GAMING (or, my entry into PC Geekdom)

Winters in Canada are a serious affair. Life as a straight, single white male in Toronto living just beneath the surface of the poverty line, regardless of intellect, also serious. You go out. You spend your money. You eat out. And go home alone, I do anyway. The dating "scene" doesn't interest me at the moment as I'm trying to break free of the cycle of serial monogamy that I've been in. Lonely stuff! Thank God(yes, I've capitalized this word on purpose) my best friend built me a little "FrankenBox" out of spare computer parts a couple of years back. He may have saved my life....

I've played video games on and off for almost 30 years, from PONG in the arcade of Welland's Seaway Mall where I, like a lot of teens growing up in Welland, hung out, to the current crop of "first-person shooters", or "FPS" for short, available for my PC( I don't do console games, don't like the interface, and maybe it's my way of being a little elitist, but you can't really tech out a TV). Sure, I live in the real world as well, where I understand it's wrong to blow stuff up/shoot people and the like, but I'm already a professional musician, so "ROCKSTAR" or "GUITAR HERO" are meaningless to me; I do that already! But I don't get to fly an Apache helicopter, plant C4, or shoot an M16 everyday....


I've had periods of time where I've come into contact with a game for short times in the past, played them until they were done, and moved on: Shadow Warrior on a Mac, Resident Evil 2(13 years ago, black disc!) and so on, but it wasn't until my friend "L" hooked up a spare PC with Battlefield 1942, and the modification, or "MOD", Desert Combat on it, linked up to his main PC via LAN, that I got into FPS like addicts get into Heroin or Cocaine(for the record, I've never done either, and have had no curiosity to do so). Suddenly I was, with L as my teammate/mentor, fighting epic battles, para-dropping into hostile territory, and taking out the "enemy". Or rather, I was a paratrooper, as I hadn't gotten the hang of flying at that time, L would do the bombing runs from his A10. Bada BOOM!

As I was moving out of a rather codependent living arrangement with an ex, L presented me with the first version of my current "battle machine", a scavenged-parts-PC with a P4 1.9 CPU, 756 mb of RAM, and a 128 mb AGP video card, just barely enough to run BF '42. I then began my monk-like dedication to the world of downloading mods, tweaking XP(bought my own copy), and learning to "fly". Planes were easy, although, like the alleged 911 "pilots", I am still better at crashing them than landing them. Helo's were a bigger challenge however, most early attempts ending very quickly in disaster. Until I learned to "invert my mouse", I was convinced that I was a gaming moron! Then, with a "tick of a box", enlightenment. My favorite became the Apache helicopter, a flying/hovering cannon of sorts....BIG BADA BOOOOOM!


I quickly realized that part of the problem was not so much my lack of skills, but the lack of resources my PC had at the time: not enough RAM, CPU power, or video card strength so therefore lag became a constant issue, as I was playing predominately in offline single player mode at first, me against my PC's generated "bots", learning my skills before taking them online into the multi player realm. So, with L's assistance, the upgrades started, the first being more RAM(2Gb), then, a faster video card(my current ASUS 9550, an ATI agp with a whopping 256mb of RAM!), and finally, a new motherboard/CPU, a hyper threading enabled Asrock MB with an Intel P4 2.8Gb processor, and things started to progress nicely. I took my show "on the road" so to speak, playing online with other players from all over, whose sole purpose apparently was to kill me 87 times in 3 minutes! Now THAT'S TRAINING! I'm convinced most of them were 12 year olds with supercomputers that their mommies and daddies bought for them....

(Incidentally, while this is my current PC, it is still "ancient" technology, current as of 5 years ago, but it's mine!)

ENTER BATTLEFIELD 2!

The follow up to EA Games' Battlefield 1942(obviously a WWII based game) was released in 2005, and is a modern combat game, featuring current weapons, factions, vehicles, more advanced animation, effects, a more tweak able GUI(graphic-user-interface), and the ability to use VOIP(voice-over-internet-protocol) ingame. Battlefield 2 became the standard for my comprehensive research into what my machine can and can't do. The mods for it alone, like in bf42, are seperate games themselves, modifying the original BF2(AKA: BF VANILLA)'s settings, armies, weapons, time frames, maps (in many cases adding new ones). Downloading these mods almost as soon as the developers had them released became more important to me than anything else. There was one mod however that I was not yet able to play with any success as it relied on having the one thing a gamer now needs....a headset...

I GO ONLINE, IN A VIRTUAL WORLD, TO PLAY A GAME CALLED "PROJECT REALITY"

Project Reality, or "PR" for short, had been the glass ceiling I couldn't break through until I got my first USB headset. The mod focuses heavily on team/squad play, tactics, and achieving objectives through VOIP communication: you talk to your guys, and is MUCH more complicated than Vanilla BF2. So, for $29.99 one day in late August 2008, I acquired a little Logitech number, downloaded PR v.756, and launched into live action squad play in a mod I was still a "newbie" or "noob" at. Then, 2 days later, a newer version of PR, .809, came out. I downloaded this gem, with updated animations, weapons, maps, etc., the night before it's general release, waiting "inline" at FilePlanet. I was now to begin a serious commitment to what is basically a whole new game.



Because of the verbal communication element of the game, PR became a "social" outlet, and I quickly made friends with fellow players around the world. One chap in particular from Seattle and I became fast friends, and I learned alot about squad leading, squadplay, and stealthy tactics from him. When my initial headset became nonfunctional, "B" even mailed me a new one he wasn't using! That's a buddy for sure. I still haven't met him in person, but he, like me, is also a musician, and I'm sure that we'll be collaborating musically on some level at some point....we even have the same NAME!


We'd hookup routinely ingame or on Xfire(a gaming/communication application) and play, chat about this and that, shoot the "enemy", and transfer files back and forth. I hope to get L hooked up with PR as soon as his PC is back up and running, his wife and him just moved recently and they're still trying to get things unpacked. A fun squad would be B, L, and myself!


I joined a PR gaming league, played online battles in a tournament setting, became a squad leader in two subsequent tournaments, and made more good friends, one of them surviving a minor heart attack that happened during the time I've "known" him. I still play with many of these lads(I haven't heard a female voice in any of these games yet, although while I'm sure they're out there, this is predominately so far a "guy-thing", and probably for good reasons) even though now I won't be able to continue in the tournaments with them, as they happen on Saturday afternoons, and the "real world" has begged me to work on Saturdays(shudder)......

PR now is at version .856, and I hear that when .9 comes out, there will be a Canadian faction, no doubt "deploying" in the Afghanistan theatre.....I'm waiting.....


Sure beats getting drunk and telling lies to women.....