Before you subject yourself to this long winded blog post that will go on endlessly talking about me, me and me, I want to say thank you. You actually clicked on a link to view this post in the first place which means a great deal to me. I suspect I already know who will be my earliest audience; you know of my previous attempt to start a blog like this. You guys are truly my closest friends and you know who you are!
I'm mangOskittle. I'm a gamer and have been to some extent for most of my life. Over the course of my gaming life, I have used dozens of aliases, but this one has been the flavor of the year. Though I have been gaming for most of my life, I only started to pursue games to my full potential about five years ago when I gained my financial freedom (read: I got a full time job). Since that time, that fabled "IRL" has become more and more mysterious. I love games like some might like reading books or watching movies, listening to music or going hiking or having drinks with good friends. Games help cure my stress after dealing with a bad day. I escape from this bizarre thing called reality by playing games. I socialize with great people while playing games. I also use gaming as an excuse to splurge my hard earned money since I am not nearly as inclined towards other activities like drinking.
So this entire blog is my tribute to games. Here I will share all the juicy (or not so juicy) stories about my past, present, and future gaming career. I cannot guarantee I will cover any enlightening topics from post to post. However, I did write a post in my previous blog about fear in games compared to real life experiences and the element of control. The same topic was covered in GamePro magazine about half a year later, but I had ripped my blog down by then and I could never prove how awesome I was. But I am awesome, really.
I'm sure I will stress about more awesome topics to fill this empty blog with. In the meantime, I will selfishly eat more of your time by talking more about myself. My first gaming experiences were with my family's Nintendo Entertainment System, playing some of my favorite games like Super Mario Brothers, Bomber Man, Penguin Adventure, Joust, Excitebike, and Twin Bee(I loved this one, thank you bro for reminding me of it!!!). When we got the Super Nintendo, the old system was slowly forgotten and replaced by more Mario and Donkey Kong games, as well as some crazy Star Wars games. I can't honestly even remember most games I played. I just remember that my father had gotten big disk boxes full of games (let's not speculate where these came from, yeah?) and we didn't even get through a quarter of all those games!
When my father finally built a PC for me and my brother to use, it won over our consoles easily and soon the Super Nintendo was left to collect dust. Together, my brother and I played all the usual classics like Doom (my father had bought us some silly extras like Doom Barney. We enjoyed killing him under closing doors frequently). Wing Commander was one of my favs, I will never forget how heartbroken I felt when our next PC could no longer run the game properly (it would speed through it like it was on fast forward). Civ2, Mario is Missing!, D/Generation... and of course, Monkey Island!
During our visit to Taiwan in '97, my uncle got me and my brother hooked on Star Craft. Once back in America, we joined my first gaming clan where I was always the total noob that had to be baby sat through most matches. Eventually we moved on to Counterstrike (I'm sure I'm missing games in between).
Around my high school years, I started playing a lot of obscure titles, many alpha/beta tests that eventually didn't survive. But they were free so the price was right. Some names still stick in my memory, like Astonia, which remains F2P to this day. I also remember playing Ragnarok Online during testing phase. Shortly before I had to pretend to be a responsible adult (apply for college), I became an overlord (how the hell did that happen) for Shattered Galaxy Beta. That's just a fancy term for someone who has shout and map tagging rights and can tell people where to go and what to do.
I played Diablo II into my freshman year in college. I probably played it before too, but it's all a bit of a blur. My favorite story from Diablo II that I never get bored of telling was about my level 45 Assassin hardcore character that died to Mephisto on normal difficulty because someone came to visit us in our dorm and I forgot I left her there to tank him. When I got back 45 minutes later, she was a little puddle on the floor and I was doing my best Luke Skywalker impression.
Around this time I also need to admit that I contracted a NeoPets addiction. I ended up with over a million NeoPet dollars, or whatever, and a !@#% ton of junk. I can't remember why I got so obsessed with it, but I did. I can neither confirm nor deny that I might have NeoPet McDonald's toys.
Thanks to my bother (thanks a lot bro, sheesh), I got addicted to online poker over the summer after my freshman year (okay, so it's not exactly gaming, but poker has plenty of life lessons, surprisingly). Later on I encountered my gambling addiction, spent whole days playing and losing and playing more and losing, overcoming the illogical gambler mindset and continued on to play poker to this day. Not saying gambling is right or anything, but it's fun to play poker on my phone while falling asleep.
Junior year found me playing another obscure title called Fairyland and also a not so obscure one, City of Heroes. After playing Fairyland obsessively for almost two years (my bf at the time was extremely tolerant, which I can't say for all the gentlemen I have been close to in my past!), on some lucky day, I read on the Fairyland forums that someone was badmouthing this game called Project Entropia where players could make money while playing! Blinded by the marketing that was just too good to be true, I made all of the appropriate sheep bleating noises while downloading the game which would eventually become my new obsession, addiction and my gateway to all the fun I am having now.
I say this because it was in Project Entropia that I met the crew of gamers that I now speak to on TS on a daily basis. When in proximity of my computer I am plugged into TS constantly, where we discuss old, new and upcoming games, play together and in general share and bitch about "IRL" together. Months after meeting these fine folks, I downloaded Eve Online with them. Eve became my longest MMO career to date. If you are familiar with Eve, this will hardly be a shock considering the massive titans floating in the background. Sadly, I am on Eve hiatus for tons of reasons, one big one being that the engaging content that has kept me going year after year has been sorely missing over the past few expansions.
With my cool gaming crew, I attempted to improve on my shooting skills with games such as Fallout 3, Battlefield 2, Left4Dead, Killing Floor...Though I think the most significant improvement happened when I realize it wasn't that my arm likes to spasm randomly, it was my mouse pad being terrible. That's my excuse.
I have a terrible flaw which is I never seem able to finish games. I still haven't finished Fallout 3, nor Dragon Age: Origins. I do plan to! I can count on one hand how many I have actually completed; Portal, Portal2, Singularity, Resident Evil 5... and that's about it. Oh, and Plants vs. Zombies. That counts, right?!
I feel I should mention I do own SC2. But thanks to someone who I won't name, our SC2 crew was soon sucked into the SOTIS custom map. After months of playing this, I introduced League of Legends into the fold, and we have been (mostly) collectively obsessed with LoL since.
When my muscles aren't atrophying while I play LoL (every muscle except for my mouse clicking muscles), I have been exploring Steam's new F2P games. Currently, I am running Iron Grip: Marauders in the background, where a 3 Shield raid awaits me and I have a strong feeling I am going to lose.
That was my way of saying this is where I should conclude this absurdly long first post. If you have gotten here without skipping everything from the first paragraph on, I just want to say thank you, again. You are an insane @^%!. If you skipped everything, then well @#%!. I don't blame you(but secretly I do, I am disappoint!). If you played a game with me in the past and I forgot to mention it, you are more than welcome to poke my memory! Until next time... I'm off to pillage, raid, smuggle, and plunder!
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