Wow. Halfway through this series. You can kind of tell I'm struggling to get to the 15 parts I wanted to. People who have 10,000 word essays in uni, how do you guys do it? Anyway, continuing the story. I'd just finished primary school. Great school it was, aside from one crap year. Good bunch of kids for the most part, but I don't talk to more than a couple of people from there now, including Daniel, who I haven't seen or heard of since I left). This new school was still in the area, but it was a high school, whereas my old one was only up to the 6th Grade.

So yeah, Year 7. New school, new teachers, new opportunities. It was the whole one teacher per subject thing that was all weird. Not weird in a bad way, but in primary school, you'd be in your one class for all your subjects (save for Sports/PE, which would either be in the gym or out on the oval). Now we'd have different classrooms and teachers for each subject. It was crazy. The school was far bigger as well. In the first few weeks, I'd often rock up late to class since I'd have no idea where I was going. Sometimes I'd even wander right past my classroom and kids would yell out the window saying it's in here.

Anyway, what did I do in Year 7? Not a lot in terms of gaming during school. I remember simply hanging out with my friends out on the oval, and I'd bring my Game Boy Color to school and play a bit of Pokémon, but I didn't know anyone who had a Game Boy to battle with. Sometimes I'd join in when they played cricket, but most of the time they played soccer, which I never really enjoyed playing (at least in real life, in game form I do enjoy it).

School was good, though. My teachers were all pretty helpful, but things like tests and essays were a little different. Until high school, I'd never written an essay before. I had, I think, five teachers for seven subjects. One teacher was my English and Humanities, another for Math and Science, one for PE (who was actually my PE teacher at my primary school, which was awesome). I ended up having him as my PE teacher for five years. One more for Home Eco and one last one for Woodwork. Gee, that Woodwork teacher got a lot of unfair scuff from the kids. Nobody seemed to like him, and the worst thing was that he wasn't mean or anything. He was one of those teachers who was just... there, you know?

Yeah, gaming outside of school was much more convenient, though. I quickly became friends with some new kids who were much more into their games and I actually met people who had an Xbox 360. It was the first time I had played one, when I went to my friend Jake's house. We played a bit of Gears of War, which I guess was okay. I've never really been into the series. When I played Gears 3 at my mate Peter's house, that was off, but the first two are kinda average. That's coming from me having only put about 10 hours into all three games combined, mind you. Most of that was on Gears 3 as well.

Speaking of playing something for a first time, one of those local government-funded youth centres just opened up right behind my school. After school, three days a week (Tuesday, Thursday and Friday), I'd go there. They had about half a dozen PC's, a Playstation 2, a POOL TABLE YO, and a constant supply of cordial, juice, water and other snacks like biscuits, lollies, potato chips, etc. Fridays were the night session. Bring $1 and you got dinner, fish and chips. You basically got a serving of chips and a quarter piece of fish. Not a bad feed at all.

Anyway, bit off topic. Something for the first time. The PC's. I've never used one for gaming up to that point. It was really confusing, what, with the keys doing everything. There were far too many keys for me to keep track of everything. What keys did an action? What keys weren't assigned to anything? On consoles, that's no worries. All the buttons on, say, a PS2 controller do something for the game, but about half the keys on a PC keyboard don't do anything for the game. I couldn't comprehend it at first.

And I picked the perfect game to learn to play PC games. Command and Conquer 3. Wow, I was so lost. The computers were all hooked up to each other and we'd run LAN sessions against other players, either 1v1 or 2v2. Geez, I hated going against that Dwayne kid. Guy was a freak. He'd have so much stuff set up in the first minute or so. He could get more things set up in one minute than I could manage in about 10, heck, maybe 15 would be more appropriate. But I soon picked up how to play the game. Also, some shooting game (I think it was Soldier of Fortune, but it might have been Counter-Strike) was another game everyone played. I picked it up quickly, but I'd rather have played Half-Life. For some reason, though, no one wanted to play it.

Apparently this game was more popular than Half-Life 2 a few years ago amongst kids my age.
I had to Google this screenshot. The HUD doesn't even look familiar at all. 

The youth centre was open three days a week, from 3:30 to 7pm. After 5pm, most people left, so for the most part I'd have the PS2 in the other room all to myself. They had Guitar Hero, so I'd shape up my skills there. It was at this place that I learned to make the transition to the harder difficulties, and early 2008 I started to play on Expert. Six months into Expert, I started to get a few 100% scores on some of the songs, as well as getting 5 stars on the harder tracks. Pretty solid effort, I believe. It's not a difficult game to learn, but man, is it hard to master, particularly the harder tracks on Expert. I passed Through the Fire and Flames for the first time well over three years ago, and I'm still even getting as low as 85% of the total notes in the song.

But the fact that I got roughly half a dozen hours a week extra practice on the game helped immensely. I suppose it was playing with others that helped, I've no idea. It's not as if I'd still be playing on Medium if I never played there, but it helped with things like my co-op skills. Another thing I learnt was how to use Star Power effectively, instead of a case of using it as soon as I got it. Use it where chords are rather than single notes. Repeating triple chords are Star Power gold. And so on and so forth. I'll take this time to end this part of the blog series here. Hope you're enjoying it. We're half way home.

What do you prefer to play your games on, a console or a PC? Let me know in the comments section below.

Contents:
Part 01 | Part 02 | Part 03 | Part 04 | Part 05 | Part 06 | Part 07 | Part 08 
Part 09 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15