My Life As a Gamer Part 4: Reconstruction

After the Recent Unpleasantness in mid-2003, rebuilding of everything began, including my collection of games and gaming hardware.

With the aid of a new job and steady income, my library passed its former size sometime in 2005. So now it's all about new titles and next-gen systems, old titles that are new to me, completing collections of game series, and my first tentative steps into mutliplayer and online gaming.

And actually finishing some of the games!

I'm still adding to my library, of course, but as I have enough games to play for years, I'm being far more selective. For me to consider acquiring it, a game has to be one that I would be interested in anyway, and pass one of the following four tests:

• Does it help complete a game series I like and already own one or more from it, such as Prince of Persia or Wing Commander?
• Does it score 90% or better on gamerankings.com?
• Has it been recommended to me by someone I trust for reasons I agree with?
• Is it a game I need in order to play online or multiplayer with a friend?

Titles I've enjoyed during these years include Silent Hill 3 and 4, the first three titles in the Myst series, Max Payne, Halo, Starlancer, Freelancer, Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider Legend, Starfleet Command III, TIE Fighter, Fury3, Babylon 5 I've Found Her: Danger and Opportunity, Armagetron, Grim Fandango, Final Fantasy VII and X, Painkiller, Frozen Bubble, Bejewelled 2, Black Knight, Golden Sun, Burnout Takedown and Revenge, Burnout Legends, all three Fatal Frames, Wipeout 3 and Pure, Katamari Damacy, Dragon Quest 8, Need for Speed Most Wanted, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Battlestar Galactica, Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, Mercury, Stubbs the Zombie, Half-Life 2, Black, EVE Online, Medal of Honor Frontline, Shadow of the Colossus, Jet Set Radio Future, SSX 3, the Marathon series, Metal Gear Acid, Ridge Racer PSP, Prey, Ninja Gaiden, Nintendogs, Guitar Hero, Forza Motorsport, and Killzone.

Those who say there are no good games out there are deluded; I think the ratio of dreck to worthwhile titles remains about the same (90%/10%), but the volume of titles has increased dramatically in recent years. Clearly, given that the above list isn't complete, I'd say there's plenty out there worth playing.

That brings us to the present, the start of this blog, and the end of this post.

My Life As a Gamer Part 3: After Us, The Deluge

By 1997 Commodore was no more, and it was plain that the Amiga's days were numbered. Additionally, I'd married a PC user who also owned a Playstation, and picked up her old PC when she got a new one. So the Amiga gathered dust while I played X-Wing and Wipeout and Duke Nukem 3D. Real Life concerns ate up my gaming time, and the Amiga moved from the house to the garage and finally to the trash.

Technically this was not a violation of my oath, as by this time the Intel processors had moved to a less-brain-dead architecture, and something close to a real operating system had come from Microsoft (Windows 95). Still, I punished myself by feeling bad about it. Honest!

During this era, which lasted until 2003, I steadily accumulated PC and PS1 titles, and PS2 and Xbox titles after we acquired those platforms.

Memorably enjoyable titles from this era include (in addition to the ones already mentioned): Dark Forces, Jedi Knight, Colony Wars, Rainbow Six, Half-Life, Silent Hill, Wipeout 3, Aliens vs. Predator, Star Trek DS9: The Fallen, Gunman Chronicles, Fear Effect 2, Gran Turismo 3, Ico, Ace Combat 4, Ghost Recon, Jedi Outcast, Star Trek Elite Force, and Silent Hill 2.

In 2003 came Divorce, and among other things washed away in the Deluge was my entire game collection. And that bring us to the last era: Reconstruction.

My Life As a Gamer Part 2: The PC Years

With 1981 came college and the continuation of TRS-80 gaming. It also saw the introduction of the IBM PC, a machine I was utterly uninterested in, for esoteric programming-related reasons. Having dealt with CP/M86, I had sworn an oath never to own a machine primarily based on Intel's brain-damaged segmented architecture. This oath I kept until 1997.

There weren't a lot of games for the TRS-80, but in combination with trips to the arcades there were enough to keep the gaming spark alive through around 1990 or so. Most were ports of arcade games, including surprisingly good (considering the 128x48 resolution graphics) versions of Defender, Galaxian and Pac-Man. There were also occasional original games like the hilarious and fun Outhouse. And there were text adventures from Adventure International and later Infocom.

By 1990 I'd been working for a major IT firm for four years and could afford a new PC (dont beat me up over the ''microcomputer vs. PC" distinction; that battle was lost long ago). I stuck to my oath and bought a Commodore Amiga. It was easy. At the time, the PC wars had not yet been decided, and in every technical respect the Amiga was superior to an Intel-based PC running Windows 3.0. It was also superior in some suspects to a Mac, and was considerably cheaper.

And of course it had better games.

These ranged from the unwieldy ArcticFox, Barbarian, Defender of the Crown, Dungeon Master, Falcon, Jet, Pac-Mania, Red Baron, SDI, Space Quest, and Their Finest Hour: Battle of Britain, to the middling Emerald Mine, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Ferrari Formula One, Great Giana Sisters, Gunship 2000, Knights of the Sky, Outrun, Plutos, Silent Service, and StarGlider 2, to the excellent A-10 Tank Killer, Arkanoids, F-16 Combat Pilot, F/A-18 Interceptor, Fighter Duel Pro, Frontier Elite II, Indianapolis 500, Lemmings, Marble Madness, Star Wars, Super Hang-On, Test Drive 2, Turrican, and Wing Commander.

All this kept me in gaming goodness until 1997. My trips to the arcades dropped off drastically; those shallow coin-eating game designs couldn't compete with the hours of enjoyment in titles like Wing Commander, A-10 Tank Killer, or Frontier Elite II. Nor could the Nintendos or Segas, which I perceived as arcade rip-offs. I was unaware of superior titles like Metroid or Final Fantasy.

Then, in 1997, I got married, and the PC-only phase of my gaming life ended. And the next began: After Us, The Deluge.

My Life As A Gamer Part 1: The Public School Years

My first exposure to videogames was in the early 70s, when as a child I saw a Pong machine in a local store. Once I played, I was hooked. After that, I played whatever I could, whenever I could get a few quarters. Arcades, department stores, supermarkets, bowling alleys, whatever. If there was a game there and I could wheedle some quarters, I was playing.

The Atari 2600, when it came out, interested me. Intensely. But alas, Mom and Dad were of modest means and so I had to make do with a dedicated Tank War videogame. Which I played. Until it wore out.

Upon entering high school, I was presented with the opportunity to write software - first for programmable calculators (including my TI-57), then for the school's leased IBM 1130 "small" computer system, and finally for the TRS-80 and CP/M systems (the latter as a summer and part-time job). So of course I tried my hand at writing computer games.

First were a couple of games for the TI-57:

Pinball: A string of '1's would randomly grow and shrink, and you had to hit a button before it shrank to nothing.

Dogfight: You had to put in a roll and pitch value on each turn, and was told the angles of the target plane in response. If you managed to get the angles under five degrees, you shot the other plane down.

Then there were these games in BASIC for the TRS-80:

Blasteroids: This was a side-scrolling shoot-em-down with your ship at the top, dodging and shooting down at the asteroids that scrolled up from the bottom.

Night of the Living Dead: You're in a minefield full of electric mines - they electrocute rather than explode so they're reusable. You can see the mines. The zombies run straight at you. To win, move so that the zombies step on the mines. Don't get caught or step on a mine yourself.

Escape From Death Star: This was my masterpiece. It's the first game I know of to cover loading time with a cutscene. It began with the Star Wars logo, followed by the title and some forgettable text, scrolling from bottom to top. Then came the cutscene of the Falcon leaving the Death Star's docking bay. Finally was an animation of the ship flying away. When gameplay started, the player was presented with a starfield behind a targeting crosshair. You could rotate the turret up, down, left or right. A T.I.E. fighter would move randomly across the starfield, shooting at you. Sometimes it would hit. When you shot at it, two lasers would come in from the corners of the screen and meet at the crosshair. Shoot down all four TIEs, and win. Get hit five times (25% shield loss on each hit) and lose.

This, my acquisition of a TRS-80 Model III, and the availability of some rather good commercial games for it such as Adventure International's Adventure and subLogic's Flight Simulator took some of the shine off arcade games and consoles (like the 2600 and the Nintendo). That's not to say I quit putting quarters into arcade machines; after all, there was Space Invaders, Galaxian, Galaga, Asteroids, and Donkey Kong, just to name a few. But gameplay on the TRS-80, crude as its graphics and sound were, was good enough to kill my interest in consoles entirely. And this perception that anything a console can do, a PC can do as well or better, continued throughout my adult life until around 1997. So I missed out on the Nintendo and Sega eras.

And that brings us to 1981, graduation from high school, and the next era in this gamer's history: the PC years.