EPTTL;DR: Blog not relevant.
The earliest anything related to gaming was probably when I got a TETRIS for my 6th birthday. I used to carry it around everywhere and even tho I don't really remember that my parents told me I used to give them attitude when my batteries ran out and we didn't have any spare ones lol :D
I was a rather curious kid as much as curious goes I mean. Somehow everyone who ends up in engineering thinks of themselves as "born to be a geek", playing with blocks and then with lego and then a lot of computer games. I'm not much of an exception. When I was in 2nd grade (age 8) I got a SEGA console as a present for "the 1st of September". (lol, why give a procrastination tool as a present for the start of the school year?). I did play a lot. I don't know wat kind of SEGA it was… I just thought it was "normal" SEGA :D It wasn't GENESIS and it wasn't the one with CDs. I remember playing some Flinstones game on that also Sonic and battletoads. Can't really remember any other ones.
Now as I got older my yound mind needed something even more complex. I had a gaming buddy classmate whom with we would hang out after classes & on weekends playing games on my sega or just chatting mostly about said games. A couple of years later came a wave of PC Bangs. They got really popular really fast. It's very interesting to think about it now. This "new thing" suddenly became popular. And it did because other people saw the appeal. When you think about it. PC Bangs (I'll call them PCBs from here on), became popular because people who had money and who really did enjoy gaming saw how it would cater to the youth. BUT at the time I was like 11 or 12 years old and it was an age at which I could still be influenced enough to accept gaming as part of my life. It's the same with my education. I grew up in the time when Internet and all of this virtual world just started to develop and therefore I had a chance to investigate it from all the possible angles and for that I am very grateful.
Counter-Strike was a really popular game back then. Everybody was playing it. I mention in my first blog that I live in Lithuania. This is a country with at the time was only "free" of Soviet Union for only 10 years and all these things like games and the Internet and even PCBs were so new that everybody didn't even know what to do with them. It used to cost very very little to play for hours and we did. My generation grew up in these PCBs.
I didn't have my own PC at the time. Some of my friends did but it wasn't so popular back then. I had this one friend who was a son of my fathers best friend. We didn't meet much only like a couple of times a year. I remember when I was around 12 (in 2002) my family was visiting them and stayed there for a couple of days. This friend has a PC and we used to play Rollercoaster Tycoon on it. But during this visit he said "Hey, let's go play on the PC, I have this new game and it's really badass."… Oh, little did I then know how badass it was. Yes, oh yes. It was Brood War.
I remember we played it for the whole 2 days. Remember gasping when we saw the ultralisk for the first time (we were playing the campaign). It was SO FUCKING BIG! We decided that ultralisks were imba because their so big lol :D Now, since I didn't have my own computer I could only dream about playing that awesome game again when I got back home.
At this time around 2003 I used to visit PCBangs again with a couple of friends weekly. We played warcraft3, but I wasn't much into it. Was kinda doing it for the feel of the team
I thought that makers of Warcraft totally ripped the name "x..Craft" and even the controls from that awesome awesome game I did play long ago.
For Christmas of 2003 I got my first PC! YEAY! It was REALLY powerful at the time. Don't remember the specs now but yea. My first games ever were the first 3 harry potter games. I just got really invested and played through them a lot. After that I got my hands on vice city. And play A LOT of vice city.
I play these games which come out from time to time even now. I just download them, play through them and forget about them. I pirate most of these games. Please, don't hate. First of all, only now I understand that piracy is actually wrong. When I was a younger teenager, everybody was doing it and since I was just plainly thrown into the whole thing it seemed perfectly normal to download games over the internet and not pay for them. I wasn't even doing it for the money. Ofc, I hadn't any and it would've been difficult but I surely would have at least bought the ones I really loved. I just didn't understand the whole idea.
I'm not really going to talk about games that didn't stick. And the ones that did form a rather short list. These would be as follows: GTA: Vice City, Diablo series, Warcraft series, baldur's gate, half-life series and of course, starcraft.
GTA: Vice City. Now this game is just good. I don't really like the ohters so much. I don't understand the "nostalgia" behind GTA2. I really think people like it JUST because their nostalgic about it but it wasn't THAT good. Vice City I love to this day and sometimes still play it. I love the whole Scarface feel to it
Diablo & Warcraft - There's really not much I can say about these… We all know they are GREAT games (WoW included). I just think that anything with "Blizzard Entertainment" on it would be good… But I liked those games even before I figured out they were made by blizzard. Diablo, you can just play and play for days, weeks, years. And warcraft is just cool. War3 has a SICK campaign and I love the lore. Besides war3 as much as WoW has the whole "moddability" feel to them which makes them even greater.
Baldur's Gate? Years have been spent playing this game. I love it. I love EVERY FUCKING LITTLE THING in it. I have played so many times and every fucking time it's just been more awesome. I remember half the games lines by now but it's just too awesome.
Half-life series - not much to tell also. I didn't get very interested in HL1, and all the mods except CS. But HL2 and episodes were insanely great and I have also played them too much ^_^
But whatever I played throughout the years there was one game which was never uninstalled and always used since the day I got my pc. Starcraft is forever going to be my game of choice if I had to chose only one. I never got invested TOO MUCH. Like in bw, I just couldn't do it. Every damn season I would fall to D- and then struggle to climb out of it. I played Protoss and people used to say that it was ez mode, just 1a2a3a and that's it and it used to get me even madder… How can everyone cheese their way into C- and I can't? I always played just never had the time/willpower to get any better. And this was the case all the way until Sc2.
Towards 2007, 2008 I discovered sc match commentating on youtube. There was so little exposure of these commentators back then… I got so exited. I used to watch the greats: Klazart, Diggity, Moltrap, Cholera & Rise. WoW! The nostalgia! Over some months it became "my thing". I used to watch it and follow the scene really closely. This relates back to the thing I said about PCBangs. Commentating was this "new" and "hot" thing right at the time when I got into watching commentaries. I loved it so much. And I still do.
Then starcraft 2 beta came and I got invited on the second wave I think. I SOMEHOW had a lot of free time on my hands so I did play quite a lot. Then I bought starcraft 2 almost half a year after it came out and play it at least weekly if not every day. I don't have a lot of time for it tho. I'm a student working full-time as a software developer and I take an occasional after-work project for myself. I usually play 0-4 games a day. That's not much but it gets me my starcraft fix and on weekends or sick days I play some more. I started in bronze league in season 1 & two, right now I'm in gold but I believe my skill is higher.
I got better a lot recently just from reforming my viewpoint on the game. Right now I play and I think to myself "How am I gold?". But still, I lose sometimes. I can't really deal with the P deathball lategame… The collosi, HTs just SHREAD me. I manage to EMP decently but when its lategame they just seem to have toooo much stuff. I don't see pros using tanks in TvP a a lot so I don't too, and I know tanks would not be such a great choice since they're so immobile but just bio,medivac,viking armies of mine don't seem to work so well
Also I have problems with TvT siege lines so I always try to work banshees into my play to take out their tanks or at least make them waste scans. I just hate how everything dies so quickly in this game…. I bw if you had cloacked something and they scanned you had time to run away or something… Now? Not possible… if my banshee is killing tanks and opponent scans and had like 5 marines = banshee dead. Even Naxi, hatches, cc's… Well CCs are ok, to be honest, but hatcheries and nexi die way too fast… Oh and turrents/cannons/spores don't do shit now. I mean in bw if you had 3 spores, MUTA CLOUD RAN THE FUCK AWAY, now? PFfffft 3 spores? Eat my 50 mutalisks, I can just make more in 4 seconds…. Like wtf…So yeah. Right now I DO play starcraft and I DO watch professional starcraft. Esports has gotten to the point where it's way too hard for a working man to follow EVERYTHING. I don't watch the GSTL & GSL, but I do check the results and try to keep up who's good and who's not so good. I try to watch all the MLGs, Dreamhacks, IPLs, IEMs. It's as interesting as it has ever been. Starcraft is SUCH a big part of my life I wouldn't know what to do if esports somehow wouldn't work out and everything would just collapse somehow. Even tho I think starcraft is never gonna go away now since we have the Internet.
So that's that. Thanks for reading if you have.
