A little about me

I am 26. I grew up in a town of around 45K people in Michigan.

My dad is a Ph.D. Chemist working for a big company for the last 28 years. He always liked chemistry. Even as a kid he had a chemistry set making smoke bombs in his LA suburb garage till his parents "accidentally" misplaced it one year. His brother that used to play cowboys and indians became an Orange County sheriff, and his other brother works on spy satellite technologies. (at least that's the story I remember)

He liked computers as a hobby. When companies were making computers that you bought in a kit and attached some wires to a circuit board to perform basic math functions and were selling it for thousands (or hundreds) and calling them home computers, he wanted one though he couldn't afford it. After graduating and finding a job (or during graduate school, I'm not sure) he found a TI-99 4a home computer. I grew up playing with it. It was like an atari with a built in keyboard and BASIC programming language. It had cool games and a speech synthesizer.

Bill Cosby endorsement:

It can speak for itself (a little long winded imo):


Before I was born in 1982, or before I can remember, he had an Amiga 1000 which could run circles around all the cool Apple computers of the day.

Old Amiga TV ad:

The Portal song "Still Alive" written in the Amiga music composer - fitting song:


I can vividly recall the day when he was showing my older sister some games he had on the Amiga while I was playing the TI. Those games looked much cooler. So I asked him to show me how to play them.

The Amiga had awesome games and could do some impressive 3d graphics and you could write music in a program that is scarily similar to current day's Finale software. He taught me how to run programs and play games well enough that I mastered the floppy swap by the age of 6 (There was no hard drive and only one 3.5 inch floppy drive. Any time a program needed information from the system, you had to swap the floppies back and forth about 3 times).

When I was 10 we moved from southern Indiana back to Michigan. (Ok, I skipped over moving to Indiana, but it really doesn't matter that much) Our old Amiga wasn't quite the power horse it used to be. 486s had come down in price enough and so we bought a brand new Gateway 2000 486 DX2 66 Mhz, with (8? 16?) Mb RAM and a 5 or 10Gb hard drive. We were on the Net before there was a world wide web. Dialup BBS sites to get jokes and ebooks. We tried AOL when it came out, decided it stank then (still does imho. Too much fluff. Give me a connection and the browser of my choice and I'm happy.)

(I still have this poster that game with my game. I laminated it.)

One of the first things we did with the computer was games. Shortly after getting the computer my dad came home with a Doom 1.666 demo cd. Not sure where he got it. It may have been floating around the office and he thought I would like it. Maybe he played it at work and thought he would like it, I don't know. Either way, it got me hooked. Doom may not be as P.C. as todays morning cartoons but it was fun. (I'll save the topic of video game violence for a later post) I learned how to use the computer quite well. I even made some of my own levels. They were never as cool, but I could make something! He brought home another demo, Descent. A 360 degree space flying combat game set in asteroid mining tunnels. Also a great game, made levels, and my friends and I ate the game up. Literally with milk and a spoon, ate the game (not literally). Often games required more system than Microsoft's default settings and a batch file had to be cooked up to redistribute the amount of system, extended, and magical gorschnack RAM needed for the game (I'm looking at you Jurassic Park). This prompted further learning of how computers work. Essentially, games brought recreational and societal happiness and they were good teachers. It was a good, positive cycle.

I forgot to mention that back before the 486 was NES. I was there, I went to the store with my dad. We had to drive late into the evening and miles into Kentucky to find a store that was selling them. I'll bet they had been out for months before my dad could talk my mom into letting him get one. I'm sure it was "for the kids." He played it a lot too, for a while. There was one very short point in time that we had in our house every major nintendo system from the NES to the N64. (NES, SNES, N64, Game Boy, GB pocket, GB color, Virtual Boy, SNES gameboy adapter)

Many good memories with Nintendo. Sega came and went, but I stuck with Mario. After Sony came out with the Playstation and favorites like Street Fighter and Mega Man moved to the PS I had to stick with Mario, he was about all that was left. Other good things came and left for Nintendo. Goldeneye 64 was awesome, as well as many other 64 games. But while the PS2 and the XBOX were making a scene, the gamecube kept chugging along doing cutesy stuff. I didn't notice it too much while I was off at college and on the mission. When I helped my family get a Wii for that first christmas, they sent me the olf gamecube. My wife and I were excited about the Wii because it promised to be a game system that we could both enjoy together. So we played some great GC titles and dreamed of the day when she would be interested in something I enjoyed so much that she would play with me (on the Wii. She played some GC titles too, but not that often.)
We got a Wii, and it's been really fun. We play, when I'm not busy with school and work. I'm currently working away from home for a few weeks and get to play more during my off time. There have been some great games for the wii that have been really fun. However, every time I go look at the game titles in the store very few of them catch my interest. Most upcoming games look like the same old stuff we've seen from Nintendo for the last year. As Nintendo grows closer to new fan bases, expands its market to non-gamers, it seems as though it is moving farther from the hard core/serious gamer. I used to consider myself as a serious gamer. I played super star wars (SNES) for hours at a time, forsaking food till the either the Death Star was destroyed or my confidence was by a rogue TIE fighter. I look at the new games for the 360 and PS3 and actually want to play them (Street Fighter 4, Soul Calibur 3). Sure they have the same old control style, but as long as they are fun and challenging and beautifully rendered, does it matter? Come on Nintendo, why not the cool games? Why the crippled internet abilities? Not to say the other guys aren't getting lousy either. How long can the same old style of games on the 360 and PS3 hold a person's interest?

Are games moving away from me? Or am I outgrowing them? I love a good game, always have. Is it a matter of time and money? After reading this article and comic I'm not exactly sure what to think. Nintendo has moved to the casual gamer side of the table. M$ and Sony are still making games for the 10-18 year old market (mainly). Who is making games for the busy 26 year old that wants a good story, great graphics, exciting game play, and some gaming respect on a budget?

I guess the trophy goes to who and whatever we make time for. It will take some research, time and maybe a little money, but I hope to keep this entertaining hobby of mine alive somehow.