Meet the td0t

We here at Gamers Wish List want you to get to know us. We're starting a little feature about getting to know who's posting what and why they can be so opinionated.

I'll get this party started by letting you know that I'm a 25 year old avid sports fan and gamer. I've been gaming since about the time I was born. My parents had a 2600 way back when and I can remember scouring department stores, malls and any available Woolworth's around the area I grew up to find an NES with my dad. In the NES days, my parents were still much better than I was; my mother beat Metroid before I could even get past Kraid or Ridley. My dad was more into the sports games, Baseball, Ice Hockey, Tecmo Super Bowl and then Baseball Stars; he would just straight-up outclass me in any sporting setting, real life or gaming. (On a side note, my original NES still works, but I donated many a cartridge to a friend who has amassed a collection of NES games that would make most normal men seem gay.)

Then the Genesis came. I received it as a birthday present around the time I was turning 7 or 8. I was given the choice between an SNES or Sega Genesis and seeing as we'd had a Nintendo for a console generation, I was willing to give a fair chance to somebody new. The Genesis changed everything in our household with Madden Football and PGA Tour Golf. All of the sudden, I was the little engine that could. Games weren't blowouts anymore and my dad stopped playing against me consistently. One day the unthinkable happened; I won. Gaming for me at that point become a big single player experience.  There were other platforming titles mixed in during the Genesis days, but nothing was more fun than a game of Madden 92, taking out the opposing QB and watching an ambulance run over a team.

I'd been a pretty big console guy to that point until I saw a fun little shareware game known as Wolfenstein 3D. All of the sudden, I was doing anything I could to play games on my computer. Next thing you know point and click adventures came into the fray. Kings Quest, Police Quest, Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion and Full Throttle; these were the games that defined my adolescence. Mind you, the early days of my PC gaming were done on a 486-26, not exactly a speed demon. I can remember upgrading that computer to a 500 Meg hard drive and 8 Megs of ram. It's almost unfathomable to think that most games are up over the 4 Gig mark these days. 

In the mid 90s, I remember my dad coming home with a Pentium 120 MHz beast. This monstrosity introduced me to real 3D gaming with a Creative Labs 3D Blaster Banshee. Quake 2 with its colored lighting was unprecedented. No longer did we have to live with the muddy browns of the original Quake or the blocky sprites of Doom. It was near the end of the P120 useful life that I was introduced to another gaming-life changing game; Half-Life. I played through Half-Life a dozen times and it never got old. The original Counter-Strike introduced me dedicated online play. Sure Quake and Quake 2 had their moments, but the combo of HL/CS was a deal breaker.

The mid 90s also brought me my first disc based console. I received the original PlayStation for Christmas in 1995 with FIFA Soccer and Tekken. At the time, I was blown away by this bad boy. I invested a lot of time into games like Resident Evil, Final Fantasy VII and my personal favorite, Final Fantasy VIII. I know I've probably lost a lot of you with saying that FF8 was my favorite of the PSX line, but it was the first to show your entire party as you ran around the map. The player models were much more realistic than FF7, the cut scenes were unlike anything we'd ever seen, the battle trigger system was a cool idea and the time-spanning memories were very well done.

Christmas of 1997 brought me a surprise visit; the Nintendo 64. It'd been a while since Nintendo was given the fortune to grace my grubby little fingers and with Ocarina of Time glaring at me, shouting at me, nay forcing me to obtain it, the N64 came at just the right time. I'm not ashamed to tell you that I was pretty into wrestling at this point in my life and those WCW/NWO and WWF games by THQ on the N64 were some of the most fun and most played on my machine. Sadly, the N64 just didn't have enough to keep me interested and became my first console casualty of a trade in.

If you've gotten this far, I commend you. We're going to take a break at this point in the story as it's getting a little lengthy. Stay posted for part 2.

*And yes, that is yours truly in the image. Halloween + College = Me as ninja.