I've been playing computer games since I was a wee lad; at first it was on a TRS-80 (ancient!) that we bought very very cheap from somewhere; I was 10 or so at the time, and the computer also came with about a hundred pounds of various computer books. Some of these were books on BASIC, and of course there were some game programs. What's a bored kid to do but type in those many-line programs and play them? Quite a few simple games were there, including Snake, a two-player Snake (think of light cycles in Tron and you've got the idea), Mancala, Tic-Tac-Toe, Checkers, and some sort of driving game (overhead view, just stay on the road as long as possible - could set things like visibility and speed). Sure, I had a Nintendo, but this was a computer! I wasn't going out and buying $50 games. I was typing in the programs, and I could change something I didn't like. It was simple, but it was fun.

(Okay, actually I should say here that I did play some games back in elementary school on the Apple ][e's that they had - Oregon Trail and Number Munchers mostly.)

Later (several years down the road) we got a Tandy that had a nice little mockup of a desktop. I say "mockup" because there were only certain things that you could display there, in a certain order. You couldn't just have a link to a text file; you had to display the entire directory contents that the file was in. And sixteen customisable colours! Those were all-or-nothing: they either had red|blue|green in them, or they didn't. Want yellow? That's red and green but no blue. Want a lighter shade of yellow? You're SOL.

Anyway, there were some fun games there, too. One was a text adventure with graphics (the graphics were static, or nearly so; they might change if something significant happened to the room you were in), which I never managed to solve, somewhat along the lines of Zork (another one I never managed to solve). There was Checkers again (but with glorious colour! black and red game pieces on a black-and-white board), Poker (which I got very good at), very simple Pinball, a space-battle type game, and a few others I can't quite remember. I didn't have the control over these that I did with the BASIC programs, but I was sold on computer gaming already.

Fast forward many years to 1998 (actually, in 1997, we were playing Doom on the computers in the physics classroom in high school). I was a freshman in college and my dad had gotten me a computer as a high-school graduation present. Not much power, but it worked well enough for typing up papers and checking my e-mail and such (part of "such" being "making ugly webpages on Angelfire"). Then I met some kids down the hall in my dorm at this party my friend invited me to, she was the only one there I knew but this was during my social days, so it didn't really matter. I'm getting off topic. Soon I was playing Diablo, Quake, Starcraft, Age of Empires and Heroes of Might and Magic 2, among others. I was also introduced to MUDs around this time.

Eventually (read: in a few months), that computer couldn't handle the new games coming out, but I stuck with it anyway. First, I was very broke. Second, I didn't know what I was doing. Later (2000 or so?), I got some advice from an immortal on the MUD I was working on, and bought a barebones kit. Tacked on a hard drive and video card, installed the copy of Windows 98 that I had, and there was my computer. It's the one I'm using to this day, actually, but I have since learned and have upgraded it myself. Now that I think about it, I've replaced everything over the past few years except the case and floppy drive.

Its specs, if you are interested:

Now I am mostly playing Morrowind, Quake 3, NetHack, ADoM and Half-Life. Funny, that with all this computing power, I'm playing two games whose graphics consist of ASCII characters. In the past, I've enjoyed Neverwinter Nights, the Baldur's Gate series, Quake 1 and 2, Doom 1 and 2, Diablo 2, Dungeon Siege, Age of Empires 2, Warcraft 1, 2 and 3, and HoMM 3 and 4.

In the games section here at csd, you'll be able to read about the games I'm playing now. Sections will come and go here rather quickly, as compared to the rest of the site (which is more or less permanent). At the moment, you can have my take on Morrowind, NetHack and ADoM.