Why Games

So you're wondering how come I love games huh?  To me I always was one growing up. I enjoyed the quarter arcade type of games or my older brother's Atari games. Then when I used to visit my cousin, he had some games on his Apple computer like Oregon Trail, Donkey Kong and pinball. Then came Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Playstation. I started drifting from the game scene around high school though. It wasn't until I got out of high school and working for a while when I found a game called Command and Conquer by Westwood Studios. At first I would see my brothers and their friends play it but wasn't interested until I was practically forced to play it evening after a long day at work. I was stressed, irrigated easily and just overall frustrated. 

My brother kept asking me to try the game out and I just felt I was too tired. Finally after him constantly bothering me about it I went ahead and played it just to get him to stop asking me. He taught me how to make a base, how many power plants, what to do to gain resources and so forth. It totally took my mind off of the hard day at work. After playing C&C for about 8 months constantly, I noticed some of my friends where going to another game. This to me was like betraying us all who still wanted to play the game. The less gamers playing, the harder it was to play the game multiplayer. I was addicted to the multiplayer aspect of being ruthless to the opponent, destroying them like they were a piece of cheese against a shredder. I knew back then I was good at this game, why did they have to leave C&C to some game called Quake I asked.

Scarab was a game I also played during the time I played C&C and Quake. I mainly played this as the nick name ShadowGirl since it was more intimidating and I happened to be in the Shadow clan at the time. The game was based more so on Egyptian legends with a futuristic robot touch to it. 

By this time the FPS side of things started to flow. I knew about Doom and Wolfenstein from my brother's friends but wasn't interested in the games much. However, when I saw Quake it seemed so much more intriguing. It took me a few weeks to overcome the motion sickness but I know that most of it had to do with the modem connection I had. I was pinging from 280-450. That's insane now that I think about it but that's how it was back then until I finally got a Cable modem. I also didn't have a graphics card. Later on the clan I was in started getting into a modification of Quake 1 called Team Fortress (TF). They were in many different leagues for this. It was different though, they were always known as a Deathmatch (DM) Team or 1 vs 1 so they grew a lot of respect even on the TF servers in a swift manner. 

Unreal was a game that I beta tested for Mplayer's Gaming Service. I received a copy in the mail and while I was installing it, the monsters were sort of blah to me. However,  once the game loaded it was one of those games where I just stared at for a while. The glowing bright colors and maps were intrusive to my mind. Playing it wasn't like Quake but it had female characters that were fun to run around as. 

When Quake II came out I shifted over to it for a while. Something was wrong though, the game play wasn't like Quake 1 but the Female players were really cool. I liked playing Rocket Arena 2 and CTF the most for this game.  

Half-Life was the most intriguing game I played back in 1998. I was at the PGL finals that year in San Francisco. I played it at the Gamers Extreme offices (an old employer) one evening. A few of my friends started playing StarCraft while Spear and Nemesis played Half-life in Multi-player mode. The game wasn't out to the public at the time so I was extremely excited to see it in action. XP-Chael and I watched the matches from various screens. After watching a few Half-life matches, Spear asked me if I wanted to play it so he let me play Half-life on his PC. He showed me the single player and I started my journey. The game was fascinating. I played it for about 2 hours that night. The enemies in the game were pretty nice too. One enemy that was really creepy was the critters that chase after you. Along with the enemy that looked like a rope for a tongue. When I first saw that creature I thought I jumped on a rope moving upwards. As I looked up I realized it trying to eat me.  The tongue was like it was sticky so it was hard for me to jump off of it.

I loved Tribes too much my hand were sore at times from how hard I held the mouse from being too excited. Then when Tribes 2 came out years later I really enjoyed playing this game a lot. It's just one of those things where I couldn't get any time set aside for it because I was working so much.

Later on I almost became a really bad addict for Everquest for a few weeks. I actually bought the game only a few days after it was released on the shelves because my buddy Reptile had been beta testing it and wanted me to experience the whole evolving world. But at the time the game just didn't work well on my system. I didn't even get an account online at the time (where I would have installed an update patch for it to run right) because I didn't know what was going on really. Finally I lost interest and 3 months later my other friend XP-Kiljoy wanted me to try it out again. He explained I needed to install an update of the game. That's when I got addicted to the game. I didn't really play on the servers that all of my friends played on though. I was too busy trying to learn the game, earn more experience and was having a nice time doing so. I had to stop playing it right away, it was destroying my social life.

Then Asheron's Call was a pretty game to play as well. I used to have to put a timer on in the kitchen for only two hours a night. That didn't work... that game is like Everquest where the world evolves. Of course it is going to soak up your free time like no other. 

My brother originally created the first Unreal news site online called Unreal Kingdom. So by the time Unreal Tournament was talked about, I wasn't too interested in the game. I thought the multiplayer aspect would be like the original Unreal game. A couple of days before the demo released to the public, a few Epic guys gave my brother the demo and a private server for both of us to hop on. The game was like a found a secret jewel. It was fun seeing the creators of the games fall of into space like the rest of us too. 

Quake III Arena was a game that some of the old school Quake 1 gamers were going to. This was one reason why I got it to learn. By the time I was good at the game I realized I had to play UT and Q3A at different times. The keys I played on each of them were a tad different so it would trigger my mind to hit wrong keys. My two button mouse was set so when I used the left button for Rocket Launcher in Quake III Arena, it would fire but my right button was to switch to the Rocket Launcher weapon itself. In other words, if I was running around with a shotgun and I picked up a RL, I could just hit the right button and it would change to that weapon right away. When I played Unreal Tournament the mouse keys were a little different. I had my left button set for the SECONDARY weapon in the game. When I used the CTRL key to get to the Rocket Launcher, I'd use the left button to change to the grenade launcher. So when I played Unreal Tournament is when I had the most problems. I'd pick up a Rocket Launcher, it would auto switch to that weapon, then I'd click the left button (thinking I was playing in Q3), only to be popping out grenades. Then silly me I'd end up walking right into them. 

I realized after many times walking over the grenades that I had to make a choice out of UT or Q3A even if I enjoyed them both from each of them being unique in different ways. It only took a few weeks of me wondering until I was offered a job to work at Quake3world. I knew I had to choose Q3 so I stuck with it from then on out. When Team Arena came out I was really impressed on id Software's hard work on creating an expansion. At first the terrain maps reminded me a little of Tribes but the structures and landscape detail was just brilliant. 

Metal Fatigue is one of my favorites among the newer bot styled strategy games. I followed this game in-depth when it was in development. I designed and launched the first Metal Fatigue site - MetalFatigue.net because I believed in it so much. The public went wild after it when this site was launched. There's something special about the audience of websites. I enjoy helping people unfold a game when there's not many details out there for it at the time. When the site was launched I worked closely with the developers to see what they wanted done to the site. 

The sad thing about Metal Fatigue was when the publisher, Psygnosis, went out of business. This delayed the game to be on the shelves when everyone else expected it to be. I feel this game deserved a lot more attention than it received. It's a creative strategy game that isn't too tedious to learn. 

When Diablo II came out the whole Mplayer crew went berzerk. There was a few copies some of the Mplayer tester's had already so all of the rest of us had to run down to the video store to get our copies.

That night about 8 of us tried to get in a LAN game but a couple of them kept falling out of the game or they'd just simply crash and have to reboot their system. Four of the got frustrated from a few crashes so they just ended up playing single player. As for Evil Twin, DarkViper, Huckster and I... we were able to connect fine to each other. Of course every so often we'd crash too but we all enjoyed playing the game so much we'd laugh and reconnect. The game was definitely in need of a patch at the time. I think the coolest thing about our LAN together was hose we were spread out in different rooms in the building. We used out intercom on the phone to talk to each other. The neat thing was when I would hear the other three talking. Every so often I'd year one of them squealing or yelling what was happening to him.

Like one of the times was when I heard Evil Twin saying a huge green goat guy was after him. He kept traveling ahead of us at times so we had no idea where he was. Then I'd would follow a track of dead creatures laying on the ground and would find where he was. Then I ended up having the same green goat guy chasing after me. hehe :D 

Baldur's Gate 2 was a game I simply had to play!  I wasn't ever a real role playing games until a guy I had a crush on for a year or so talked to me about it one day. So naturally I knew him well enough but never though he'd like Baldur's Gate. Just that alone had me wondering if the game was really good. He asked me to go buy it to play him multiplayer sometime with him. I played the game single player a few times so I could get familiar with the keys and so forth. The game was gorgeous, the quests were a lot of fun and it was all around a stable game even playing multiplayer. The cute thing about this guy was how he always tried to make things so romantic, like the settings, the scenery in Baldur's Gate even in the game like near the waterfall. He always has had a charm about him that was hard to understand. 

 

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