EPTSo after reading through the forum guidelines and lurking for a few months now, I decided that it is finally time to write my first post. It doesn’t seem right to me to throw away my first post on something unimportant and completely useless, so I suppose it makes the most sense to write a short blog entry to introduce myself and my experiences and goals, so I'll do that. It will also give me the chance to reminisce and be nostalgic, so it really serves a personal purpose as well.
I played my first game before I was two (I'm 19 now), it was some Barney & Friends game on the NES, and played games ever since then. A few of my favorite games from my younger days were Paperboy (also for the NES), the Super Mario Bros. Games for the NES, Desert and Jungle Strike were amazing (Sega Genesis), as well as the early Sonic games on the Genesis. There was one DOS game I played – TIE Fighter. It was awesome, both me and my dad loved it. I remember trying to play the role of the pilot, and would report back to my dad, who I pretended was my commander. I remember finishing a mission and going to him and saying “Mission accomplished, sir!” and saluting him (Hey I was like 4 years old, stop laughing). There were a few others, but they were so long ago that I can't really recall the rest at this point. For one of my early birthdays, I don't really recall exactly which one, but when I was around 6, I got the Nintendo 64. These days are much easier for me to remember. I spent hours and hours and hours playing it over several years' time. A few games really stand out to me in memory:
1) Goldeneye - An almost mandatory game when discussing the N64. I spent a ton of time playing the campaign, my dad beat it before me on the highest difficulty. He played a ton, but recently has kind of fallen off of the gaming path, with a few exceptions (Fallout 3 and New Vegas). The cheats were fun to play around with too.
2) Perfect Dark - Much grittier but very similar (basically the same engine) to Goldeneye, this game was also fun, but younger me found the campaign to be much harder and more confusing.
3) Ocarina of Time - Easily one of the top 5 best games ever made. I actually had been replaying this very recently on Project 64, but never beat it again (I hate the ice temple so much, always have). My dad also beat this before me, but I still went through to finish the game myself. Honestly, I liked Majora's Mask as well, I never finished it though. That's on my list of games I have to go back and play again.
4) Mario Party - This is one game I played with my brother constantly. We never really played Goldeneye since there was no Cooperative mode (we played vs bots in The World is Not Enough, another amazing game. For some reason he never liked playing against me, I don’t really know why because I wasn’t even that much better than him at it). But the minigames were fun and it was more friendly competition. The second one was even better.
5) Harvest Moon - This may seem the oddest of the bunch, but Harvest Moon will always be one of my favorite games. The sequel Back to Nature (for PS1, I bought it and played it on the PS2, which will be mentioned later) was exponentially better than the already awesome original. Honestly, it seems like it would be repetitive, but I never got bored of it. I think it also inspired some of my personal goals for later on in life. If you actually remember playing and enjoying this game, you instantly gain respect in my eyes.
6) Paper Mario – I remember being in a Toys R Us store getting this game. I didn’t want to get it, because I said the graphics looked terrible (I was one of those retarded kids lol, I’m even embarrassed I thought this when I was 7 or 8), but my mom insisted I get it for some reason. It was awesome. Gameplay was awesome and even the graphics were actually good, I just wasn’t able to recognize that from the cartoony style of it. As a relatively unheard of game, I feel it’s worth the mention.
The N64 days were awesome. I was too young then to have any worries and gaming was always fun, and already my favorite thing to do. There were other neat things that me and my brother would do involving gaming, one being something we called “Save the World.” We would pretend that some place in the world was in danger, and we would go do a mission in Goldeneye or a level in some other game in order to protect the citizens and restore order. It sounds lame, but trust me, it was AWESOME. We did a bunch of other cool things like that, but as time went on we stopped as our interests diverged (sadly).
The N64 lasted me until I got a PS2, which was right after it was released, around third to fourth grade for me, so I would have been around 9 (Honestly, I have to do background research and ask people to find these numbers, I don’t think in terms of quantities like age but relative to other events, i.e. what grade I was in at the time and what else happened around then). But anyway, we got it with Dark Cloud, which looked and played amazingly. It was a great great game, with tons of depth and detail and awesome little features I’d never seen before. I expected every PS2 game to be that awesome and needless to say was disappointed by a lot of them, and my expectations sunk to a more normal level. I played a few other games, none really that unique or special until Final Fantasy X.
I have and will always say that this is by far the best game ever made. In no way had I enjoyed or played a game like it. I loved the story, the gameplay, the tons of extras, everything. The story connected with me in a way I can’t even describe. I was instantly changed after it, and after I beat it again it changed me even more. Describing it is tough, because I can’t really find the words to do it, so just accept the fact that this game is the best game ever to be produced to me, and can’t be topped. I have beaten FFX 4 times, one time doing a 100% completion of it (completing all of the side quests and extra content). I will most likely catch a lot of flak for this statement from those who are all scrambling to yell “OMG WTF?!?! FFVII WAS SO MUCH BETTER!!! FFX WAS TERRIBLE!!!!”. But as I mentioned, I never had a PS1, but was able to play PS1 games on the PS2. And even though I have FFVII sitting somewhere, I never played it. I’m sorry, FFVII fans, but my opinion on this matter is rock solid. Also, there was news recently that there is going to be a remake of this game for PS3. When that was announced, I was the happiest person alive for days.
The rest of the PS2’s lifetime was kind of uneventful considering how long it lasted. There were a few good games, like Freedom Fighters (awesome story), Splinter Cell games, SOCOM, and a few other good games that I can’t really think of at the moment, but they were really hindered by one major factor: the lack of multiplayer. I had no access to online play at the time, and my brother didn’t play as much as me anymore, so single player was all I had. That changed when I got the PS3. My mom loves to tell people how much I was shaking when I got it, which I was. I was so excited. I got it with Resistance, and we actually got a wireless router and set up the internet connection so I could play online for the first time. It was awesome playing with other people, and I met a few people that I played with all the time. I was okay at the game, not awful but certainly not good, which I suppose is passable for my first online experience. I was fascinated by online play because I didn’t need to keep buying more games, there was infinite replay value in only one game. I observed how my giant stack of PS2 games was inferior to only one or two PS3 games because of it.
After Resistance came what I honestly think were the best days of my life. Rainbow Six Vegas came out, and I got a Resistance friend or two to get it with me. I met I think ALL of my best gaming friends on Vegas. I met RUSTY_GRILLZZ while I was playing co-op to get used to the game. He didn’t have a microphone, but he heard me and some other guy in the game talking, and he would shoot at us to acknowledge what we were saying. He sent a friend request to the other guy in the game, but accidentally sent it to me instead. I didn’t know this at the time, and I told him where he could get a headset, and soon enough he had gotten one and we played almost daily. We are actually still friends today, even though I don’t play console anymore. Another member of our group was Tha_Legend. I forget how I met him exactly, but I know for a fact it was on Rainbow Six. He was an awesome kid, we refused to let him host games after a while because there were times where he would say everyone was cheating and kick anyone that killed him. I’m also still friends with him today. We had two other guys who we played with constantly, CFERG (an awesome guy from Texas, diehard Cowboys fan), and crshngod, a kid slightly older than me and Rusty, both of whom we met when they faced a team of me, Rusty, and Legend and were obliterated, then we moved them onto our team, exchanged friend requests, and basically played together after that. We never lost. I mean EVER lost. Sure, it was only pubs, and sure, we didn’t play top tier competition, but it was FUN. Best time I ever had playing online. It came out in June, right when school ended for the summer. I would play it literally all day every day, wait for Rusty to finish his morning run and get a sausage egg and cheese sandwich, and then tha_legend would show up and then CFERG would finish work, and the party would resume. Those times were the best times. We talked about doing gamebattles, but at that time I thought gamebattles was really strict and required photographic proof and a lot of other crazy things, so we never did it.
After Rainbow Six Vegas we (minus CFERG, who shortly after disappeared for what we later discovered to be personal reasons) transitioned to COD4, which was also amazing. We had great times in that game also, being pub stars to the max and just having fun with the game. Legend was weird, though, because despite being really really good at the game, he did not share my interest in forming a gamebattles team, which I now realized we could actually do, and start playing competitively. A bit defeated at this, I continued to pub with him throughout World at War and Modern Warfare 2. A lot of people hated on MW2 a bit unjustly, I thought the maps were good and the killstreaks were okay, the only things I thought that were annoying were the pave low glitch (didn’t count towards total current killstreak) and being the unlucky guy who got targeted by the predator missile. Other than that (on console at least) it was pretty much the same as CoD4. Around this time, I had made a new friend in real life, Adam, who introduced me to Quake Live.
Quake Live was the first PC game I ever played (I say this because I don’t count things like Rollercoaster Tycoon as a game, I love them, but don’t fall into the same category). I played Quake for a few weeks, then quit. It was rough, I hated losing every game I played and it was fast and I was terrible. A few months later, I was drawn back. I realized that there was huge competition and an enormous skill gap. It was fun playing on your own and dueling, where you had no one to carry and could face off one against one. I watched a ton of professional matches, and realized that I could get to that level with enough practice and effort. So I practiced. I got better. I played console games less and less, until I reached the point where I literally did not touch my consoles after MW2 with the only exception being FFXIII, which was also excellent, but still well under FFX’s standards.
(Aside: I realize I may also get a bunch of angry comments when I say that FFXIII was amazing as well. The linearity did not bother me ONE BIT. I honestly think to have a story as good as those in FF games, you need linearity for cohesion. Take Fallout 3 for example. I loved that game, it’s my third favorite game of all time. But had the story been a little more linear, I think it would have been a lot better. I just think games with a great story have that story weakened by an open-world setup, it just never flows as well.)
But anyway, I played Quake for about two years, getting steadily better and better, and then it started to die out. I’m not driven to talk about the Quake days as much for some reason, maybe because they were much more recent, but they were also really really fun. I enjoyed practicing and seeing myself improve rapidly. But my relationship with Quake wasn’t to be. The devs showed they didn’t care at all about the game, it was basically a ploy to make a few extra bucks for RAGE, and it showed. Site updates came once every couple of months and accomplished essentially nothing. There was no one coming in, and a bunch of people leaving to Starcraft and other games. I didn’t know what else to do. I considered switching to Starcraft since I had a friend that recommended it to me and the community was huge, but I wasn't sure. I never played an RTS game before with very very minimal exceptions (Original Command & Conquer on the N64, lol!). I decided to give the RTS genre a try before sinking a full $60 on Starcraft. I got C&C3 off of a steam sale for around $5. I played the campaign, and could not for the life of me win on the easiest difficulty. I gave up on RTS again for a while. Then I remembered something my math teacher mentioned: there was a kid from our high school that had moved to Korea to play Starcraft. I didn’t think anything significant of it at the time, because I figured it was just some random and mediocre player I had never heard of. I decided to do some investigating, and was pretty surprised by what I found. It was NOT some random player, but the Gracken himself. I didn’t know ANYTHING about the Starcraft scene at ALL, but I still recognized the name IdrA as a total powerhouse in gaming. So with that realization, I dropped everything bought SC2, and started playing it in June 2011, determined to finally learn how to play an RTS.
I played the campaign (Struggled through it on normal), and decided to play Zerg because my friend said he thought I was a Zerg kind of guy. I played a few games against the AI and some against friends. I played around 8 games in the practice league, then skipped the rest of the practice league games since they were too slow and I got sick of the obscene amounts of destructible rocks. I placed into silver despite the fact that I lost all my placement matches. Tired of losing games and not wanting to get demoted to bronze (I was losing to bronzes), I immersed myself in the game. I watched tons of Day9, tons of Destiny, IdrA, tournament games, everything, looking at the styles and mechanics they used. Then what I did was MASSED games versus the AI. I started at Easy, then played until I could win comfortably, then moved the difficulty up, and did this until I could easily beat the Hard A.I. It was actually very good practice for my nonexistent mechanics and a relaxed environment with no pressure at all. I recognized that playing a computer could only be so beneficial, and from then on only played ladder games and practice games against friends. I made it to the top of my silver division before the ladder lock. I continued to play and get better.
Right now, I’m a top diamond Zerg about to get into masters, which I guess is decent for the four months I’ve been playing RTS. I really want to keep playing and getting better until I reach the top 200 and maybe reach a professional level. However, I know that almost everyone can say that and a lot aspire the same, so I guess my only option is to go and get it done. Being a part of the community should help me progress and give me additional enjoyment and motivation, hence why I came here to TL.
If anyone is interested, my stream is http://www.twitch.tv/anxair
Anyway, that’s about it. Now that I’ve actually gotten this done, I can actually start posting here finally. If there’s any questions let me know, and comments are always appreciated.
No TL;DR because there's really nothing important here, just some stuff about my gaming background.
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