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My first video game memories were of the Atari 2600.  I first saw one when I was five, and the controls were easy enough for me to play “Combat” against anyone.  I still think that “Adventure” is the best game ever (”You were a DOT, man, and you LIKED IT THAT WAY!”).  I eventually got one of my own around 1981, and played it non-stop on a tiny 12-inch black and white TV in my room.  “River Raid”, “Pitfall”, and “Yars Revenge” were some of my favorite games.

I heard a rumor of the first Nintendo gaming system at an arcade.  Some kids playing “Super Mario Brothers” were talking about a new Atari that could play games just like the arcade games.  I didn’t believe it, not after the debacle that was Atari’s “Pac-Man”.  But the NES did come out, from Nintendo (not Atari, which was synonymous with gaming until then), and I got one for Christmas in 1985.  I even got a small color TV by then.  I remember the hype before the first Zelda game came out, and was amazed that you could play it TWICE.

“Castlevania” and “Metroid” were a couple of my favorite games for the NES.  My friends and I rented video games from Blockbuster Video every weekend.  We would play “Punch-Out” all night, yet never beat Mike Tyson, and then switched to “Metal Gear” (back before Snake went all 3D).  I didn’t play sports in high school, so video games took up a lot of my time then.  Although I had upgraded to the Super Nintendo by ‘91, I didn’t play games much while in college, except for “Warcraft” and “Diablo” on the PC.

It wasn’t until I got my first place, and my first roommate, Carl, that I started playing video games again.  My roomie introduced me to “Resident Evil 2″ on the Playstation, and we would play “Final Fantasy VII” into the wee hours of the night.  “Symphony of the Night” was the best Castlevania game ever, and we explored every room of both castles and maxed out the levels on every familiar before we were happy.  We played more Playstation than we watched TV (mostly Star Trek and Farscape).

Carl got hooked on racing games, and he switched to “Gran Tourismo”.  I never like racing games, so I moved back to PC games instead.  “Baldur’s Gate” started my great love of RPG games.  I’ve followed the D&D game franchise ever since.  “Starcraft” was another big one, but I didn’t play it online.  I would play “Diablo 2″ across the internet all night, however, to an almost unhealthy amount.  But I stuck with PC gaming, since computer games looked better and were more fun than console games (depending on your hardware, of course).

I’ve focused more on RPG games in the last few years, which are usually much better on the PC than on the console systems.  I played “Elder Scrolls: Morrowind” for nine months straight, along with the two expansion packs.  Based on my Morrowind addiction, I was first in line when “Elder Scrolls: Oblivion” came out in 2006.  All told, I probably played Oblivion for about six months, and that was before the “Shivering Isles” expansion pack came out.  I’ve had a lot of fun with computer games this year as well, most recently with “Gears of War”, “Crysis” and “Titan Quest”.

It’s looking like consoles are finally starting to overpower computers today though.  Some games, like “Star Wars: Force Unleashed”, won’t even be available for the PC, since the developers know that you would need a Power Rig to run it.  I’m not quite ready to trade in my PC games for XBOX games though.  But that didn’t stop me from getting a Wii last June!  I do like the casual gaming style and the fitness aspects of the Wii.  I barely even consider the Wii as gaming, but I enjoy the shooting games and the Wii Fit balance games.

I think that my next batch of fond memories will revolve around family gaming.  I can’t wait for Aiden to be old enough to play video games with me.  Not the NC-17 games that I’m used to playing, surely, but he’ll want age-appropriate games.  I’ll make certain that he spends time doing real-life activities (sports, music, karate, etc.) as well, but I think that we’ll bond most over video games.  Who knows what gaming will be like by the time Gavin is ready to pick up his first controller?  It should be interesting to find out!

Diablo (1997) was the first PC game that I bought for myself. I had played other computer games, but they were either shareware or borrowed from my friend Swavek.  The interface was so intuitive, just point and click to do just about anything.  Although there were only sixteen levels, each one was randomized every time you played, so it never got old.  It was different from anything else that I had ever played before.  It was also the first PC game that I played online (not including Doom’s peer-to-peer cooperative mode). I would join a small team and defeat Diablo at least twice every night.

When Diablo 2 (2000) came out, I bought it on the day of release and played it day and night for months. More character classes, each with a unique skill tree, made gameplay very customizable. And it was BIG: four entire Acts of content that spanned many diverse environments.  And the loot was incredible, even allowing you to piece together rare sets of items for extra bonuses.  Diablo 2 was the only game that I ever bought items for outside of the game. People sold powerful weapons and armor on eBay; you would pay via PayPal and then the seller would give you the items online in a private game.

“Stay a while, and listen!”- Deckard Cain

So when Blizzard announced Diablo 3, my heart stopped.  Well, maybe not stopped, at least not until I actually say the preview site. Then I died.  Seeing Deckard Cain, the narrator for the first two games, again was like being greeted by an old friend. The new Diablo 3 site includes “The Journal of Deckard Cain“, with thirty pages voiced by the same guy who played Cain before.  The journal is illustrated with plenty of concept images from Diablo 3, as well as all of the cinematics from Diablo 2 (they still hold up very well after all these years). It serves as an excellent refresher for the Diablo mythology.

The new content introduced in Diablo 3 looks really good.  There is an excellent gameplay trailer that highlights the new environments, two of the five available character classes (and their abilities) and some of the new monsters that will appear.  The designers include enough of the familiar to make the game slightly nostalgic, but also include enough new stuff to push ahead of the copycat games that have come out before. There was even a “boss” battle at the end of the trailer that left me wanting to play the game right now. I’m pretty excited to see more from Blizzard’s Diablo 3 site.

I installed Titan Quest on Thursday, and I’m glad that I installed the expansion pack along with it.  It’s like Diablo 2, except with Romans.  From the looks of it, all of the features that make it better than Diablo 2 (from a user interface perspective, since I can’t speak to the story yet) come from the expansion pack, “Immortal Throne“.  Stuff like the caravan driver would have been a huge thing in online Diablo.  The caravan driver holds items for you so that you don’t have to keep it in your own inventory. And finally, unlimited arrows!

Unlike Diablo, there are eight different character classes to choose from.  I decided to start with “Warfare” as a skill domain, but you can only choose two skill domains.  You get one to start with, and one more once you hit level 8.  There’s just too many to choose from, and I had a hard time deciding.  So I stuck with “fighter” for the timebeing.  I might enhance it with “Earth” (fire magic) or “Nature” (druid magic) later.  There’s definitely some replay value here, at least, which is better than the first person shooters that I’ve been playing lately. 

The inventory screen is a step up from Diablo as well.  When you move your mouse over an item, the stats for the item are displayed in a box along with the stats of the item that you currently have equipped, so that you can compare the two side-by-side.  When trading with a blacksmith, you have the option to “untrade” before you complete your transaction. I’d really like to be able to carry more, since I love to cart loot back to the villages for cash, and I’ve read that you increase your inventory size periodically in the game.

So far, I’ve gotten to the Spartan camp, cleared out the undead camp just before that, and carried all the loot back to Helos (before I found that there was a blacksmith in the Spartan camp).  There’s no caravan driver there though, so I’ve had to teleport back to Helos to drop off the powerful stuff that I can’t use yet.  Currently, I’m using a spear and a bunch of magic armor.  Not a bad setup for a level 5 guy.  I running around the fields now, trying to find that Centaur boss. We’ll see if this one is as awesome as Diablo 2 was.