I feel and good place to start, on a blog about gaming, is how I started gaming. So here goes, let's see how much my ever unreliable memory can recall.
Gaming began for me at quite an early age, being the young'un I am (18's still young, right?). I remember at age 5 or 6, going to a friend's house and playing Worms on his Playstation 1, progressing pretty far through it too. When that got boring we'd play Command and Conquer on his PC, which we never got very far in at all. In all honesty, at this young age, it was mainly my friend who played them, while I sat and watched, bored out of my skull. I could never understand how he could play the same game for so long, when he had so many other toys like pokemon cards and toy soldiers. To look at me then, you would not predict my interest in gaming.
After a few years, this friend got given an Xbox, the original one, as this was long before the 360 and suddenly gaming became interesting. He had, to my memory, around 40 games after just a few months of owning this Xbox, but the one we always played, along with so many like us, was Halo. More often than not we would play the mission 'Assault On The Control Room', as he didn't have Xbox Live to play online. We could play this mission over and over for hours on end, never getting bored of it. But as time passed and I moved from Primary to Secondary school, I lost contact with this friend.
At age 11, I began to play Runescape, an in browser, free to play RPG. I got ridiculed constantly at school for it, but it never put me off. Sure, it's repetitive and takes ages to get anywhere, but it was fun, it held my attention, and the little set of fireworks that used to appear above the character's head when you gained a level in a skill was just so satisfying! I played this, on and off, for a good 7 years, meaning I still do to this day, however this may soon change, although that's another story for another blog post. Runescape was great, in fact, it was the first game I paid for with my own money, while it was free to play, certain aspects are only accessible via 'membership' payments.
When I was about 12, I was given an Xbox for my birthday, having spent years playing it at my friend's house as a child, I was ecstatic when I saw Halo in the box, within a few hours of opening I had completed the campaign, and was a little lost on what to do now. So I looked into the other games that had come with it, and found Midtown Madness 3. Midtown Madness, I have since learned, was a racing series often overlooked in gaming, though for the life of me I can't understand why, such a big open world environment wouldn't be seen again in racing games for at least 3 more years, and such a vast collection of cars, challenges and mixed gameplay in the racing genre not seen again until Forza Motorsport. I adored this game and spent hours on end playing it. It got to such a point my parents began limiting my time, forcing me outside to play with friends.
My gaming life from here trundled along as most do, going from game to game, not finding anything hugely special, until one day, about 6 years ago I found a game for 50p in a bargain bin, in some shop in the back end of no where. This game was Jet Set Radio Future, for the original Xbox, which, at the time, I still had one of. I bought it, came home from whatever wet, English, manor house filled holiday we happened to be on at the time, and began playing it. I cannot sum up Jet Set Radio Future, unfortunately, but to say that other than Runescape it is the only game I have continued to play for more than a year or so (not counting Halo, as for the majority of the years in which I played it, I didn't own my own copy). To this day I still play JSRF, it's a manga style Japanese game produced by Sega, published in 2001 it is set in 2007 Tokyo, in which the mayor has his own private police force, stopping roller bladers from, well, roller blading. You have to mark your territory with graffiti, battle police with graffiti and battle other gangs... You guessed it, with graffiti. This may sound repetitive but each situation has it's own mechanics, and police battles vary from simply knocking over PC Plod and spraying his jacket with graffiti to grinding down the barrel of a tank gun to spray the driver to entering a 'Dream Tower', grinding up floating scenery to the top, only to face the mayor in his madness power suit, now named A.KU.MU for no explainable reason. This game provided hours of fun, and over my Xbox and various Xbox 360s I've racked up a grand total of over 300 hours gameplay time, on a game who's story takes around 10 hours to complete, or 20 hours for 100% completion. This is by far my all time favourite game.
As for my gaming now, as an 18 year old, I have an Xbox 360, an Alienware M17x gaming laptop, and a PS3, which is technically my father's but I bought it and then gave it to him (Long story). I play the usual games, Call of Duty, Runescape, World of Warcraft (Although I recently quit WoW after only a year and a half of playing it), The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Battlefield 3 and so on and so forth. What I'm waiting for is to come across another JSRF... Games like this are rare, but special. I hope to one day, after my Games Design course, help develop another gem of a game.
~Rusty Mongrel.
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