Browsing Month: February 2016

As mentioned previously, I love video games. I suck at them, but that really has very little effect on my overall enjoyment of them. Then came The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. This is a game unlike anything I had played up to this point. You don’t start out playing some predefined character created and designed by some game designer. The game has an inherent freedom that I was unaccustomed to. In the first 5 minutes of the game you get to choose your name, race, appearance, attributes, skills and abilities. You can choose some predefined classes that will give you a general set of stats, skills and abilities or you can choose to be an “Adventurer” and build your own customized class that fits your playing style. The game starts you out in a small fishing village and presents you with a task that opens up the main quest/story for you. However, you do not have to complete a single quest in the main story line to advance your character in levels, skills and abilities. The game is filled with areas to explore, creatures to kill, resources/ingredients to gather, armor and weapons to collect and enough side-quests to fill any two or three other games. You can join and complete quests for various guilds, factions and religious organizations and with the two expansions available you are looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 hours of playtime from a single-player game. With the included editor and building tools, the game has gathered an impressive modding community who have produced everything from simple additional items to quests to full elaborate story lines. I spent nearly a year and half playing it over and over. When the announcement was made that a sequel was in development but still a couple years out, I started looking around for another game to tide me over. About this time I saw an article about the up-coming Jump to Lightspeed expansion for Star Wars Galaxies and decided to give it a try since it had been out for nearly a year by that point, so on April 16, 2004 I began what became my longest affair with a video game to date. Continued in Gaming Episode V: An Empire Divided…  

Summer 1977, I’m five years old and my Dad takes me to the theater for the single most significant event in cinematic history… Star Wars. There just are not enough words to express the impact that movie had on a young boy in the late 70′s. It was like nothing we had ever seen before. We had Lost in Space, Space 1999, Star trek, things like that, but Star Wars was on a completely different level. It was action and adventure, lasers and space ships and the ultimate weapon… the lightsaber. I watched the movies, bought the merchandise, got into lengthy arguments about why Star Wars is better than Star Trek. So naturally, when it comes to video games, it’s a given that you can take just about any genre of game, slap a Star Wars skin over it and I’m going to play it. First it was the old arcade Star Wars game, you know the one, where you replay the final battle against the Death Star. Then there were many, many, very bad Star Wars games for the Atari 2600 and various other consoles which I won’t mention. Then came the Star Wars: X-Wing series of games, space combat simulators that are still some of the most fun you can have with a joystick. Real-Time-Strategy made an appearance in the form of Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, a game that disappointed some, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. FPS came along in the form of Dark Forces which evolved into the Jedi Knight series, still one of the most popular games to carry the name of Star Wars. The Battlefront squad shooters were very popular as well. Knights of the Old Republic is still considered by many to be the best Star Wars story written since the original trilogy (way better than the prequel trilogy). So yeah, I’m a bit of a Star Wars fan. Naturally when I saw the first ads for Star Wars Galaxies I was beside myself in anticipation. A massively multi-player online game set in the Star Wars universe, it was a dream come true. Of course, after the original announcement, it was delayed… and delayed again… and then in 2002 as I watched TechTV, I saw a review of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The graphics (at the time) were amazing, the gameplay looked dynamic and the game world itself was so incredibly detailed compared to anything else around. The entire game world, from the terrain to the interiors was built by hand. No randomly generated environments like other games, everything was designed, sculpted and placed individually down to the loaves of bread in the basket on the table in some cabin out in the middle of nowhere. I immediately had to get it and play it. Continued in Part IV, TES…

Enter my first PC. A generic clone PC running a 386DX-40. It was a monster (to me at the time), that could do anything from running Windows 3.1 to connecting to the Internet to Wolfenstein 3D. Wolfenstein was a game-changer, it revolutionized PC gaming in so many ways. Graphics, gameplay design, even the ability to modify the game and share your own levels with others. It ushered in the age of the First Person Shooter, a genre which has dominated the gaming landscape ever since. Battlefield, Call of Duty, the list goes on, they all owe their existence to Wolfenstein. And I played it, I played it a lot… but I never finished it, ’cause as I mentioned in the beginning, I suck at video games. But that doesn’t stop me from trying. Wolfenstein lead me into other games in the FPS genre, Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Duke Nukem 3d, Quake, Blood, Unreal, etc. These games while having differing themes were all fairly similar, you follow the paths through the levels shooting the bad guys until you reach the boss at the end of the level and defeat him to progress to the next level. They all tend to include your basic compliment of weapons, a pistol, shotgun, rifle/machine gun, rocket launcher and sometimes an alpha-class weapon (generally slow firing, extremely powerful and with very limited ammunition, think along the lines of a tactical nuke). While they do try to spice it up sometimes to fit the theme of the game (Heretic/Hexen’s magic spells) the effects are basically the same. Around 1993-94 (when I got my first PC) I began dialing in to local BBS’s (Bulletin Board Systems) which allowed you to access news groups, share files and even play games. The best of these (to me) was something called Legend Of the Red Dragon (LORD). It was a text based door-game similar to the old text adventures on the Ti and C64. The thing that set LORD apart from those old games like Zork was that it was a multi-player game. Each player gets X# of turns a day and how you chose to use those turns could earn you varying amounts of experience. The first person to level up high enough and kill the red dragon wins. After somebody killed the dragon the game would be reset and restarted. Once I graduated from BBS’s to the Internet I was introduced to something called a MUD (Multi-User-Dungeon). MUDs were basically like LORD taken to the next level, a persistent, multi-player, text-based game. The direct interaction with other players enhanced the gaming experience and made it into something entirely new. Continued in Gaming Episode III: Han Shot First…