A Most Humble Introduction

Greetings and salutations children of technology! You may all know me as the “who is that guy with the mohawk?” guy during the PAX 2009 Broadcasts. It was a great weekend of gaming introspection and since then Nick has been posting links to my blog (The Wasteland). I'm thrilled to announce that I've been asked to formally join the crew here at 4PP so now you'll get to enjoy my written, and perhaps audio, contributions directly.

I've been able to pull myself away from Borderlands and I thought I would write up a bit about myself and my gaming past so you guys can see where I'm coming from. Hit the jump for the sordid tale.

My earliest gaming memory is having my entire family sitting in the living room of my house in New Jersey playing Pong on the Atari 2600. I can't be any older than 5 years old , and as much as it seems like a cliche, this was the way gaming was when it first started. The high degree of accessibility made it a family activity and it especially helped that my family were gamers; although it was board games they usually played. The Atari 2600 was just a simple lateral move for them.

Shortly afterword we got a Commodore 64 where I remember becoming entranced by a game called Sky Writer. What was different about this game, and perhaps only for this system, was that the player practically had to input the entire code for the game manually. Pages and pages in the manual were nothing more than abstract gaming code (the language escapes me) which would have to be input by the user and a press of the Enter key would start the game. Make one mistake in the code and it wouldn't work, nor would it tell you where the mistake was. You would have to go line by line and find it yourself.

Oh and what a game it was. There was no actually game play per se. Letters and words would fly across the screen, mimicking in some archaic way, sky writing planes that would create words in the sky with smoke. Some game.

Growing up in the years following I was an avid NES player, devouring games like Zelda, Air Wolf, Uncle Festers Quest, Akari Warriors and most others. My parents would take me to the local video store to rent games on the weekend. I had tons of games and, sadly, I have no idea where they are now. As the life cycle of the NES began to end we got our first real computer in the house. On it was the Indian Jones and the Holy Grail Adventure Game. I devoured every inch of that experience and then moved away from gaming for a good 2-4 years. Music became my focus, playing with bands around New Jersey and New York City. Soon I went off to college and it almost seemed like my gaming days might be over for good.

My freshman year of college I moved into a house with a bunch of people. That's when it happened...and I remember that morning vividly. Coming downstairs one day I noticed one of my roommates playing a PlayStation. Pulling up a chair next to him I asked if I could give it a try. He said “yes', saved his game, and handed me the controller. How fantastic the new controllers felt compared to older consoles. Ergonomic. Comfortable.

I pressed start.

The screen flashed.

It was Final Fantasy Tactics.

That night I went out and bought a PS1 and a slew of games. I was back.

To be honest PC gaming has dominated most of my recent gaming experiences. I've finished Modern Warfare and Bioshock on PC and only recently have I gotten an XBOX 360 and started to put my retro-gaming collection back together. I expect it to be a long, expensive, slog but I'm looking forward to it nonetheless. It will be fun to share parts of that experience with the community here so I hope you don't mind some reviews and comments about some older games that you may or may not have already played.

In closing, its great to be a part of 4PP, to contribute to this site and be a part of the gaming community here as a whole.

Alright...enough about me. Time to go kill Sledge.

-Joseph-

Gamertag: Sardunos