So, this is my first blog, and I do feel slightly shameless since my first blog post here is to enter in to win that fabulous-blow-your-mind PC. But as I think about it, that PC is worth doing a lot of things for and this is definitely not the most shameless thing one could do to try to win it. To skip the long story and go straight for the short reason on why I'm writing, just go down to the paragraph with the ***.
As long as I've been able to crawl around, a PC has been in my family. And growing up with it has made it in a weird way, a sort of a sibling. As I'm sure it was for many of you, some of my first experiences with games were on the PC. My grandfather loved them and took on the home PC with passion and hobby. Vacations with them were always the ones I looked forward to most because he'd always have the latest software and games (and this was in a time where there was no such as "windows" and you had to run everything from DOS).
It also gave something my grandfather and I could talk about and relate to and I feel that I was able to get to know how great of a man my grandfather was because of that time I spent with him working. But I know, no one wants to hear about a sappy story of a boy and his grandfather…what we love is drama, and there has been plenty of that in the past. I compared the PC to a sibling like figure, and just like siblings, there are times where you want to threaten them with odd blunt objects and throw them off your balcony.
As games got better, faster, cooler, my PC sat there unchanging…slowly at first but more quickly as time progressed, decaying and becoming outdated. Then came the game that seemed cooler than all other games before it. It was the golden head in my Indy cave and I knew I had to buy a new PC just for this game. Finally came the time where I had my own job and the first thing to buy on the list was a brand new PC of course. After what felt like years I was able to buy a PC computer. I went in to a PC store and told the guy what I wanted and the seller was happy to assist. Unfortunately I was too young and naïve to do the research on current PCs. If only I would have I would not have purchased the trendy new slim tower desktop computer. Smaller and sleeker than all your other "clunky" PCs, this slim tower looked cool…but looking cool was the only thing it did well. It was cool for a year and played some of the newer games my old PC couldn't, but the very game I had bought to work on my PC it would not run. It was a simple problem, the PC just didn't have enough RAM. When we came home with some extra RAM to put into the computer we found that the "slim" looked made it inaccessible to most PC accessories. What normally would have fit inside a bigger tower now couldn't fit halfway in this slim tower. Only able to use the smaller of the two RAM parts we purchased the game was able to run on the PC…but at a snails pace.
It wouldn't be till I graduated that I would upgrade to a new PC. Using part of my graduating gift money I wanted to invest in a PC for college. This time I would not be so easily duped! Or so I had thought. I thought I'd want an easily transportable PC so I would buy a laptop but knowing how slow some laptops were I built my own gaming laptop. Throwing in an extra $$$ for all the bells and whistles this thing was heavy as a tower, but at least able to be transported to and from college. However, I still wasn't aware at how limiting laptops were. It worked great for the first two years, but once again, when new games came out I was left at the sidelines watching as my laptop struggle to play them. And now as more years pass, the laptop feels more and more like a old arcade machine.
***This is not to say that my life with a PC has been bad…I've had great memories with friends and family and have been able to experience some great games. The reason I am writing this blog is to not to post my pity story of turtle playing in the past 8 years, but to have the chance to experience the joys of coming together with friends and family online and be caught up in the modern world once more. It is to share our time, our fun, and ourselves with other people. And yes, maybe just a little bit of a desire to play the newest PC titles for once when they come out right away is not a bad reason either.