disclaimer: i tend to post lengthy ... posts.
i'm actually relatively new to the whole online gaming sector. especially on pc. i believe my first experience with online gaming was rainbow six (the very first one) way back in like 1998. at the time my parents had this old clunker of a machine. i think it was a pentium 2 with the leetest 2x cd-rom drive you would have ever seen. at least that is what i tried to convince myself. it had some crappy integrated graphics abomination and as such what was supposed to be fairly good visuals were just a muddy mess. and to top that off, we had a 56.6k modem and were using juno for our service provider. anyways, so i did try to play online, and by try i mean i would log on and proceed to run around the map and saw that everyone was just kinda standing around and wouldn't die if i unloaded an entire clip into them ... and then ... i would just magically die. at the time i had no idea what was going on and i got really pissed (clearly it was that ultimate skill defeating demon named lag, but again, i was a total kn00b). so i stopped playing.
then my parents got a newer pc in late 1999. this one had a celeron processor, and again i don't know the speed. but since it was a celeron it really doesn't matter. those things can't do crap. anyways, this pc worked fine for playing diablo and diablo2, but i still couldn't do online because of dial up internet. but then, i bought star trek voyager: elite force when it launched. this was the first time i came to the really hard realization about pc hardware -- rarely is your hardware really good enough. i had spent money on a game that i couldn't play it turned out. that was really disappointing. and it wasn't for about another year before i could finally convince my parents to get a new video card for the pc (again, integrated graphics ftl!). when i did get it, i again tried to play online and again lag just killed the whole experience. that killed my gaming for a bit.
fast forward to the xbox being released. i got one about a year after the system had launched and was reintroduced to fps gaming by halo. i proceeded to play that game about 6-8 hours a day and i actually got pretty darn good. that was my senior year in high school, i don't really know how i found that much time to play when i was taking calc3 and calc based physics ... go figure. in the time that i was able to play that much i actually never lost a game of ffa. that summer though i did my second drum corps tour and so lost all the skill i had built up. after i came back from the summer i just sucked. this forced me to find another game to play. i kinda fiddled around for a bit and didn't actually find something until the next march when i got mechassault and xbox live. again, i was hooked. i played that game even more than i played halo: 8-10 hours / day. and i got even better at that game than halo -- was ranked #3 in the world for a period of time. that was my freshman year in college, which is why i had all the extra time to mess around (even had a girl friend at the time ... so yeah, i didn't sleep much but still got my 4.0 ... seriously, i don't know how). again, after the summer doing drum corps i came back and found all my skill had disappeared. but, before i had left i had joined a clan of sorts and so when i came back i still played some each day because i had a bunch of friends to hang out with online.
fast forward about a year, and i'm starting to look into pc gaming. my parents got me a new sony vaio (big mistake, i will never buy another prebuilt machine) for my freshman year in college. i had played some cs on it off and on, but never really got into it because i just sucked, no innate talent there at all. but anyways, now i started to look into it more and what with hl2 supposedly coming out in the near future i wanted to be ready to play it and hl2:deathmatch. so i started to play more cs with a friend and actually kinda got decent. and by decent i mean i got to about a .75 k/d ratio. i just never got the hang of that game. but, i must admit, it is what has moved me so much to play pc games. so that took up my time until halo2 came out. then i played that some, but it never stuck like halo1.
so yeah, anyways messed around with cs and some hl1 mods until about 2005 (so about 2 years essentially). then guild wars comes out. i pick it up at launch because it has "free online". seriously, that is what got me to play it. anyways, i was hooked instantly. i started a guild in there and in fact, it is still "active" today. we have been through many ups (getting all the way to top 200 in the world during the last competition ladder before factions) and many downs (going effectively dormant for a couple months). i don't play like i used to, but i still log on every now and then ... from my work computer.
fastforward a little to the xbox360 launch. at the time i was working for a local website doing game reviews and as such i made sure i had my 360 on launch. the 360 re-opened my eyes to the online console market. since its release i have been playing it at least once a day. i've gone from pgr3 to gears of war to crackdown to ghost recon to ffxi (bad idea) to halo3 to rock band and pretty much everything in between. i truly enjoy playing on my 360 and think that its online setup is pretty freaking sweet. and no, i don't mind paying $50/yr for it because it works so well and is so well designed. and yes, i own a ps3. and no, i don't like its online better even if it is free. free != better automatically.
so, how did i get back to pc fps games? well, essentially one of the down periods for my gw guild started when one of the officers started to play css. so i decided to play again/too just to try and keep us all together. and while just casually skimming gaming news i heard about crysis. and yeah, well at first i wasn't too excited because far cry wasn't too high on my list. but, as the game got more and more press and info started to come out i got more and more excited. then i heard the specs and i was crushed. there was no way, at the time (about mid 2006) that i was going to be able to play that game on my crappy vaio with its geforce4 mx440. just no way. so i decided that i was gonna save up and get a new pc just to play crysis. and so i did and have my new pc. and i'm totally digging it.
so, with this new pc i play all kinds of games. i play crysis, cod4, world in conflict (my 2007 pc game of the year, hands down), orange box, galactic civilizations 2, and the all powerful addictinggames.com (i know, truly putting all that power under the hood to use, huh?).
anyways, so yeah, that is pretty much my online gaming history from crappy p2 with dial up to a qx6850 with cable.
oh, what about me off teh intrawebz? i'm just a 5th year senior at ku (rock chalk!) getting ready to graduate. last semester i had 4 jobs and this semester i have 3. my major is engineering and frankly, i could get a job anywhere i wanted in the country ... but i haven't even started looking yet. got 2 cats -- athena and serena. live in a town home with 2 of my classmates. love soccer, enjoy going to football games, love ku basketball (and the football team this season was amazing). i enjoy programming a whole lot more than i enjoy structural design but i didn't really know that until i was in my 4th year so it was a little late to change majors. i am able to play the french horn, mellophone, piano, and can fumble around on the guitar. according to rock band i also sing pretty well.
if there is anything else you want to know, just ask!
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