbox again as I got all my games back from my brother and bought the console again from flea market for a very low price. My Xbox broke just last year. After that I have utilized my Xbox 360’s backward compatibility and I gladly found out that Halo and Halo 2 also work with the 360.

This blog post is named “introduction” because I wanted to introduce the game because it has it’s own and original game play that is a bit different from the FPS’s of it’s time. Also I just some days ago started to play Halo 5. You can start from whatever Halo you have available. I know that there’s a package sold in online stores for Xbox and PC that contains Halo’s first  four games. This four game compilation is called Master Chief Collection. There’s also the next Halo game soon to be released. I think it it’s release date is in December this year.

I have completed Halo 3. I am not sure if I have completed other Halo games totally but I do have tens or even hundreds of hours of experience from this great game series. It is possible to play Halo with your friends. The original Xbox enables up to four players to play with a shared screen and from the first game it was also possible to play online. This brought the hardware and design and features of the first Xbox to their maximum. That was basically how the game was designed.

Halo is a first person shooter. You have health level. If your health level drops to zero you die. After that you start from the last save point. The health increases back to maximum level when you stop receiving hits from shooting enemies for a long enough time. So there are no health packs at all. You have many different weapons. You have a limited amount of ammo. Some weapons are from enemies that are aliens so they also have a limitation that makes your can like burn in your hands if you fire too many rounds. When this happens you have to wait a while as your player regains the ability to shoot again. You have to change weapons often. Different weapons have different abilities. Some weapons have less ammo than others and some weapons shoot faster and some are more accurate to shoot with or have a way to zoom to the target that you are trying to shoot.

This is the basics. The weapons are very uniquely designed. I think you cannot find similar weapons in any other game released before the first Halo. Maybe the first Half Life is the most close to Halo if you want to think about games that are similar to it. I was very disappointed in the Half Life’s release for PS2. In my opinion the controls were horrible. This was corrected in Half Life 2 when it was released for Xbox later.

Halo has a certain science fiction feel to it. It has been for a long time one of the most popular games. It has been exclusive for Xbox for a number of game console generations. There is no end in sight. I am a big fan of Halo games. The controls made it easy and fun to play FPS games with Xbox. It helped to bring game pads to be used more and more in gaming in general. After Halo was released for consoles many other same kind of games followed it. I could name some titles that I liked but that list would maybe be too long for here. I know many PS3 and Xbox 360 games and also games for PS4 that have taken influence from Halo. The image you see as the featured image is a screenshot I took with my Xbox Series S from Halo 5.