A Breath of Air

Trejkaz — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 11:58:00 +1100

It seems forever since I made my last weblog entry, so I feel like I’m under some kind of obligation to make one now. Today we’ll talk about gaming.

Despite what my blog might suggest, I am really a gamer before a developer. I find it somewhat surprising that I don’t blog about the subject constantly, considering that I tend to spend more time gaming than writing code. Perhaps the problem is that, when games are on my mind, I would rather be sitting down and playing them than talking about it.

But it’s true, I’ve been playing games since around the time of Commander Keen and Wolfenstein3D, and later was a big fanatic of Doom and Doom II. I continued being a first-person shooter fanatic until around the time of Quake 2 and Unreal.

Commander Keen was, in my opinion, the best 2D platformer ever (certainly for its time, but it even stands up by today’s standards) and would look great if someone ever revived it with nice 3D side-scrolling. Wolf3D got its swanky remake but Keen has been more or less forgotten since id Software moved on and focused themselves purely on first-person shooter titles.

Amongst all that, I somehow never owned a NES, SNES, Sega Master System or Sega MegaDrive, although I spent an awful lot of time playing on friends’ versions of said consoles. I was even late on the N64 boat, but eventually did end up owning one of those and playing various games on that (and was particularly fond of Mario 64)

University became the time of Quake and Quake 2, and a lot of time in particular was wasted on Action Quake 2. I bought Half-Life on prerelease and that was the very last time I was interested in first-person shooters. Half-Life was good, but it was eventually destroyed by Counter-Strike. Counter-Strike was good for a while, perhaps up to beta 4 or 5, before all the good weapons were nerfed, and that completely destroyed my interest in the genre until much later with Doom 3.

Getting bored of the whole PC gaming thing was what prompted us into buying a second-hand Nintendo 64. We played things like Mario 64 and also Super Smash Bros., the latter of which probably ate more of our time overall, particularly when friends were around to beat the crap out of us. Eventually we did move onto buying a GameCube, and played a number of marvellous titles on that, but eventually the good titles simply stopped coming, so the console slowly became less useful.

These days, I prefer to go handheld. I bought two GBAs on launch with the intent of playing multiplayer, which never happened. However, I eventually found myself playing dozens of games on that console and thus I bought a GBA-SP about half a year after it came out, to get rid of the problems with getting a bright enough screen on the GBA. Lately, I’ve been playing the Nintendo DS a lot more than anything else, and I think that instead of blogging about coding for a while, I’m going to fill in some space in the weblog over the next few weeks blogging about Nintendo DS games.

For now though, I suspect this is already too much text for a single entry. I’d better cut it in half, huh?

Trypticon: A Breath of Air

A Breath of Air