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Gaming Biography

Childhood

My gaming life began the same way as many children of the 80s, with Pong, and later with Nintendo. (Super Mario Bros. 3 is my favorite game of all time.) Due to my extreme early geekdom (see my computer biography), I also got into PC gaming at an early age. Like most children of the 80s, it was all about Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego.

With the age of CD-ROMs of course the first game I got was Myst. I enjoyed the 90s immensely for the popularity of simulation games, both of the SimCity variety and the Janes combat sims and others. It's really too bad that genre has pretty much died off.

The Mac Years in the Desert

My gaming life took a turn when I became a Mac user, as obviously Mac gaming sucks. Nowadays that's not a problem at all as Intel Macs run Windows quite well, but back then it was a big setback.

It was during this time that I first got broadband, and wanted to play an MMO. The only one for Mac that appealed to me was WWII Online (now called Battleground Europe), which I still play to this day, on Windows -- even when I'm playing on my Mac. My gamename is Dover, and I play for the Axis.

My Gaming Rig

In 2004, back before Intel Macs, I spent a good deal of time working on Broadway. In early 2005 I decided to blow all the money on building a gaming PC. It was a lot of fun to return to my roots of tinkering with PCs, though I would never want to use it for actual work.

In 2008 I upgraded the CPU / mobo / RAM / video card, and the current specs are in the computer biography. Here's a picture:


Today

Apple's switch to Intel has solved a lot of the problems I've faced as a gamer and a stage manager. My job has me on the road more than I'm home, so even though I have a PC for gaming, most of the time I have to rely on a laptop. Laptops are kind of the great equalizer since they remove the one thing that makes PCs better than Macs for gaming -- the ability to choose one's own hardware piece by piece. For a laptop, the Macbook Pro does a good job for Windows gaming, and while gaming on a laptop in general is not much fun, it allows me to have eveything I need in one package on the road.

I travel with the following peripherals:
Back at home I also have:

Consoles?

I haven't purchased a console since the Xbox. It's not that I don't like console gaming, I actually like it a lot for certain types of gaming. It's just that since I spend so little time at home, it ends up being a waste of money. I really did plan to buy a PS3 when GTA IV came out, but when the time came I was broke, so the $800 just to play one game was not going to happen. I actually lost the $5 preorder I had on the game for a year before its release. With an unclear winner in the current-gen console wars (and my natural preference for the Playstation over the Xbox format), I just have no interest in any of it right now.