So why not write a blog on here? I've updated some other sections, like Games, Contacts, Images... might as well keep going!
I've been playing video games for what seems like forever. Ever since my dad bought my brother and I an Atari 2600 way back when I was 6 years old I think, 1981 was it? I still remember the Asteroids tournament they had at Devonshire Mall that year, where they had like forty 2600's setup in the middle of an open space, all playing Asteroids. That was awesome.
My mom, a teacher, brought home a Commodore PET computer once in a while from school, and we loaded games off the tape drive and played them in green-screen goodness. That was actually a really fun machine to play on.
I eventually got a Commodore Vic-20 and played a few games on it, although they were pretty boring compared to the ones on my friends' Commodore 64. The C64 was about as awesome a gaming machine that existed at the time, perhaps the best. It got me interested in computers, too. However, they were expensive, and so were the peripherals like the floppy disk drive, printer, and monitor (although you could simply use a TV with available composite video input), so we never had one at home.
Throughout grade school I went over to friends' houses and played games on their Commodore 64s, Nintendo, TurboGrafx-16, Sega and Sega Genesis. My uncle had a ColecoVision, and I thought it was a good system, with games like Donkey Kong and Looping. Of course, I played a bunch of video games at the arcades, which was mainly the corner store near my house, or the 7-Eleven near my friend's house. My friends and I eventually became friends with the owner of a large arcade in the city, and help him organize tournaments in exchange for loads of free games-that was the best.
Much later on, in Grade 11 of high school, my parents bought an AMD 386 DX-40 PC "for the family". Well I was the one who used it almost all of the time. A friend got me into BBSes, downloading games, and just generally messing around with it, figuring it all out. I read loads of Windows magazine, learning about all the available hardware and software, and spent lots of time playing (relatively) early PC games. The DX-40 was a fast machine, better than the Intel 486 SX series, but eclipsed by the Intel 486 DX series.
A PC upgrade didn't happen until a few years later in University, when I bought a used Intel 486 DX-33 from a friend. The CPU was later upgraded to a Intel 486 DX2-66, purchased from another friend. I was using it for school programming projects, Internet access, office applications, and of course, gaming. Gaming started to become more of a priority, and so I eventually splurged and bought a brand-spankin' new Intel Pentium 166 MMX and a 3Dfx Voodoo (the 6MB version!) video card. This was a revolution in terms of performance and graphical capabilities! We were playing a lot of Doom II, Duke Nukem 3D, and then Quake--GL Quake, to be precise... how unbelievable was that game? But perhaps the most significant game of my career came shortly after this: Unreal. The game I'd been waiting for all my life! Using the power of the Voodoo, then later a 32MB Diamond Stealth Riva TNT2 Ultra, Unreal and its descendants changed my life (for better or worse, I still don't know!).
That same PC was later upgraded to an AMD K6 233 courtesy of another friend, then another whole-system upgrade to an AMD Athlon 800 "Thunderbird" which gave way to an Athlon XP 2400+ then an Athlon 64 3700+, and now, finally, an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600.
Video cards have come and gone, starting with the lousy onboard VGA (maybe 256KB) of the 386 motherboard, then a 512KB Trident (I think), a 4MB S3 Virge DX, the aforementioned 3Dfx Voodoo and Diamond Stealth TNT2 Ultra, then a (mediocre) 64MB GeForce 2 MX400, a (also mediocre) 128MB GeForce 4 MX440 8x, a decent 256MB GeForce FX 5900XT, 512MB GeForce 7600GS (chosen for its passive cooling for use in my HTPC), and currently in use is a 640MB GeForce 8800GTS.
A couple weeks ago I finally picked up an Xbox 360 Elite, only my second console (the Atari 2600 being the first!), and have been playing some fun games on it: Rock Band, Guitar Hero II and III, NHL 08, and MLB 2K8. I like that I can stream music and video from my PC and Linux server to it, and it may well replace the HTPC, which will be disconnected from the TV this week and reattached to my desktop LCD monitor for PC gaming, the traditional way!