I’m somewhat of a pariah at work because I don’t really enjoy PC gaming. I’m not a big FPS player – I suck at Quake and older games in that genre tend to give me motion sickness any day.

I suppose the first thing that would come to your mind is as to why I even work in the video gaming industry?

Group Gaming!

I love group gaming. I love watching a group of people huddled around a TV with a console attached and trying to beat the crap out of each other. Call me old fashioned, but as much as there is to X-BOX Live and other such services, I cant seem to get enough of people getting all emotional together in front of a TV.

My brother and his wife spent a lot of time playing Sega Tennis for the PS2. Their marriage literally relied on it. If they had a conflict or a fight, they’d take it out with that game. And after going through multiple copies that were either lost or scratched beyond disc legibility, they had to resort to ordering copies from places as far as Taiwan.

My friends and I play Burnout 3 (X-Box) or Shadow of Rome (PS2) ever weekend at my place. We order pizza, get some beer and have Burnout ‘Crash Parties’ or contests of macho might on the ‘Gladiator level’ for Shadow of Rome – trying to prove to the other guy who can earn the most salvos (points).

This is exactly why I love to play games. I love to play games with other people. I hate playing games where it’s me on a PC all by myself with either my headphones or a 5.1 sound system vs. some other Tom, Dick, or Harry on a LAN or other network.

For me – it’s too aloof.

And that’s not what providing entertainment is about.

I’m an old school PC gamer. I enjoy playing old PC games and for a very long time I was the kid without a Nintendo or a Sega. Growing up in Ottawa, Canada, I was a bit of an outcast because my parents felt that keeping nothing but a monochrome yellow XT with a CGA display might just have made my chances of becoming a productive adult, greater.

I suppose, the ufnny part of all of this is that I didn’t own a console of my own till my twenties. I ended up getting a PS2 off my brother for a birthday he missed (for a very long and out of difficult circumstances, we ignored birthdays for a few years and after that we made vow to make the best out of everything). It was kind of odd at the time because, I was so used to playing PC games and thoroughly sucking at a majority of the titles.

You see, for a pretty long time I preferred playing Sierra’s old catalogue of quest games, and when those wore out, I played Playstation ports like Metal Gear Solid and Spider-Man (the cartoony version). There were a couple of babies on the PC that I played to death at the time as well (and still do) such as Homeworld 1 and Star Trek: Bridge Commander. I never did get into a lot of the FPS games because they game me nausea.

Shortly after acquiring my Playstation 2, I realized my playing tastes were more or less inclined towards console gaming. I played FFX and FFX-2 and fell in love with how vast of a world you could create. Zone of the Enders: 2 fast paced action and short levels suited my very limited attention span. God of War, and Shadow of Rome are simply some of the best games I’ve ever played. I could never find those in consoles. Not now. Not ever.

Eventually, I realized that my new laptop, a centrino based Toshiba with built in Intel Graphics acceleration, couldn’t play some of the new titles. I was able to play Max Payne 2 and a few others, but I really wanted to play Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Everytime I ran that thing, the @#$ing thing would crash. So I realized I needed to upgrade my PC. The thing is I didn’t want to – I had a really spiffy new laptop, and even though I worked in the gaming industry, I didn’t want bring my work home.

So I got an X-Box. It played all those PC titles I wanted to and at the sametime I didn’t have to spring a gazillion bucks more for a PC with a 5.1 sound system. I wasn’t that big of a FPS player either although I did play bits of Doom 3 on PC and managed to finish it off on my X-Box. Since the console is visually better, I tend to purchase games available on both systems primarily on X-Box (like SSX-3). If I want great sound, I have both systems hooked up to my Home Theater System (although I have a really nice pair of Altec Lansing 2.1 speakers for me to listen to my mp3s off my Ipod).

I also own a PSP and a DS. The PSP is a much better system in terms of performance, but the DS has an amazing level of user friendliness and playability. It took me five minutes to figure out the DS and fifteen for the PSP. I did load a lot of videos on it, but it gave my neck a crick. I do play an enormous amount of Wipeout Pure on it, and I’m eagerly awaiting one of my all-time favourite games on it – Virtua: Tennis. I’m also awaiting Lunar for the DS as well as Metroid.

A lot of the DS titles are N64 ports which I have played using a EMUs. I wasn’t that interested in purchasing a new N64 to sample these titles. I do plan on getting them when the Revolution comes out. I did get a Sega CD system with a copy of Silpheed. I really loved the old Silpheed for the PC. What I need with the Sega CD is a proper Genesis to go with it because it doesn’t run without it, and for the time being I’m stuck until I find enough time to go on E-Bay.

As far as mobile gaming in itself goes, I played a lot of Splinter Cell on my old Nokia 6230, and after finishing it, I got a Sony Ericsson 750i. The Ngage is too outdated for my liking. It was outdated as a phone when it first came out, and I don’t think Nokia can convince me to purchase a series 60 phone with 4096 colors when I can keep my handheld gaming restricted to superior handhelds which I already own or better phones. Also – they’re pretty darn ugly

This game had potential - I swore it did.

As I went along, I realized what a total wasted effort this was because the camera was driving me mad. Now I love the visuals of the game and it had honest-to-god-i-swear potential until that camera just shoved itself in my face. It could have been the 'Ninja Scroll' of the games but the freaking camera was so out of focus most of the time that my newbie gamer room mate and myself spat on the X-BOX controller and replaced it with SSX3.

The moral: Any game has a chance, and people will try to get beyond the first level, if they spend enough time tweaking the camera. I guess thats why MGS is still king of the genre. The mechanics of that, in itself is another story.

-a