Level 1: Holy Shit... am I blogging now?

Hello all and welcome,

First off before I try to tell you anything about what will be the paragraphs upon paragraphs... etc... that will follow in the days, months, (years?), to come. I'll give you an idea of why I decided to start this blog.

I've been an avid video gamer since I was 7 years old. I'm 26 now. You do the math. I can still remember the first video games I ever played. Wall Street Kid for NES and SkiFree for PC. God those were good games. Even though I could never figure out how to play Wall Street Kid in the first place. Thinking about it now, I have no idea what went though the minds of my parents. I guess they just saw a game that someone at K-Mart must have told them would be educational and they thought... "Oh Really?! That would be perfect for Daniel!". Thanks random K-Mart sales associate! *grumble*

Games are driving a big chunk of the younger generations of this world. Seriously... how many of you reading this have NEVER played a video game EVER? In fact, if you haven't even picked up a controller, then just shame on you... Where have you been the last two decades? When I go to visit my friends, every single one of them usually has at least one console in their house. They're teaching their kids to play with it. Some of them are even playing games with their kids already. People love video games for an uncountable number of reasons. My personal reason to thinking why they are loved is simple. It's an easy way to escape reality for even a brief period and become something that you can only imagine. Taking the role of a goofy plumber and stop on turtles throwing their shells at you, racing through a city in a Porsche 911 and crashing into a barricade, blowing shit up in space then tea bagging the bodies of your enemy... can you do it in real life? 99.999999% probably no. Would you want to if you had the chance? Probably.

I've decided to blog about video games and how they relate to me since they've had such a vast impression on my life. I wouldn't consider myself an industry expert by any means. But as a consumer, I've had more than my fair share of experiences in both the casual and professional senses. I've owned an NES, SEGA, SNES, Gameboy, Virtual Boy, Game Gear, Dreamcast, N64, PS1, Xbox, PS2, Wii, and Xbox 360. (Sorry if I don't show any PS3 love, but just never got into it after Sony's realllly slow launch of the system and library to follow). Plus the entire time I've gamed through these consoles, I've ALWAYS owned a PC (my personal favorite). I'd rather not get into a debate of whether consoles or PC gaming is leading or has led. I figure if the topic appears later I'll get into it deeper. But as a quick insight into the brains of this guy... PC gaming has always been a step ahead of consoles.....

Most of my time has been devoted to PC gaming as a whole. Genre non-exclusive. My involvement with PC gaming really started way-back-when with the original Command and Conquer. If you haven't played any of the series, just pick up any of them and give it a try. There's a reason why some people have said it set the benchmark for future RTS games to follow and it shows. The soundtrack, production, development.. all top notch for each game. Well with the exception of C&C4. I tried my best to really find the connection between it and the previous games and just couldn't do it. I'm really hoping they revive the series with C&C:G2, but time will tell.

From C&C though, I brought myself into some of my other favorite games. Counter Strike, Starcraft, Warcraft, Diablo, just to name a few. (I know that 3 of those games are developed by Blizzard... but the quality of their games are just so ridiculously top notch and the support they give them after release is insanely high. I just find them insanely reliable games if you ever want to play them long after their initial release.) Counter Strike was my one swaray into professional gaming. Even for a brief period. It began back with CS:1.4 when I first got my taste of the game back in my friend Eli's old Win95 PC. This was back before Steam came out. It was just a mod based off of the old Half-Life series. (Again, awesome series... go play it if you haven't...). But holy shit was it fun. It wasn't like Quake or Doom or any of the other FPS games of it's time. It was a tactical, team-based, real-time strategy shooter. For those who never played it at the entry-level competitive scene it was essentially a game of 5 people on a side, first time to kill all the opponents wins or if the "Terrorist" team plants a bomb and defends it till it explodes they win. At the time you played 30 rounds. First to 16 round wins takes the match. Tie breakers were a best of 6, first to 4 wins with unlimited overtime rounds if needed.

It all started back when I was playing in a Pub (Public Server) and someone playing in there with me was a member of a casual team. They offered me a tryout and thinking I had no experience I was never going to make it. I was wrong. I joined up with their team and signed up on their CAL roster.

By the way, whoever bought CAL just to shut it down needs a swift kick in the nuts... or ovaries. It was the original league which helped people move from just casual gaming to a window where they could easily get recognized on a regional or even national level. Anyway, after competing in season after season after season in CS:1.6, I eventually moved to CS:Source. I just felt more natural playing it and I adopted to it much easier than I did with CS:1.6. After moving between teams probably 4 times over 2 years, I eventually found the group of guys which would bring me to the upper-level professional league of competition. Our team name was InSincerity. After about a year and a half together, we rose in the ranks of CAL and made it to the league's highest level of competition... CAL-Invitational. Just to stress the prestige of this devision, you have to be one of the top ranking teams out of all other teams competing in your game at the time. The division had only 16 teams in it at the time out of a total of around 50,000 total teams in the CS:Source league.

I remember growing up and my folks telling me... "You need to stop playing games so much. They're not going to help you later in life". Well mom and dad, this didn't happen often but for once... you were wrong. Once I made it into CAL-I, our team was eventually picked up by Red Bull for 9 months and I was making money playing games. Not a whole lot mind you, but enough that I was able to fund 2 years of college drinking with. It was just nice knowing that all the hard work and time I had put into video games wasn't a complete waste.

So there ya go. There's a quick, long, whatever, little window into my brain and my gaming history for now. This is the best way I can think of to write my thoughts on how video games are progressing as well as my opinions and views of games that I'm currently playing. Right now, most of my time is being put into Diablo 3, Battlefield 3, Starcraft 2, DOTA 2, and CS:GO (when it becomes released I'll be writing about it much more). I'll be putting up my thoughts of the games as well as photos, movies, or whatever I can generate in the future. So if you'd like something casual and fun to read in the future, bookmark me, favorite me, whatever the hell google blogger does and revisit.

--ECVGamer