[Mezza]

So I'll kick off by writing a super long essay to summarize the list of games I've played. I don't think its complete, I'm sure I left out some here and there.

I've been gaming since the time of 386s. When you need boot disks which came in floppies, when you had to squirt liquid cleaner to clean out a drive cos of fungus buildup. Heh. Those were the days of frogger and alley cat.

Then there was console games, like SEGA 16-bit with stuff like Afterburner and Sonic. But PC games were just too cool. Went on to Command and Conquer, then SC1 came out and changed everyone's lives forever. My friends and I played SC1 in the com labs in school, we cannoned in and carrier rushed each other, until someone discovered that scouts >>> carriers. And that Valkryies >> scouts. We only knew how to use permutations of "12" units cos that was the max control group size? I think. In between here somewhere was the 56k modem era and dialups where you can call your friend on his home phone to play FIFA 97/98 soccer. When "ctrl" + dribble was too overpowered.

I also vaguely remembered playing some FPS called Outlaws on the same LAN in school where I installed Starcraft 1. Outlaws was by Lucasarts and was WAYYY cool. Probably one of the first FPS to adopt the mouselook and WASD commands. We started off using WASD + arrow keys to navigate, then once we discovered the mouse to do commands, the level of play skyrocketed! Shortly after Outlaws, there was also Half-life 1, and that changed everything. HL spawned 2 damn solid mods which ran off the original valve engine, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. Both were AWESOME, AWESOME games.

Between then there were a ton of not so notable games, but somewhere in 2003? There was WarCraft 3, where I went for the midnight launch, it wasn't even half as cool as the SC2 launch, but it was at midnight! But War3 was short-lived and gave way to dota, where I played with a bunch of uni schoolmates for 2 years for leisure, until we realised we could play competitions We took part in some intra-unis and won some rather funny stuff like speakers and creative mp3 players and a UPS (uninterruptible power supply, that died 6 years later, it served me well, ensuring that my cable modem and computer stayed online during lighting storms and trips!) My most memorable match was at some lanshop in selegie, where they had shuttle PCs. We thought we were pretty damn big hotshots for winning some intra-university shit, so we decided to go to some lanshop to do a pickup game 5v5. We tapped some kid playing O2Jam on the shoulder and asked him if he'd like to play a 5v5 with his friends, and he picked up his phone and called his kakis. The logged into the LAN game and their nicknames were - Tofu, Ice, Lux, Ant and Musica. 4/5 of Team mVp then, soon to become Team Zenith.

Our facial expressions were priceless. Pickup game vs what we thought to be some bulliable sec school kids became the biggest raping of our lives. F***. We lost 56-14. Tofu's veno monsterkilling by 20 minutes. Never again did we ever just wander into a lanshop to get pickupgames.

Then after that, the next big thing came the MMORPGs, I played Guild Wars, and WOW. Guild Wars undoubtedly being imho the BEST RPG 8v8 player vs player experience ON EARTH. I used to skip lectures to stay at home to join a US team to climb the Guild vs Guild ladder. Obviously the Koreans were pwning everyone at Guild Wars too, until they had to enter the army. Burnt out after GW, one of my guildwar guildmates gave me a WOW trial account 2 weeks before WOTLK. I was hooked and ended up raiding 25Naxx 2-3 weeks after WOTLK was released and that went on until the SG guild fizzled out and died doing 25Ulduar. Always wanted to do ICC but after SC2 came out, I guess there's just not enough time!

I must have missed out a ton of games, but there's just too much shit to list out. Right now, I'm working, and still gaming, and looking forward to Gran Turismo 5's launch in November! And more funky Playstation Move titles And yeah, damn I'm old, but I still love gaming. So share your story!