LONG BLOG
Changes: Fear and Loathing in Silicon Valley (And... introductions?!)
I remember unboxing my first gaming console. The PlayStation. The palpable excitement of hooking the little bastard up and clicking the first disk into place. The months that followed, hours of digital joy chock-full of dragons, bandicoots, ninjas, and guns. Platformers and shooters and beat-em-ups that ignited the fire that still burns inside me today; unmitigated, unfiltered, unsoiled love of games.
For years before that I'd spent time with friends and family alike who who had enough income to support such a pastime during the days of the SNES and the Genesis. I had previously tasted videogames and I had a distinct suspicion that I would be smitten with them forever if I had a console of my own. The PlayStation proved my suspicions had merit. I would never be the same.
Around the same time, we assembled our first computer. An unwieldy, ugly beast of cobbled together parts crammed together in an IBM case. Through this maniacal contraption of backdoors and half-working parts, I learned to love entirely new games. WarCraft II and StarCraft became some of the greatest games I had ever played. They were sewed in with Metal Gear Solid, Syphon Filter, and Doom as the games that shaped me.
When the PlayStation 2 came around, I had not yet matured enough as a gamer to know the difference between a good game and a bad one. I sought out anything that piqued my interest, and played it all with the same joyous reverence as I had before. It didn't matter if the game froze occasionally, or I slipped through a wall, or if the difficulty was utterly mind-shatteringly punishing. All I needed was for something on the screen to move when I pressed a button.
Eventually, though, I developed a nose for good and for bad. My adolescence as a gamer made itself known quite suddenly and without warning. Tastes had developed entirely without my realizing it. I ceased to be content with simplicity in my games, and began to research games on the internet, purchase magazines, and therein made my first discovery of entire communities dedicated to videogames. Not so surprising now, looking back on it, but I found the notion of this utterly shocking at the time. More games came, more games went. My library expanded, and Blockbuster became a weekly event of testing the waters for gems slated for future purchase.
The Xbox arrived on the scene and like so many others smitten with Sony, I wrote it off as a fool's errand. Time would prove me very wrong but I was unwilling to see it at the time. I continued to build upon my library, gathering classics like Onimusha to sit on my shelf, proudly displayed alongside a plethora of Mobile Suit Gundam titles, Metal Gear games, and a dozen others that had intrigued me enough to warrant a purchase. The first and second Splinter Cell titles passed through my PlayStation 2. The third would change gaming for me once again.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was the game that changed my mind about the Xbox. It would not be the only game that would force me to enter a platform I had concerns about; later, the Metal Gear Solid siren song would entice me to both the PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 3 systems long before I felt they were viable. My gamble on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was about faith, and that faith was rewarded with one of the most incredible games I'd ever played. When my week long journey through its story had come to an end, I found my faith had been rewarded. Halo, Halo 2, Ghost Recon 2, and Ninja Gaiden rounded out my Xbox library in its entirety. I only played five games on the Xbox, and I have never regretted it once.
When the Xbox 360 came it was received with open arms. I said a fond goodbye to my Xbox and bid an excited hello to the next generation.
And now we arrive at one of the most important changes in my life as a gamer. Somewhere along the way, I had lost that giddiness about gaming. It had been replaced with a sort of grim suspicion. Each game I played suddenly lacked that joy I so fondly remembered. It had been replaced by a series of experienced filters, sampling, tasting, touching, and examining what I played in very minute detail; the whole experience had become uncomfortably mechanical. The grand sense of pleasure had been misplaced somewhere and in its stead was merely the sensory input without any of the eager, pleased interpretation.
I still don't know exactly how that happened. For a terrible moment I thought I had outgrown games.
I started to search for anything that could reawaken that sensation. I crawled back to news sites and game magazines in an effort to find something in the works that could ignite that spark again. I returned to old games with feigned vigor, trying my hands at speed runs and other more challenging attempts. The Hard mode became my new Normal setting. Something would flip the switch and I'd be back to enjoying games again instead of looking at them as a time-wasting chore; a second appetite I had to occasionally appease in order to feel whole. My era of fear and loathing had begun.
Every new game was met with my grim expectation of failure. Studios closed, Sony's profit margins dropped, Nintendo started making shitloads of money off of fitness products, and I lost track of what games actually looked good to me. My own tastes had left me. I was staring at a smorgasbord of delights but nothing looked good anymore. I was about as dreary as I could be when it came to games.
And then... Destructoid.
I don't even remember how I got here. Google, probably. I'm just happy I did. I lurked for awhile, watching the news roll in. This and that going on in the industry. A preview here, an editorial there. The occasional interesting community blog. Eventually I started to feel my own excitement return to me. I registered to make the occasional comment. I wrote my first blog ever, an event that was confusing and more than a little hypocritical (I had previously sworn that I thought the practice of blogging was ridiculous). You can even see my pessimistic attitude in action if you read it. Even now it's a little hard to believe I wrote that.
Slowly but surely, Destructoid turned my unhappy state of stagnation around. Surrounded on all sides by people who love videogames the same way I used to, it was only a matter of time before that overwhelming collective joy infected me again. Games became about fun again. The fire was back.
We've known one another for awhile now, but it seemed like the right time to make the formal introduction.
So, hello Destructoid. Hello, and thank you.
Blindfire 
CelicaCrazed 1
Beyamor 1
Nihil 1
For years before that I'd spent time with friends and family alike who who had enough income to support such a pastime during the days of the SNES and the Genesis. I had previously tasted videogames and I had a distinct suspicion that I would be smitten with them forever if I had a console of my own. The PlayStation proved my suspicions had merit. I would never be the same.
Around the same time, we assembled our first computer. An unwieldy, ugly beast of cobbled together parts crammed together in an IBM case. Through this maniacal contraption of backdoors and half-working parts, I learned to love entirely new games. WarCraft II and StarCraft became some of the greatest games I had ever played. They were sewed in with Metal Gear Solid, Syphon Filter, and Doom as the games that shaped me.
When the PlayStation 2 came around, I had not yet matured enough as a gamer to know the difference between a good game and a bad one. I sought out anything that piqued my interest, and played it all with the same joyous reverence as I had before. It didn't matter if the game froze occasionally, or I slipped through a wall, or if the difficulty was utterly mind-shatteringly punishing. All I needed was for something on the screen to move when I pressed a button.
Eventually, though, I developed a nose for good and for bad. My adolescence as a gamer made itself known quite suddenly and without warning. Tastes had developed entirely without my realizing it. I ceased to be content with simplicity in my games, and began to research games on the internet, purchase magazines, and therein made my first discovery of entire communities dedicated to videogames. Not so surprising now, looking back on it, but I found the notion of this utterly shocking at the time. More games came, more games went. My library expanded, and Blockbuster became a weekly event of testing the waters for gems slated for future purchase.
The Xbox arrived on the scene and like so many others smitten with Sony, I wrote it off as a fool's errand. Time would prove me very wrong but I was unwilling to see it at the time. I continued to build upon my library, gathering classics like Onimusha to sit on my shelf, proudly displayed alongside a plethora of Mobile Suit Gundam titles, Metal Gear games, and a dozen others that had intrigued me enough to warrant a purchase. The first and second Splinter Cell titles passed through my PlayStation 2. The third would change gaming for me once again.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was the game that changed my mind about the Xbox. It would not be the only game that would force me to enter a platform I had concerns about; later, the Metal Gear Solid siren song would entice me to both the PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 3 systems long before I felt they were viable. My gamble on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was about faith, and that faith was rewarded with one of the most incredible games I'd ever played. When my week long journey through its story had come to an end, I found my faith had been rewarded. Halo, Halo 2, Ghost Recon 2, and Ninja Gaiden rounded out my Xbox library in its entirety. I only played five games on the Xbox, and I have never regretted it once.
When the Xbox 360 came it was received with open arms. I said a fond goodbye to my Xbox and bid an excited hello to the next generation.
And now we arrive at one of the most important changes in my life as a gamer. Somewhere along the way, I had lost that giddiness about gaming. It had been replaced with a sort of grim suspicion. Each game I played suddenly lacked that joy I so fondly remembered. It had been replaced by a series of experienced filters, sampling, tasting, touching, and examining what I played in very minute detail; the whole experience had become uncomfortably mechanical. The grand sense of pleasure had been misplaced somewhere and in its stead was merely the sensory input without any of the eager, pleased interpretation.
I still don't know exactly how that happened. For a terrible moment I thought I had outgrown games.
I started to search for anything that could reawaken that sensation. I crawled back to news sites and game magazines in an effort to find something in the works that could ignite that spark again. I returned to old games with feigned vigor, trying my hands at speed runs and other more challenging attempts. The Hard mode became my new Normal setting. Something would flip the switch and I'd be back to enjoying games again instead of looking at them as a time-wasting chore; a second appetite I had to occasionally appease in order to feel whole. My era of fear and loathing had begun.
Every new game was met with my grim expectation of failure. Studios closed, Sony's profit margins dropped, Nintendo started making shitloads of money off of fitness products, and I lost track of what games actually looked good to me. My own tastes had left me. I was staring at a smorgasbord of delights but nothing looked good anymore. I was about as dreary as I could be when it came to games.
And then... Destructoid.
I don't even remember how I got here. Google, probably. I'm just happy I did. I lurked for awhile, watching the news roll in. This and that going on in the industry. A preview here, an editorial there. The occasional interesting community blog. Eventually I started to feel my own excitement return to me. I registered to make the occasional comment. I wrote my first blog ever, an event that was confusing and more than a little hypocritical (I had previously sworn that I thought the practice of blogging was ridiculous). You can even see my pessimistic attitude in action if you read it. Even now it's a little hard to believe I wrote that.
Slowly but surely, Destructoid turned my unhappy state of stagnation around. Surrounded on all sides by people who love videogames the same way I used to, it was only a matter of time before that overwhelming collective joy infected me again. Games became about fun again. The fire was back.
We've known one another for awhile now, but it seemed like the right time to make the formal introduction.
So, hello Destructoid. Hello, and thank you.
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About Blindfireone of us since 7:06 AM on 06.09.2009
Howdy, I go by Blindfire. Welcome to my blog on Destructoid.
I was a late bloomer when it comes to videogames. Growing up, my family has never been especially affluent, and we pretty much just didn't have the cash to throw down on Nintendo or Sega.
I didn't really play a lot of games outside of the occasional visits to family friends in Phoenix, where I got acquainted with classics like Sonic, Donkey Kong, and Mortal Kombat. I was awful at them but I didn't care, I knew then and there that I'd fallen in love with videogames. The next time I'd get to play videogames would be on a PC, home-built basically from scratch by my uncle and my mother. It was a piece of crap that housed everything I could cram onto it, from Doom to WarCraft II. It underwent several hardware mods as time went on, but eventually we moved on to pre-built equipment and haven't looked back since. Some of my fondest memories, though, are of starting up DOS and typing in the command string to start up Rise of the Triad. I still have a huge soft spot for RTS games, as WarCraft II was the first game I really understood all the mechanics of.
The PlayStation was my first console. It was a pastime for me more than anything, really. A handful of decent games that I played occasionally when I wasn't doing something else. It wasn't until Metal Gear Solid that I really started to grasp gaming as a kind of physical concept. Metal Gear Solid made gaming a tangible thing for me, and I still have a powerful love for that series to this day.
I didn't become a real gamer until around 2004. That year, my gaming collection grew exponentially for the PS2, and for my newly-acquired Xbox. I made so many discoveries about games and gaming that year that I literally can't quantify it; it was an epiphany that has led me to expanding my horizons and seeking every new game experience I can find.
These days I try to keep an open mind about games, and let anything surprise me.
I was a late bloomer when it comes to videogames. Growing up, my family has never been especially affluent, and we pretty much just didn't have the cash to throw down on Nintendo or Sega.
I didn't really play a lot of games outside of the occasional visits to family friends in Phoenix, where I got acquainted with classics like Sonic, Donkey Kong, and Mortal Kombat. I was awful at them but I didn't care, I knew then and there that I'd fallen in love with videogames. The next time I'd get to play videogames would be on a PC, home-built basically from scratch by my uncle and my mother. It was a piece of crap that housed everything I could cram onto it, from Doom to WarCraft II. It underwent several hardware mods as time went on, but eventually we moved on to pre-built equipment and haven't looked back since. Some of my fondest memories, though, are of starting up DOS and typing in the command string to start up Rise of the Triad. I still have a huge soft spot for RTS games, as WarCraft II was the first game I really understood all the mechanics of.
The PlayStation was my first console. It was a pastime for me more than anything, really. A handful of decent games that I played occasionally when I wasn't doing something else. It wasn't until Metal Gear Solid that I really started to grasp gaming as a kind of physical concept. Metal Gear Solid made gaming a tangible thing for me, and I still have a powerful love for that series to this day.
I didn't become a real gamer until around 2004. That year, my gaming collection grew exponentially for the PS2, and for my newly-acquired Xbox. I made so many discoveries about games and gaming that year that I literally can't quantify it; it was an epiphany that has led me to expanding my horizons and seeking every new game experience I can find.
These days I try to keep an open mind about games, and let anything surprise me.