Gremlins 2 (NES) – Some Notes About Gameplay

Gremlins 2 – The New Batch is a very neat Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES for short, game. In this game you control the main character, Gizmo. I am not going to go over the movies plot or setting. If you haven’t seen Gremlins 1 or 2 yet I think you should really watch them especially if you’re really into 1980s and 1990s entertainment.

As with any NES game the controller is a lot more simpler compared to a modern gaming console. You have directional buttons, select and start button and A button and B button. This is of course very logical and clear to anyone familiar with NES. I am mentioning these because I think that Gremlins 2 makes great use of the controller. The movement of the main character is very fluent in every way. As fluent as in a retro game like this can be.

The movement consists of directions (up, down, left, right), jumping and shooting. When you press the jump button Gizmo is up in the air for a short moment. You have to try to time your movement and jump so that you actually get over a gap in the game. This takes a while to learn but is very essential in the actual gameplay.

There are a total of 5 levels in this game. It can take several hours for the player to finish the game. The amount of continues isn’t limited in any way so you can continue to play as long as you wish. You get a password when you loose your life and you get to this menu where you can choose to continue to play or quit playing. At the end of the level 1-2 you get a better weapon that deals more damage and shoots a bit further. It is difficult to move to any other direction than directly to up or down or left or right but this is also possible in this game.

There are some clever strategies in Gremlins 2 that you can utilize to try to succeed better in playing the game. When you fall off the edge you get a chance to float around with a balloon. This way you can move freely over enemies or gaps until the balloon wears off and you fall to the ground. You have three hearths of health. When you get hit with an enemy you loose a half of a hearth. So, you can get hit six times after you loose your life and have to start from the beginning of the level. After getting hit you are “immortal” for a while and you should take advantage of this to progress more efficiently.

Sometimes enemies move in directions that are random. Try to figure where and how the enemy is moving and then shoot it to destroy it. Collect pearls that you get from defeated enemies. You get to go to a shop at times in the game and you can buy more lives, health or upgrades to weapons. Write down the password each time you die in a level.

Graphics and animation, also in the cut scenes, are very adorable for a game that was released in 1990. I am currently in level 2-2 out of the total 5 levels that the game ultimately has. There are many different enemies in the game that have you to think about different kinds of strategies. This is a very good NES game that I can recommend for every NES fan. I have the actual, real, physical copy of the game that I do play on my Retro Trio console. The game is a bit cheaper when it comes to its price. It can be bought from a game shop (here in Finland) for about 30 euros. You can probably get it cheaper if you buy from some private individual or from flea market of some sort as is usual with older, retro type of, video games like this.

A Tiny Book Review

I have just finally got my copy of the latest Call of Duty game called Black Ops 6. I am excited about this. But…I have to write to you about another thing just before I start to get into playing some Black Ops 6 on my Xbox Series X. The game is installing right now so I have some time here to tell you about a book that I just completely read to the final page today.

The book that we are dealing here is named Armada. It is the second book that has been written by a novelist that goes by the name Ernest Cline. Of course you might have heard of his first book Ready Player One. There was a movie made based on the book. There have been some more books written by Cline later in his career (books like Ready Player Two).

I got this book free from my local library. They were handing out some older books so they can make some newer releases available and to be borrowed. I have read Cline’s first book and I thought it was okay. It is a bit “nerdy” even in my own somewhat nerdy considerations. It was a fun read. It featured many associations to well-known computer and video games including some references to music artists and also movies. The Atari 2600 gets a special valuation in the book.

This book is not only a science fiction book. It is something that might be an interesting way to spend some free time for a gamer. I liked this more than I did like Ready Player One. The story has somewhat more situations that feel very exciting to the reader. There aren’t as many awkward moments in my opinion. Of course there are some embarrassing moments between Zack, the main character of the book, and his father.

The book has a bit over 350 pages. So, it isn’t a long book to read. I got mine as a Finnish translation. If you speak English I think you find this book in English very easily. There must be translations to many other languages also. The book was originally published in 2015.

What Makes You a Good Video Game Player?

What it takes to be a good video game player? You can be a professional level player or a casually playing person. Anyways we are going to go through some matters that can make you a better video game player. There has been a lot of talk about the limits of aged people and how you cannot be an eSports star if you are over 27 years old. This does have an impact but the matter is more complicated than this at least in my opinion.

You can be a single player gamer or you can be playing multiplayer games. Many of these points that we are dealing in this blog post have an impact on both of these ways of playing video games. Lets start to go through these facts right now.

You can have a long history in video games. This makes you familiar with all the games you have played in your whole lifetime. You might not have such good reflexes but you might just have developed very deep skills in some game or genre of games. When you are good at say FPS games you can be successful just by concentrating well.

Sometimes games do require a proper controller. Yuo might need a racing wheel and pedals or maybe you need a mouse and a keyboard to play some video game. Having skills in using this special controller can give you an edge. I have noticed that some people can have difficulties using a game-pad if they are used to using keyboard and a mouse. I have actually the opposite problem – I am not so good as a video game player when I don’t use a game-pad.

Concentration and tiredness have an impact on how you perform as a video game player. At least for your health you should make sure that you sleep enough and have some exercise at times. Also you can keep in mind that your concentration doesn’t last for unlmited time so you have to take breaks so you can have a better concentration level.

Being young has a positive impact on your performance as a video game player. You have better reflexes. You learn quicker. When you start playing young you are probably a master in many ways when you become a bit older. I also learned a lot of English when I was playing some PlayStation and PC games when I was a teenager. I am actually from Finland.

Being a quick learner gives your performance a boost. Also knowledge of technology can give you an advantage. You can know some programming or some other sort of computer science knowledge. I have noticed that even when the game is not totally an open source game I do notice some things here and there that can give me an advantage.

Cheating is of course something that you can use if nothing else works. This gives you same kind of an advantage like if some sport competitionist would use doping. It kind of takes the point out of competing. Creating cheats for a game can be also technically intereting as is also making any mods out of a video game that already exists.

You can also understand a lot about games and the platform, or the console, that you are playing with. Remember also that there is an element of luck also. Many things in video games are totally random. This makes you sometimes have to try to play your run in a game over again. This can be annoying and can make the experience just a bit repetetive.

I Read a Lot

I have to make it clear – I like reading and I read a lot. This hobby that I have might not be so popular at this moment in our history and in our society right now. I have read tens of books during the last years. I actually don’t have any statistics to back this up. I only have this pile of books that is showed in the featured image of this blog post. I have read all of them.

I have this habit of putting a book that I have read to a pile. I have many piles like this. I also have a pile of books in my home that I haven’t yet started to read. I read one book at a time. Sometimes I abandon the book I am reading but this is not so usual as I can find many topics interesting  to me. These kind of rules help me to grasp on this hobby. At times I feel a bit amazed of how large these piles are.

“Why do I enjoy reading?”, one might ask. I have always been an introvert. This was apparent all the way through my childhood. I liked drawing. I stayed home for hours drawing. When I was seven years old I learned to read. I was nine years old when I started learning English in school. At first I read books written in Finnish. Lately I have picked up some books that were written in English. I have thought about also reading a book written in French or Swedish since I have studied both of them.

I haven’t really counted how many books I have read. I can make some conclusions. During my four week vacation I read four books. That makes one book per week. I don’t normally read at a pace this fast. The time I do spend reading is depending very much on what else I have to do. This includes working, cleaning the house and things like that. Also, my other freetime hobbies take up some time.

Some topics I am interested in when it comes to books are technology, future, science, physics, space, video games (of course), programming, computers, philosophy and phychology. I do read also fictive books (like that book written by Dan Brown that you can find form the image featured on this blog post).

I just wanted to impress this side of my life also. I read a lot. Currently I am reading a book about Linux and its creator Linus Torvalds. The book is titled “Kapinakoodi” that means “Rebel Code”. The book is a bit old but the topic is fascinating.

Reasons to Keep Playing

As I was growing up video games really made me feel like a hero. There was this combination right in front of my eyes of technology and excitement that made my imagination go wild. I remember how graphics looked like and in my mind they are hugely exaggerated. I can understand this today when I look at any NES game that I witnessed back then. My mind plays tricks on me and I just can’t make it stop even if I wanted.

Of course there has to be a balance in life in overall. You don’t want to play all your life as you don’t also want to be working or studying all the time. You have to keep yourself exercising enough and eating well so you stay healthy and also live a good life. There are many sides to life. And there are so many things you can do.

What brought me to gaming was the technology and also the entertainment that it offered. While I was a kid I started to learn things also in school. I was good in mathematics. When I was maybe nine or ten I figured that I wanted to be an engineer. They had to utilize mathematics to develop technical devices. Soon I found out how video games basically were made. They were constructed with a programming language. There are many other things about how games are made also, like generating graphics, composing music and sound effects among many other things, but this programming stuff seemed interesting to me at that moment.

So I am a kid that is good at maths and likes to play video games. Video games are made with a programming language. This is what made me to think that I would like to create games. I wanted to be able to create all these amazing worlds and characters and plots and schemes that I had stumbled on while I was playing video games. This is what sparked my mind and made me feel interested towards mathematics and computer science.

Now that I have already some knowledge of programming I can say that it necessarily doesn’t require a high level of understanding of mathematics. You can definitely start programming even if you are bad at maths. I have to say that nowadays there are many tools for you if you don’t like writing code. There are many game development engines that you can use. And there are also many other areas in game development besides pure programming.

How can games develop you? You definitely get some training with your motor skills. You get this sense of how what you are doing with your hands is affecting what you are seeing ans that is happening in front of your eyes. Of course when you are young your motors are stronger and keep developing faster than when you are older. You are watching something that is happening. This develops your visual sense and even your three-dimensional comprehension. When you are young these skills that I mentioned are fast to develop.

I also have to say that I learned a lot of English from playing video games. You are right now reading this text that I have written fully in English. I am a native speaker of Finnish. I have learned English in school and in my spare time reading and writing and to some extent even speaking. I haven’t studied or worked in any other country besides my home country. So, this is how I got started with my English. I am still trying to learn it today. No one is perfect.

Games are also very entertaining. When PlayStation was released it took only some years for video games to become also popular amongst young adults. Today people of every age are playing. There is just so much more that games can offer when compared to music, books or movies. I am not saying that games are better. I think they are different.

Can you learn programming through playing video games? I think you can learn some game design but you don’t directly learn it with playing. You need to study some programming to actually get to a level that you can achieve something as technically challenging as making a whole video game. Knowing how to program can give you some deep insight of how games are working. I have learned to understand more about games and what happens in the code and see it also while I am playing.

There are some reasons to not to spend all of your time playing video games. There are also other things in life besides games. You definitely have to keep doing your work or keep studying. You have to take some responsibility. You also have to eat and exercise to keep yourself happy and healthy. You can in a way be addicted to playing games. This addiction is very different from a drug addiction that deals more with a chemical addiction. If you can’t do anything else in your life you can actually be addicted also to games. Basically you are then addicted to your own habits and you might need to prioritize your life again. And I know that very few people are actually addicted to video games. There are way more people understanding the balance in life than there are people addicted to gaming.

There was a story about a guy that played a video game for several moths continuously. What happened to him is very sad. He lost his wife, job and basically all of other things in life that he had. This is what can happen. But I must stress that this is very rare and people tend to understand everything that they have in life and they want to maintain their physical and mental health,

If you are feeling that you have had enough of video games you can try to center your focus on to some other things. You can read a good book. Go do some exercise. Have a nice conversation with someone you like or someone you love. Watch a movie or a series. Do some work or study and don’t forget to eat and do it also as healthy as you can.

What Creates The Passion Towards Video Games?

The question that I am trying to answer in this blog post is, as the title says, “what is the key in any video game” and “what makes you so attracted to it”. There is this certain simplicity. The video game that you love to play creates the rules, gives you short term and long term goals and then you start figuring out how you could beat the game. I have noticed that the older I get the more I tend to find some sort of a strategy when I play a video game.

I find this topic very interesting and I am hoping to keep you reading and also interested in this topic also. Please, I beg you, hit me with some feedback right away, if my text feels too boring or too plain. Just let me know if this is the case. You can send me feedback to my email or message on Instagram. I always consider seriously any feedback you want to give.

Lets get back to the matter of fact that I was starting to explain right here. I think what appeals in any game is these rules and different strategies you can have. I think games somehow reflect reality. They also offer a way for the player to interact strongly. This is something so much more than what books, music or movies can provide as a way to entertain the person that is consuming the entertainment.

There have existed games for many thousand years. People have played foot ball. For how long has for example chess existed? So, there certainly is something in playing a game that makes us attracted to it.

What makes a video game a very good one? For me the attraction forms deeply because I have always been around computers. You have heard of this if you have been paying attention to this blog. I was four years old as I got my first experiences of personal computers. Anything you could do  with that thing made me eager to learn more. This lead to me one day programming a piece of text based adventure game. I didn’t even realize what I had achieved. Basically I just made some “IF…THEN” clauses and made the user make some choices in the game. I used QBasic.

The technology is certainly attractive. I guess we are naturally attracted to things that seem to simplify and help us in our routines. Computer as a word is very descriptive. That’s what it does. It “computes”. There are many parts in a computer. Maybe the most important form of use for a computer is making difficult calculations fast and faster than a human ever could.

Another approach to this matter is what this guy called Steve Jobs, a man that had a very keen vision, always, was talking about. He said that computers are bicycles for minds. He meant as a way that a bicycle gives you more speed also computer adds up your own mathematical or creative performance. The computer enhances your ability to make solutions. You don’t even have to be a programmer to witness this fact. I think applications like image manipulation software or some software sequencer for music production or even a real time strategy game can enhance your way of thinking a lot.

With computers we have used to being able to solve something. It can be a puzzle in a game, a strategy for a driving or shooting game that can make you successful. In my current job I solve users problems. This is closely connected to the technology that can be used. Problems vary a bit. In any ways knowing about technology makes you a savvier user of a computer and also as a video game player.

If you are looking this posts featured image you can find some consoles that I currently have in my setup. I wanted to makes the picture a bit gloomy so I turned off the lights and turned on that LED light that resonates with the wall behind it. This makes the whole room look very cool. And cool is good in the summer time. The consoles I have right here are, from left to right and up to down, Mega Drive Mini, Nintendo Switch, Retro Trio, PS3, PS2, Nintendo GameCube and Xbox 360. I also have on top of this shelf my Xbox Series X. It isn’t visible on this picture. I also have some other consoles in storage. The ones I named are the ones that I can use instantly. I also use PC for gaming. It’s located in my home studio or working spot or home office, whatever you like to call it.

That light on the back of the shelf is a stripe of LED lights. I bought it from Myyrmäki some years ago. That shelf is from IKEA. It is actually a bookshelf but I use it for this purpose. I can recommend it for a truly enthusiastic gamer. There are also some bigger shelf available but I like this one. It is maybe a bit too high to be a TV stand. But it is a decent choice if you have to fit something like eight video game consoles on it.

I think this is enough for this blog post. I hope you got some new ideas. I hope you’ll like this post. I might write longer blog posts since it might be nicer for the reader. I write every time I get a good idea for a blog post. It might be about a game that is about to be released, some other news type of subject, a game that I have been attracted to lately or some other subjec that I am interested in. It is very warm at the moment here in Finland. It’s a nice weather all in all. I am hoping to go swimming and as Finnish people say “throw away my winter fur”. This is a very nice matter. And right now this blog posts word count is a bit over 1000 words. I think I am going to stop here…

 

Pro Controller for Nintendo Switch

I got myself a Pro Controller for Nintendo Switch. I first played with joycons and then got a cheap wired controller but since I wanted to get the best possible gamepad and not pay too much of it I made my decision. The controller cost 70 euros. I also bought Grand Theft Auto 2 for PlayStation. I got my package just some hours ago.

I connected my new controller to my Switch with a cable that was included. It isn’t a long one. It takes six hours for the battery to charge fully. The controller feels nice. You don’t have to worry about hitting accidentially these trigger buttons that my old controller had. It was a bit frustrating to have those buttons and they were only making things difficult. I kept pushing them for a long time but got used to them a bit. I didn’t find them to be practical.

So this is a licensed Nintendo Switch product. Even if it’s already 2022 Nintendo keeps assuring the quality of devices produced for its hardware. This was one of those actions that led to video gaming becoming popular again back in the 1980s after Atari effed up almost everything. If you don’t know what I am talking about we can make it clear. I am talking about the video game recession that happened because there were too many games released and a lot of them were of poor quality. You can probably once again use your favorite search engine to find information about this.

I am going to try this controller after it has charged fully. How do I like Nintendo Switch compared to Xbox Series X or PC (those are the only “new” game consoles I have)? The screen resolution isn’t comfortable in Switch. There are however lots of games released for it that aren’t released on any other console. I really like Switch because it enables playing in handheld mode. I have regretted about buying Switch lite two years ago. Currently I don’t have use for it.

There is just something charismatic in Nintendos whole brand. I mean that this is the company that brought us Nintendo  Entertainment System some decades ago. Nintendo Switch was released in 2017. It has been almost six years now. There have been rumours already about the new Nintendo console. While we are still not ready to see it there is always a possibility for a gamer to get a Switch. Currently available are Switch, Switch OLED that has a price tag that is a bit higher and of course there is Switch Lite that works only in handheld mode and cannot be connected to a televeision but is also much cheaper.

Why would you buy a Nintendo device? Because it keeps amazing us gamers. There are always new games released for new gamers and also for those that have been Nintendo fans for several tens of years. I highly recommend Nintendo to all those players that want to know more about video games.

That Certain Randomness

There is this certain randomness in video games. There is fast learning involved especially when you start playing some game. Games are usually easy to pick up but hard to master. That gives you a feeling that you want to play this game some more. You learn a lot. How much does your skill develop when you are playing? It seems to develop a lot. That isn’t although the only thing your success in playing the game depends. It also has a lot to do with good luck. We can name this element “certain randomness”.

This idea became clear to me as I was one day playing again Need For Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered. I had to catch at least 5 racers as a police officer. The task seemed hard. I kept failing and failing. After trying as hard as I could I got lucky. There were several bad guys captured. It didn’t have so much to do with my skills as it had to do with pure luck.

You might be familiar with randomness in programming. While it is debatable if the random number generated is actually random or not there is a nice way to generate a random number between certain values that can be defined in almost every programming language. At least this is possible in Java and Python. How I first got to know this type of numerical behavior was as I had to deal with a Java application that had to generate a value of a dice getting tossed. You basically had to generate a number between one and six and do it as randomly as possible so that it would describe in the source code how a dice would act in real life.

If you know anything about dices and how are they used in games like Yatzy or some roleplaying game you can figure that their role is to create this random feature that gives you a nice feel when you are playing. It gives you an element of luck. For example if dice gives you 1, 2 or 3 your hit of axe has hit and if it gives you 4,5 or 6 you have missed. You can also define the enemy’s body part that was hit and define the amount of damage caused. A common way to use dices in board games is how many times you can move your character. You get to move the character the amount of times that the dices value is showing.

Playing video games is not only about your skills or your reaction time. It would be very boring to play games that only required skill and would have nothing to do with luck. But if everything in a game is random that isn’t satisfying also. Take poker for example. It is nice to play a game or two of poker. Would you play poker for three hours? Would you enjoy the game if there were no money involved? Of course the answer to these two questions are both “no”. Poker is such a game of luck, isn’t it?

I think the best games are the games that mix randomness smoothly to the skills needed to succeed. If you succeed all the time doing exactly the same thing it gets quickly boring. You want challenge. And you want some surprises. Nowadays video games are getting more complex. This makes things more interesting to us players and I think for also game designers. While you can mix things up by making them abstract and random you always don’t even have to. That’s because games are more complicated than this. You can watch the statistics, like how many kills you have in a shooting game, and make these figures random but in this case the number of kills depends also about the players skills and this forms the players performance. Some things can be simple and random while others can just be thought to be like that.

Anyways. Thanks for reading, again! I am going to continue to have my couple days of since it’s the mid summer party here in Finland. I am probably going to play, make music and read some books. We already had a small meeting with a friend. I have also something more to tell you about our game that we hope to have for sale soon. See you next time!

Gaming Has Evolved

I have been playing video games all my life. It all began in the 1980s. I first played some PC games on our family’s computer that was running some version of MS-DOS. I really can’t remember it so clearly but I played games like Bubble Bobble and Leisure Suit Larry. These gaming session were a bit short as a young boy was starting to get attracted to gaming. And games were different in those days.

I took another step in my path to being a gamer that I am today. It was probably 1993 as I got a Sega Mega Drive. This was something different. I had played some NES games with my friends. Now I had a 16-bit gaming console. The first game I played on it was Sonic The Hedgehog. It came with the system. I remember playing it and some other games for some hours. I maybe played for three hours. I never played longer than that.

Gaming was progressing but it was still mostly considered to be something for children. If there were some older people playing Sega or Nintendo they were considered to be a bit childish. And that’s how games were back then. They were mainly targeted for not so mature audience. What would you think? We had a plumber collecting mushrooms to become larger and a blue hedgehog that was running really fast. But there were some role playing, fighting and sports games that were going to make some adults gamers too.

I was beginning to mature. And so did video games. It was around 1997 when I got a PlayStation 1. It was the first gaming console that also a bit older people would play. It made way for gaming as a hobby for a person of any age. There were no limits anymore. You could find your friends father playing video games. And it wasn’t even that awkward. Not anymore. How exactly were games now different? They had much more to give for gamers. There was action. But there was also a sharp detail of graphics. 3D modeling brought better experience. Games also had a story that would keep you entertained for long period of time.

I played longer sessions with my PlayStation than I did with any other console earlier in my life. I remember playing Diablo for six hours one week end as I was a young boy. So the time I could spend playing had doubled. I remember that I had at least 20 games for PS1. It might have had even 30 games. I had beat most of them. I think I spend maybe 20 hours for a game. That’s a lot of playing video games for a young person. This was actually nothing if you think about how much time beating a video game today might take. To make a comparison I can tell you that I have recently played Diablo II Resurrected for almost 50 hours and Gran Turismo 7 for 30 hours. And I haven’t finished them yet.

You can have gaming as your hobby. You can also spend a lot of time playing games. There are several devices that you can play games on. There are gaming consoles, mobile devices, handheld consoles and computers. If you are good in playing video games there are things today like eSports that can transform your gaming hobby to being a professional competitive gamer. If you like gaming you can do like I do and write to a blog or even to some gaming magazine about games. So you can become a game journalist. If you are interested in the technical side of video games you can try to become a game developer or game programmer. You can even be a game designer that doesn’t even program. There are lots of roles in gaming industry if you want to make your hobby also a profession.

Gaming has really evolved. I started getting into gaming as a young kid back in the 80s. I grew up playing games. It has been a hobby for me for a very long time. On my path I have seen how games have become more realistic and the audience has grown and it has also become more diverse. Now everyone can play. It doesn’t matter that you are old. It doesn’t matter what gender you are. Everyone can play video games today. And that’s one great thing to keep in mind.

Some Thoughts About Writing This Blog

May it be a blog post or some other form of text it is clear that I enjoy writing. This is not the first blog that I have set up but this is definitely to this day the most popular. I first came up with the idea of this blog when I read very interesting book about blogging. The book was “The Million Dollar Blog” that is written by Natasha Courtenay-Smith.

My goal at first wasn’t to get money or anything like that. The first priority was to write about something that interests me very much. I am from Finland. I had to make a decision about in what language I would write to the blog. I finally decided to write in English. I thought it would make my blog international and I thought I would get more visits. I also figured out that I could practice writing in English this way.

Writing a blog is a nice hobby. I don’t have any big plans. I just want to write an interesting blog post at least once a week. Sometimes I write more and some times a bit less. I think this is a topic that I have knowledge about. If you have read my blog you can find out about my personal history. We got a computer to our house as I was only about four years old. I have been a player of video and computer games since that moment.

At first it was very easy for me to come up with ideas for blog posts. Now I have dealt with lots of subjects and it’s a bit harder to come up with a good idea weekly. If you have ideas or would be interested in some topic you can always contact me through comments or even sending me e-mail to the address that you can find from this websites Contact part.

I have had a huge inspiration which has grown even more as I have progressed with this blog. I hope you are all fine and keep reading this stuff. I just wanted to let my blogs readers know some thoughts about my motivation and in what direction is this blog going. I always keep gaming and I like to write about games and everything that is around me. There are some limitations however because I have other things in my life also that I have to keep also doing. At the moment I am not, at least yet, ready to be a professional blog writer.

I am considering about publishing commercials in this blog but this decision is still open for me to decide. This post was 77th post in this blog. I am glad that I have already written so much about my dear hobby of gaming.

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