video games Archives - Page 4 of 6 - Intensive Gaming Diary

What Creates The Passion Towards Video Games?

Posted on June 24, 2023 by Viljami

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

Posted on December 22, 2022 by Viljami

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

Posted on June 24, 2022 by Viljami

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!