October of 2005 was a severely messed up time for me. I was newly divorced, living with one of my best friends, and had just found out that in several months time I would be moving to Japan. My life has always been kind of weird but the Fall of 05 was the pinnacle. Back then, gaming was an escape. My real life kind of sucked and games were an escape for me. I had an Xbox I had modded, a PS2, and a Gamecube. What I lacked in a love life, I more than made up for in pixilated goodness.
When I wasn’t playing video games, I was sleeping or at work. I hated my job and I didn’t sleep often so it can be said that I played a LOT of video games. I did other stuff too, but what sticks in my mind about that time most was the hours I whiled away in front of the TV shooting aliens or playing poker against Chris Ferguson. I won, take that Poker Jesus, I own your ass.
I have always liked video games but at that point in my life, I had nothing better to do and in a way, I was making up for lost time. Girlfriends/Fiances/Wives take up a lot of time and for a few years games were put on the back burner. Not having a wife anymore gave me a lot of free time and I blew most of it on games. What else was I going to do? I was 25, sick of life, desperately horny, and angry as hell. Beating down aliens on a ring shaped planet seemed like a better alternative than getting crazy drunk and beating a metal bathroom stall so hard I dented it in and I broke my hand. Not that I am speaking from experience or anything. Oh…the profanities I would scream at the Flood. I also used to make it my goal to smack as many people as possible with the butt of my rifle, sometimes going through whole levels not firing a shot.
At a time when things in my life were ending, videolamer was getting its start.
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Then I came to Japan. At the time, it seemed like a good idea to sell pretty much everything I owned and move as far as I possibly could from where I was. As it turned out, this was an extremely good idea for so many reasons I can’t even begin to list them all here. When I said I sold pretty much everything, that included all of my game consoles.
Now the year is 2006 and I am left with my Black Gameboy SP and a handful of games. Being in Japan, buying a DS basically comes with the territory. I wasn’t here two weeks and I had already scored myself a used DS Phat. Life in Japan was new and exciting and it involved taking a ton of trains. I took trains everywhere and my DS came with me. The time slot that I once filled with Halo 2 was now filled with Advanced Wars and Brain Age. A few months later, I also picked up a PSP and a GP2X. Don’t know what a GP2X is? And you call yourself hardcore. Ha! Don’t worry, looking at unit sales, you aren’t the only one that has never heard of the system. Either way, both the GP2X and the PSP pretty much do nothing but gather dust now so it doesn’t really matter.
It was around this time that videolamer was growing its roots in the gaming community. Small roots.
I rang in 2007 feeling slightly ill but I was with friends and in a land that was still wildly intriguing, so I was happy. Fitting for Japan, the clock rolled over from 2006 to 2007 while I was on a train. My friends and I spent the first few minutes of the year joking with train drivers and laughing at not being able to see the fireworks for all of the fog. With 2007, came my purchase of a DS Lite. I am still of the opinion that the DS Lite is probably the best game system ever made. It is stylish, ingenious, and has some great games. As far as titles goes, not much had changed. I was still playing Brain Age and Mario Kart. I was looking forward to a new Phoenix Wright title and I was itching to play the English version of Final Fantasy III (which ended up rocking by the way). The DS Lite has definitely dominated my year from a gaming standpoint.
Two things did change in 2007, especially as I moved toward the end of the year. I decided I really wanted an Xbox 360. I have yet to purchase one but will be doing so as soon as I step off the plane when I get back home. The other thing that happened occurred in late June when I stumbled across an article on Digg about the reasoning behind some popular video game makers’ names. I clicked on it and it took me to a place called videolamer. After browsing the site for a few days, I emailed Jay and told him I would like to write for the site and sent him a post from my blog. A few days later, I had an article on the site and have managed to stick around to torture you for the past five months.
At present, I am looking to the future in terms of my life, video games, and videolamer, all of which have a pretty good outlook. While in Japan, I have grown up a lot but am now ready to head back to the US. Video games have also matured and evolved (somewhat) and are becoming a much more social creature. Videolamer also looks to have some good times ahead of it, especially the nerdfest that we have planned sometime in 2008, looking forward to that big time. Anywho, that is my life in a nutshell for the past 730 some odd days, here is to many more with videolamer and the games that I love.
hear hear! that was around the same time i found videolamer and have since really enjoyed reading the site. i really like the fact that videolamer is a blog with real content and not another games “news” site that takes stories that other sites wrote and rewrites them for content. not to bash though, of course. just saying that videolamer actually has unique content worth reading.
oh and yeah you should definitely get a 360 =)
Video games are the best escapism next to killing people for real (or so I hear).
Nothing of your order of magnitude, but I remember one painfully brutal stretch out of college where my best friend’s mom died, my grandfather died, and I got dumped by my long time college girlfriend. I played so much DOTA– literally till 4 AM every night (wait a second, that sounds familiar).
And as Sage says, get a 360.
Yeah, a 360 Elite will be mine as soon as I get back. There have been so many games I have been wanting to play on it and it’s torture not being able to go out and grab one.
What is DOTA btw?
Defense of the ancients… it’s a WC3 custom map that is incredibly popular. I’ve written about it… I read articles, don’t you read mine? I’m a sad panda!
gj – you can take some solace in the fact that you wrote your DOTA column before tyson joined the site.
SAGExSDX, I meant to thank you earlier. Content is hard to generate so most sites, even big funded professional ones, seem to recycle other sites news without adding much.