Guess who's back?

WHAT IS UP BITCHES!?

Opening this one in djWHEAT style, kinda feels shitty starting the 2nd post in the row with a shit lot of time in between, to my defense I have been fucking busy with school and basically devoting 90+% of my free time to Starcraft. So this blog will essentially be about my expirience with Starcraft 2 over the past 2 months ever since I decided to switch games fully.

Part 1 aka what I just said:
To elaborate on the sentence I just wrote: For the past (roughly) 2 months most of my under the week days (you may refer to them as monday till friday) looked like this: Wake up at 7 in the morning, go to school for roughly 6 or 7 hours, drink a shit lot of coffee to get some focus going, and then play starcraft for a couple hours. After that I either tune in to some player stream (destiny, tyler, huk to name some of my favorites that I tune into regulary), watch one of the onemoregame.tv shows or watch some gsl/tournament vod. And then it gets to the point where it's 8 p.m. and I either watch more starcraft, watch some of my own replays, or watch replays that my friends sent me to get some feedback on. Before I switch over to the weekend part of things I'd like to talk some more about that final point. Another part as to why I'm so in love with starcraft these days is the fact that basically most of my close friends play it and we talk about it all the time, I have a buddy in school that I talk about starcraft with every free second, I discuss it on the weekends with other friends and so on. And I really like the fact that my friends appreciate the feedback I can provide and that I get a lot of "yeah sent him some games he is fucking good at helping you out" which makes me quiet happy. Anyways back to my week schedule. On the weekends it's usually me either going out on friday and then getting home/sleeping over at my buddies (given that he switches nicks by the week I'll use his newest one Trollzerg, but in earlier posts I refered to him as mudda) and watching replays. That is followed by what we refer to as Starcraft Saturday which is basically us playing starcraft all saturday long. Sunday is a calming for me where I might watch a game or two and play a couple ladder games, but essentially I just chill and spent some time with the family.

GS fucking L:
Now even though I watch all the big events (dreamhack, hsc, nasl etc.) GSL is by far my favorite. I purchased my first season ticket this month for roughly 7 Euro, and let me tell you that it's the best fucking 7 euro I ever spent on anything. The sheer amount of stuff they release per week is insane, and even though I watch at least 1-2 hours a day I only managed to watch all of code s and some of code a, so given that we are one week away from the finals I still have around 20 or 30 code a matches to watch. And the great part about that season ticket is that I can come back at any given time and still watch those games.
Switching over to other tournaments: After MLG Columbus it was pretty much insane since it felt like there was a tourney going on every other weekend. For me it felt like it went from MLG into Dreamhack into HSC into NASL and during all of that I still watched a shit lot of GSL as I said. Throw in the fact that I spent about 8 hours a week catching up on onemoregame.tv's shows, you can roughly imagine how much time I devote to this game. Personally I really like how I put it sometimes: "If I don't play it I watch it, and if I don't watch I play".

Playing:
In my previous blogpost I talked about how much I love winning and getting better and in the last infamous 2 months that I keep repeating I got soo damn much better. I literally went from sucking at this game and being pretty much at the bottom of bronze to having a, atleast I feel like, great understanding of the game and a skill that is catching up to that understanding.
The first month of really comiting my time to Starcraft 2 was pretty intense, I went from having a few wins in bronze and being at the bottom of my devision to breaking into the top 8 with more than 1400 ladder point and literally playing against favored player almost every game until I finally made it into silver. And during that time I could really tell that I was getting better by the day and I started to figure out each and every matchup more and more and I learned to really understand my race (protoss aka that imba shit in zergs eyes).
One thing I'd like to talk about briefly here before I move on to "month 2" is my feel for the 3 matchups that I have to give a fuck about, which is PvZ, PvT and PvP.
Given that I don't give a fuck about alphabetical order I'll just start with PvZ. Now the great part about PvZ for me in bronze was the fact that before I really got into it Zerg was the race I had played the most against, said school buddy and mudda have been playing zerg basically ever since and given that mudda got into the game through me and I learned Zerg with him, I really understood that race well and that's what I feel made me win a shit lot against zerg. Combined with the fact that one of day 9's dailies really gave me a hole new inside on makro I was able to basically out makro every zerg the game threw at me. I'll just push back PvT a little bit since that one is kinda special for me and move on to PvP:
Essentially in my eyes PvP is by far the worst matchup in the entire game right now, not in terms of how well I can play it, but in terms of how I feel about it. It's still the most underdeveloped matchup and even though blizzard tried to fix 4 gating it's still there (just look up the most recent code a finals), BUT the homestory cup with the top 3 being protoss showed that PvP is starting to evolve, we do start to see more 3/4 Gate into Robo stuff, we do start to see expansions and DTs will become really really huge in my eyes (just go over to taketv.net and check out the final game between naniwa and huk to see what I'm talking about, or just watch the hole series, it is by far the highest level of pvp we have seen thus far). And one thing that I totally agree with is what Liquidtyler said on the recent State of the game podcast: Blizzard did not remove 4 gating as a viable opening, but given that a defensive 4 gate is starting to stop an offensive one we should see 4 gating as a viable opening and then have people transitiong out of it into immortal, or coloss, or expnasion build in generel. And that is what I believe is the future of PvP, and recently I have really startet to fall in love with a mix of blink stalker and immortals.
PvT:
This matchup was by far my worst one for a long, long time, part of it due to me rarely playing terran and mainly due to me not understanding terran. Now you might say "just go on teamliquid and get a standard pvt build order duh", but I fucking hate that. In my book you should never do anything because some build order you saw said it. And what I like to do is simply build my stuff based upon when I think I'll need it done and how much money I have at point x to spent upon it. And I remember that I had a wednesday where I literally lost 3 PvTs in a row I made two decisions:
a)I have to step up my micro (which gave me the win in game number 4 of that day)
but more important b) I have to figure out a way to fuck terran so hard that they would literally rage quit after I destroyed the shit out of them
So I sat down thought about some stuff and literally came up with my first build order. Essentially it was just a 3 gate expand into HT tech with some immortals, and at that time it was poorly timed, not designed to go past a maxed out 2 base attack and what not, but I went on a terran raping spree by storming/force fielding the shit out of the bio ball. And I feel that was a point that really put me on a hole other level. I actually sat down, looked upon the matchup at it's own, and really tried to do my best to destroy what had been beating me. Later on I realized how to deal with siege tanks and how to actually expand past 2 bases and what not, but me sitting down and creating this build order in custom games against the computer until I was happy and actually fucking some kids with it on the ladder felt great and helped a lot in terms of getting better by analyzing what went wrong in the games I lost and how to fix it (there is a pretty damn awesome day 9 daily about this as well btw).
Even though I did right quiet a bit about my feel about each of my matchup I'd just like to ad one aspec to the non mirror matchups:
One thing iNcontrol once said about Zerg that really changed my look upon that matchup is: "In a perfect world zerg would just drone up and expand all game long" and that recently let me to a point where I try to intercept with that, I don't necessarily try to kill him (him being my opponent mr zerg) but force him to not drone up, or maybe even snipe an expansion. And since I am not a big fan of anything stargate at this point I try to do this by either doing it huk style and take a couple units and see what I can do or use DTs, which I feel like is, besides air, stil Zergs biggest weekness. You either force a couple spore crawler (which costs money and drones) and you have him scared which results in him putting those on all his bases for the rest of the game, or you kill some drones and cause some damage, and you may even force him to morve an overseer  and keep him with his army. You might want to check out Game 6 between Idra and MC at MLG Cbus to see my point. And I just played a game a few minutes ago which showed me a similiar thing in PvT. If Terran lets protoss Max out with a strong death ball army and you don't apply presure via drops you will either loose your army or trade armies which usually results in the protoss out makroing you due to gateways and chrone boost. And funny enough in that recent game the terran did not apply presure what so ever which allowed me to take 3 bases, max out and simple overrun that guy, his drop came way too late. So point is, I have to apply presure on zerg, while Terran has to apply presure on me.
Month 2:
Month two started with me ripping things up in silver and mainly getting matched against gold/plat guys, but blizzard being a bitch the season lock came and I could not continue to rise up into gold, but I'm looking forward to changing that starting next wednesday. Another thing about month two is the fact that I was at a point where I did not meet a zerg for a week or two which resulted in me sucking at pvz when I got back to playing zerg, but I managed to get back into PvZ and thanks to me playing  Terran for 90% of my games for two weeks I enjoy fucking the shit out of terran. Or how huk would say: "Fuck me two ou"

Moving on:
I'd like to address to more things starcraft and then I'll wrap it up with some misc stuff.
First thing is that I have decided to combine one of my other hobbies, video editing, with starcraft. I'll "cast" some replays of my friends and myself pointing out mistakes and I'll be one of those people who do one of these "from bronze to grandmasters" thing, which is essentially my biggest goal in this game at the moment. So expect some youtube stuff from me in the close future. If you are interested in checking out some of my previous stuff checkout thevetoentertainemnt on youtube (too lazy to link atm) to see the halo montage stuff I have done thus far (especially the 2nd one took a lot of time and I put a shit lot of hard work into it). Plus there is that neat Elite fun video from halo 2 which I posted in a previous post. I'll keep you updatet with the upcoming sc 2 stuff as I get around to get it done.
Which leats straight up into point 2, which is the upcoming 6 effing weeks of summer vacation (given that I'll be done with school next year my final summer vacation as well). This will allow me to play a shit lot of starcraft, hang out with my friends, get all the stuff done and not be tired each day due to school forcing me to wake up early. Plus the 2nd and 3rd week will be the shizzle. Mudda's parents go to vacations and we'll essentially set up a gaming house for those 2 weeks. There'll be roughly 6 people coming over in those 2 weeks and we'll play the shit out of starcraft 2 for atleast 6 hours per day. It's gonna be so damn awesome and I'm sure it'll help us all at improving a lot. The final two weeks will be kinda bitter sweet. I'll go to france with my parents, which is sick and I'm looking forward to being so far away from home really getting away from all the shit I have to deal with her and just calm down and relax for 2 weeks, on the sad side I'm kinda scared of how it will affect me as a sc 2 player. Sounds pretty damn nerdy I know, but I guess I'll just find a way to play some bot matches to at least keep my mechanics on track.

Misc and wraping up:
Stuff like Xperia Play reviews will come out either during the upcoming six weeks or after I'm back from france where I'll get around to actually play all the games I already have, if you have the phone yourself please check out backstab hd, that game is insanly good. On another note I recently got my hands on a SC BW key (the person who is responsibly for that knows how grateful I am) and I fucking love that game, campaign is sick, I love how much more difficulty that mechanics are and I kinda hate battle.net 2.0 now.
Other than that thanks for reading, I appreciate it, and  even though it s ounds lame by now: I'll try to not let another 6 weeks past till the next one. Next big post should be about the 2 week gaming house, expect me to be super happy about that. Oh and I'm predicting ZvZ finals between Nestea and Losira with Nestea snacking his 3rd GSL win ;) Feel free to quote me on that, sorry for any grammar mistakes I didn't read over the hole thing before posting. Peace out!

Switching to Starcraft 2 after 6 years (or so) of playing Halo

Sup everyone, sorry I couldn't release another blogpost early, I have been really busy in the last weeks, but I'll try to have these coming out more regulary (look forward to a lot of Android stuff when I'll start talking about the Xperia Play).

Without any further "blabla I didn't do x because of y" I'll start by talking about something that does have a huge impact on my life:

I have been a Halo player ever since I bought H1 in 2004 (guess those 6 years should be 7 by now) and I played every single game of the series to death. In this post I'll explain why I did make the switch to Starcraft and what will happen with me and Halo in the future.

Part 1 aka Halo ftw:
As I said I picked up H1 in 2004, and because I fucking can I'll lay down my history with halo:
In 04 I was one of these guys who would play tons of Singleplayer games and fall in love with said games story, the only shooter I played before Halo was Star Wars Republic Commando (one of the best games I played to day), to give you an Idea of what I was playing: Basically anything with Star Wars in the title and a lot of need for speed (the good old parts) and some random other stuff. I was all about singleplayer, getting into the story and just playing through those games multiple times, as you might know from my first blog post especially the Knights of the Old Republic series, which I still look upon as the best RPG series I ever played (yes I did play Final Fantasy...).
So back to Halo, I didn't know what to play next so one of my school buddies, who I'd talk about KotOR a lot, recommended me this game called Halo. At that point I had never really heard about Halo, and the main thing I used to play on was my PC, so I bought the PC Version for 10 bucks. The only console I owned was the PS2, which I used to play a effing lot of Dragonball on. Anyway Halo was sort of my first Shooter (republic commando being more of a team shooter) and since I was a huge star wars nerd I feel in love with this hole scifi alien shit in halo. I still remember spending most of my free time playing through campaign, and since I sucked at shooters back then (and game time been limited given the fact that I was like 12 years old) it took me 2 weeks. Yeah two weeks to finish a game that wouldn't take me more than a day or even a half nowadays. As I said I feel in love with the gameplay, story and characters so I played through H1 a lot. After finishing it I remembered that there was a thing called Internet (which I wasn't able to use a lot due to us having a shitty dial up connection (ISDN)), so I googled Halo and guess what the second part had just come out for the original xbox. I'm not sure whether I already owned an xbox to play kotor 2 (since around that time my pc was a bitch and I had to buy the second kotor for the xbox) or if I bought it for h2 and kotor 2 was after that. Anyways I picked up Halo 2, sucked even more at shooting thanks to the controller shit, and played through that campaign. I did play some coop with my bust buddy everyone ones in a while, but the idea of multiplayer was still a stranger. That all changed when I started watching montages, got decent internet, played h1 pc online like there was no other game, and I found out about XBC (esentially allowing you to play custom games in halo without xbox live, which was credit card based at that time). So I started to play like there was not much else to do (keep in mind that I was at the age where you don't really have anything to do since you are inbetween chilling at the playground and going out to drink) and it got to the point where me and my best buddie (I shall refer to him as Mudda for the sake of this article) played halo 2 on my xbox via xbc every weekend, and even when I had to do a presentation for school I'd end up spending most of the time preparing that presentation playing halo 2 with my buddies.
This avid Halo 1/Halo 2 playing (at one point I picked up the h2 mappack disc for moar maps) went on until one thing should change online gaming for me forever.

Christmas 06 aka Xbox 360 fuck yeah!:
As you might guess from the title I got my Xbox 360 at christmas 06 and it did change everything. I could use effing XBL, my 360 came with Kameo and PGR3 (boooo!), but the real deal where the 2nd controller and the 3 months of xbl. I signed up, put in halo 2 and that disc would not leave my xbox for the next month. The h3 beta came out in mai and I never played a game more within 3 weeks. At the end of h2 I was at a point where I got into mlg and competitive gaming and would spent my halo time playing mlg customs and ffas with pros (for those of you who know: gunsh0t was one of the names).

Halo 3 :(
Halo 3 came around and it fucked my love for halo straight up in the ass. I loved the beta, but I guess I love everything close to halo in the first few weeks. The more I played the more I realized the flaws: Melee which had so much depth in the previous games (can you say bxr, bxb?) became just dumb, the br, which was a weapon that I used to crush hole teams with, was bullshit now, and the netcode was straight up bullshit. Matchmaking was full of AR starts and shotty snipes was the main gametype. But MLG came around to safe the day and thanks to the mlg playlist (the last good thing bungie did) I stuck around and played the game a lot again. Just to keep in mind: I still played a lot of h2 and h2 for pc (aka vista).  So anyway that went on till like 09 where I was so fucking sick of this broken game that I literily stuped caring.

2010: Woo beta time, and damn those bastards killed my love
2010 came around (I did buy ODST, and thanks to the midship remake I played quiet a lot of halo again, but not as much and not as intense as I sued to) and MS announced that they'd shut down live support for xbox 1 games. The good part was that that allowed me to spent the last week in the live of the game that will always be my love (yeah I am at a point where I look upon h2 as the greatest game ever, and every single time I get around to play again I love every single fucking second of it, god damn it h2 I fucking love you) to play the game at its best: I was in a clan from the mlg community that had around 30 people on at every single point and I did nothing else than midship ffas and random 4th with mlg settings, I had so much fucking fun in that week, just thinking about it makes me fucking sentimental.
Switching away from my love, cause it makes me damn sad, the reach beta rolled around, and I don't know how bungie does it, but they're always able to give me a beta that I love. I had one of the sickest 2 screen-lan-all-the-time setups ever during those weeks and I played like I was 14 again.
In between reach beta and reach release I didn't play too much anything, just chilling enjoying live and shit.
So anyways Reach rolled around and Bungie managed to rape the beta in the ass.
The game is bullshit, literally. The only formed of ranked playing is the most broken system I have ever seen (and I played a lot of shit in between all that halo time), the mechanics are dumb and slow, and I can not force myself to enjoy that piece of shit. But it was still halo, I still had a lot of buddies playing, and I did play quiet a lot till november or so.

...Starcraft comes in bitches:
And in november Starcraft came in, I heard about it through MLG and here and there before, but I obviously didn't understand shit while watching it at MLG. But one of the guys at my school who I started to become good friends with played it, and through him I got one of those fancy trial codes and I enjoyed it, long story short I picked it up before my trial ran out and played quiet a bit. But my being a halo machine I sucked, which I was not used to, so I stopped playing, or atleast playing often. I still watched it when the halo stream was boring at mlg, but I played a lot of h3 (at that point the only playable halo that had a competitive playlist and was not dead, looking at you dead2 vista) and eventually made it back to reach every once in a while. I could write about two more paragraphs about that, but the main point would be: "Some halo, no halo, some halo". So I'll just switch to me and Mudda being at a point in Reach where we reached (icwutididthere) the skill gap, or were close to (given that the game is easy as fuck) and ended up upsetting the 2nd ranked 2 on 2 team in Europe, after about 3 weeks of really playing halo again. But shortly after that (and us not loosing in team doubles for a few weeks) we realized how fucked the game was. Magically I ended up really getting involved into SC2, and realized that it was not just the new MLG game, but a global phenomenom, I spent the last week watching more starcraft (day 9 daily, onemoregame.tv shows + a lot of pro matches) than I have ever watched anything in that short amount of time, and this tuesday I realized that Starcraft 2 offered all I wanted in my main game:
-a developer that cares; a great and friendly community (gl, hf, gg); a huge global movement; depth; a lot of skill to master + I fucking love winning and getting better at that game

Combined with the fact that I look upon Halo Reach as a raped version of what I once loved, I made the decision to switch to starcraft and become good at that. I'm still in bronze league ( 1 on 1) but it does not matter in which team league I play placement stuff I always end up in silver and I usually get matched up against way higher seeded players in every ladder, so I guess the game sorta sees me on the silver level (for all you americans thats gold - platin on your servers). I love winning in this game, I love getting better, I love all the tactics envolved and I have not have that much fun playing/discussing/caring about a game since halo fucking 2.  I effing love Starcraft and I am more excited for Heart of the Swarm than I have been for anything in a long long time. That does not mean that I stop playing halo, but I will not choose Halo as my main game again, unless reach gets patched into something that actually is halo or the rumored h1 remake is h1 and not some fucked up form of h1.
So after 7 years (and I'll probably end up writing a lot more about those 7 years since this was a really, really small summary on top of head) of playing the shit out of halo I do make the switch to Starcraft 2, the greatest competitive game out there at this point. <3 SC 2

To round this up I felt like going into PS and so some SC wallpaper action (still work in progress):

Again I really hope it won't be another ~ 3 months till the next post!

Packard Bell EasyNote TK 85 Review

Before I’ll go into detail about the Packard Bell Easynote TK85-JO-062GE I’ll discuss why I choose it and what went into the process of making the decision.

I bought my previous notebook in 06 and was super happy with it at the time. It was an Asus Z82J and it did the job.

Back then I was an avid PC Gamer and the notebook allowed me to play all my games easily. As things changed and I started to do video/photo editing as a hobby I went back to a desktop PC to get the necessary power, but my notebook still came in handy in various situations and I still used it a lot. Since I had a powerful Desktop PC I barely needed my notebook for gaming anymore, and besides some older games/emulators it was mainly used for Internet and watching movies. Mid 09 the display died and I replaced it, which made it run perfectly smooth again. In mid 10 a lot of things happened at the same time, from the battery shortening it’s power to the notebook getting incredibly loud while playing videos and almost every 3D game crashing from time to time. This finally led me to the decision to get a new notebook.

Finding a new notebook is not as easy as it may sound. Originally I wanted my new NB to run Windows XP, since I needed it to run certain games/programs. That alone is not much of an issue, there are still plenty notebooks that run xp, or at least offer the drivers to install XP on them.  The real issue was that I wanted a graphic card that is capable of running StarCraft II at least on medium settings with more than 20 fps, since I am at a friend’s house a lot where we play some games from time to time, and being able to play SC II together is a blast. And that led to my main issue: The NB’s I found were either not able to run SC II the way I wanted it to run or were not able to run XP. So I had to make a choice: No StarCraft or I had to find a way to fix my issues with Win 7.                                                  

I chose the later and spent a full week trying to get KotOR (my main reason for XP) to run on 7. The result was that KotOR II ran pretty well while the original game kept crashing. Luckily Valve’s Steam service offers a version of KotOR that runs on Vista/Seven. So all issues fixed I only had to choose a notebook.

I was mainly looking for a notebook that wasn’t too expensive, had a strong enough graphic card to run some games with decent settings, good battery life and a decent amount of RAM and a good processor too let me use Photoshop on the go. My final decision was heavily influenced by pricing, since amazon.de offered the Packard Bell EasyNote TK85 100 bucks cheaper, and I was really impressed by the Books hardware for it’s price, I ended up buying it:

Since I don’t have the time to write a full 2+ pages review right now, or even the technical knowledge, I’ll just list some pros and cons:

Pro:                                                        

•         Nvidia Optimus technology* which allows great battery life while still having a great graphic card for games and HD videos
•          Silent, and I mean silent unless it’s playing back an HD video or I’m playing a 3D game I can not here it, and even if it does it’s still pretty silent compared to other Notebooks I heard
•          Intel Turbo Boost which allows to boost your processor up if you need the power while still running at a pretty low speed to maintain battery life when you don’t
•          Fast. This might just be me and the fact that my old NB was pretty much broken and 5 years old, but given the fact that it’s a 550 Euro Notebook it’s extremely fast in terms of everyday browsing etc.
•          Running games on pretty high graphic settings. Again this is great given the fact, I can run Starcraft 2 on high settings with 70 fps, more than I hopped for.
•          The fact that the Display is mirroring is not half as annoying as I thought it would be, even though I miss my old NBs not mirroring display…
•          The Keyboard is pretty solid and it’s a huge plus that it has a build in num block, the touchpad is also pretty solid
•          It’s just a solid product, it does not look cheap or cheaply put together.
•          It ships with a full version of Adobes Photoshop Elements and MS Office 2010 Starter (it also came with some other software I don’t care about)

Cons:

•          16:9 Display (and the fact that it’s mirroring)
•          Mono Speakers
•          Recovery is only possible via a hidden partition on the HDD, you have to burn discs yourself, which takes a good 2 hours
•          Drive is pretty loud while burning

Overall: I could care less about 16:9 (though I obviously prefer 16:10 for my desktop, but that’s because I’m actually working with my PC 99% of the time, for watching videos, browsing and playing some games 16:9 is more than fine), almost every Notebook has a mirroring display and I can still switch the display. The speakers are more than fine for watching some videos, and I have headphones for everything else. It came with discs to burn all the recovery stuff on, and you can easily recover without them. I don’t use discs for anything besides watching DVDs, and I have those on my external harddrive. So all my cons don’t really concern me, while I love it for every single pro. It does what I want it to do and I have not regret my choice yet.

I almost forgot the specs:

 §  Intel i5 460m processor (2 cores, 4 threads)

 §  Nvidia Geforce GT 420M (1GB Vram)

 §  4 GB Ram

 §  320 GB HDD

    §15,6” LCD Display (1366 x 768 HD resolution)

 §  1.3 MP Cam

 §  Duallayer DVD Drive

 §  3x USB 2

 §  1x HDMI

    §1x VGA

 §  1x WLAN bgn

 §  1x Gigabit LAN

 §  Speaker Out & Mic In

 §  SD Slot

 §  3 hours battery life (got it to 5+ hours by disabling display light)

Some Nostalgia

Well it's been a while, I did start writing a review about my new NB, but School is keeping me extremly busy atm and I'm starting to get into Halo again (just forget you ever played any other decent game and Reach is fun). Anyway to do something against the lack of new blogposts I'll just get some nostalgia going and post one of the greatest H2 Videos of all time:

Enjoy :D


PS: More action coming up: Said Notebook Review, might end up reviewing Bulletstorm (currently DLing), since I'm playing FFVII and some old Pokemon games on my Notebook atm I might end up reviewing those too. I'll try to get that NB Review posted this weekend!

My Gaming History

To kick my Blog of I’d like to talk about how I started gaming and what games I spent most of my time with. Let’s go back to the 90’s, or in my case the late 90’s. If I remember correctly my only contact to gaming back then was my uncle who would play various PC games whenever we were at his place for a few days. The game that stood out for me was always Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit. I was really young back then so that’s the only game I was allowed to see, and sometimes even play. The end of the 90’s was also the time when Pokemon started to get popular in Germany and I wanted nothing more than a GB and one of the Pokemon games. My best buddy got a Gameboy for his birthday and I still remember playing Pokemon with him for whole weekends, and I’d ask him if I could borrow it whenever I could. I ended up getting my own Gameboy when it was called Gameboy Color and the most recent games were called Gold/Silver. Luckily I convinced my parents to get me the Pokemon Edition GBC, which came bundled with one of the new editions:

Anyway back to the 90’s. Another chance to game for me was always one of my best buddies who lived hundreds of kilometers away from me. But luckily I visited my grandma, who happened to live 5 minutes away from said buddy, every other holiday. So I ended up spending most of grandma holiday time at my buddy’s house playing various, rather cheap and boring games from today’s view, on his dad’s PC. We obviously played various NFS games and I do remember a golf simulation, but the game that stands out the most from that time has to be GTA. Back then GTA was 2D with a bird’s eye view and given our age we spent most of our time just doing random stuff across the city. But it sure was a lot of fun. Age of Empire was also a great experience for me back then.  

Next thing you know the century changes and even better just shortly before that happens you start to go to school. Back then it sure was cool to finally attend school, but I remember that spending my time with friends was even color. There are three things, gaming wise, that really marked me and my future view on video games from that time. One thing is that I still remember wanting a N64 badly, you might argue that in the year 2000 a N64 was pretty old, but I had been asking my parents to get me one for a very damn long time. Never worked out, but I ended up getting a PS2 half way through elementary school (only 4 years in Germany btw). 2^nd thing was my parents and the fact that we finally got a PC. Luckily for me I learned way faster than my parents, and I ended up understanding the PC way better. I played various Lego games and a lot of NFS (Porsche and Hot Pursuit 2 were sick!) games. I’m fairly sure me playing GTA Vice City also falls in that elementary time, but it could have been later. 3^rd thing has to be my buddy and his PS1. I got said PS2 relatively late in my elementary time, so before that we would always play different games on his PS1. Dragonball Z (which we were both huge fans of back then) had quite a few, really well made, PS1 games, one that stood out for me was always Final Bout. We would stay up all night long playing Final Bout again and again. That’s probably why my first PS2 game was Dragonball Z Budokai. What a sick game, the story and the cutscenes were so well done, I played through it way too many times.

Now I could go one about me playing more NFS, more GTA and more PS2 stuff in the first few years of the 21^st century, but let’s fast forward to the important stuff, 2003/2004ish. As I said we got that PC, and back then our internet was so fucking slow that the way I picked up games was by saving up my money, went to town and just checked out the games they had in store. I was a huge Star Wars fan, and I and a few friends would rewatch all movies (back then I, IV, V, VI and the newly released Episode II) all the time. So I saw this game called “Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic”. It looked sick, and from what I made up based on the backside it was everything I expected from a Star Wars game. Long story short, I bought it, got home, installed it (no fucking cd key back then, no online registration ;)) and guess what? PC can’t run it. Next thing you know I ended up reading the manual countless times, saving up all my money and a few months later I got myself my first own PC. Powerful enough to run Kotor and every other game I’d like to play. My first play through was magical, I got sucked into this world 4k years before the movies I grew up with, and I spent every single second of free time playing. The second I was done I played through it again, and again and again…                                                                                                                                                                 

Actually I liked the game so much that I still play through it today, on a yearly base. Funny enough I’m playing through it atm, I might end up posting a review once I’m done. Or atleast a small report about all the trouble I went through to get the damn game running on Windows 7.

Anyway back to gaming. Another series that ended up amazing me so much that I still play it today is Halo. I picked up the first Halo game in 04/05 for the PC after a school friend told me about it. It was available for 10 bucks, and you really can’t go wrong with a 10 euro game. When I started playing it felt like Kotor all over again, I spent most of my free time playing, and played through the campaign multiple times. I was so amazed that I immediately searched for a 2^nd game, and hey Halo 2 had just been released for the Xbox. Fortunately I had picked up a Xbox earlier in 04 to play the 2^nd Kotor game (had some major PC issues at the time and the xbox had a lot of interesting star wars games) so I ended up buying Halo 2 only a few weeks after I finished my first Legendary Playthrough of Halo 1. Halo 2 would introduce me to Halo’s Multiplayer side. Even though my internet was beyond shitty I would spent hours playing 1 vs 1’s, 2 on 2’s and FFA’s with my local buddies. The concept of MP that I found in Halo amazed me, and when the H2 MP Pack released I picked it up, together with a Xbox Copy of the original halo:

A 2nd copy of H2 can never hurt ;)

I was literally amazed by the new maps, the major balance upgrade that made the game even more awesome and it felt great playing H1 MP. Early in 06 one of my biggest dreams back then would come true when we finally got a decent internet connection. That allowed me to go online with my PC copy of H1 and I was introduced to games like CS 1.6. I wouldn’t be able to play via Xbox Life until Christmas 06 when I got my 360, which allowed me to use XBL without a credit card. So what do you do when you can’t use XBL? Right you download Xbox Connect. So I spent 06 playing H1 PC, CS and H2 via XBC. Great experience and it really shaped my idea of competitive Multiplayer and my love for competing and my drive to become better and better.

When the 360 and XBL rolled around it changed everything. The game got a lot less laggy, I would always find a game that featured something I wanted to play and I meet so many great people via XBL. I spent most of 07 playing H2, rocking the H3 Beta and looking forward to H3. Though H3 never felt like H2 for my, and I never enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed H2, I still had a blast playing, met many amazing people and had a blast. I quit H3 in mid-late 09. Afterwards I played a lot of Shadowrun, H2 and H2 Vista. ODST’s MP Disc revived H3 for a few months, but when 2010 came around I had to say goodbye to my favorite XBL game of all time: Halo 2. It was tough but the last week was literally amazing, I spent every day playing MLG customs and FFAs, played some community gametypes and said goodbye to the game I never stopped playing. 2010 brought Bioshock 2, even more Shadowrun, me missing h2 and a lot of h2 vista. The Halo Reach Beta felt great and again I was looking forward to a new Halo. Got disappointed again, and I barely play Reach atm.

Now this was a really brief view on my gaming history, I could have written 200 pages on any of the mentioned games, and my view on the course of the series, and chances are I might pick some of these games up on further articles. There are obviously other games I played, like FF VII (which I’m currently playing on my new Notebook), the original .hack Series, which I have been playing for a few years now (currently sitting at 60 hours and at the beginning of the 3^rd game), multiple Star Wars games and a lot more console games I picked up over the years. Starcraft 2 is a honorable mention, too and as everyone else I tried WoW once. Another important series was the Prince of Persia the sands of time trilogie.  Again I might come back to some of these games, but right now I just wanted to give a brief overview.

Thanks for reading, felt great to remember some of the good old days. Next thing is probably a review on the new Notebook I just mentioned.