Teppotastic

Okay – I’ve been thinking about whether I should make this post here or not. It’ll have nothing at all todo with games, games development, comicbooks, the internet or recreation in any sense. It’s abit of a philosophical waxing and as such doesn’t necessarily fit here. So I leave the decision to you. Beyond the following link will be my post. If you’re interested in learning alittle more perhaps about the man behind the blog then feel free to read it, though please take it in the form it is presented i.e. as personal reflection, of opinions and without intending offense to anyone.

(continue reading…)

… there was a totally dissatisfied student who gained magical powers that allowed him to accomplish all his life-long goals.

Uhhh… not quite.

In short, I am a gamer. Since I moved to Wales when I was about 6 or 7 and my ‘rents bought me a Megadrive. Skipping all the boring stuff, I wrangled a PC of my own back in my days of secondry school (that’s ages 11-ish to 16/18 for non-UK people), and thus began the addiction! Well, I wouldn’t call it that so much. I kept decent grades (not amazing, but that is a WHOLE other story ) and so on and so forth.

For whatever reason, after my A-levels, I applied for a whole load of courses – almost all of them either Physics or joint-honours Physics-Computer Science. Apart from one. Which was Computer Science with Games Development at the University of Hull. I thought “well I looove playing games, wouldn’t it be just AWESOME to be making them?!” plus the money seemed pretty good at the time .

Oh how wrong was I?!

Over the next 5 years, I bounced from one mind-bending disaster to another, eventually culminating in my formally withdrawing from my Masters year just afew days ago (don’t worry – I’d already failed back before Christmas, I was just hanging around). 

Now this may be sounding abit like a sob-story by now, and I apologise if that’s true but there’s afew really good bits I’m going to mention now.

Though I discovered I have a problem learing from text-based sources (books, lecture slides etc), I did discover that I love working in more organisation and community-based roles. I much prefer working with people than face-planting the keyboard  Two people that helped me see this were John aka Shuttler and Shawn Schuster when they invited me to cohost TabulaCast with John, as Shawn moved onto greener pastures. It was like a kind of epiphany (y’know, aside from the 1st show jitters) and the listeners were incredibly kind and supportive.

Now ofc, times have moved on abit, TabulaRasa has gone to the great server-farm in the sky and I’m currently co-hosting (albeit alittle quietly at times) Limited Edition with Shuttler and RockJaw. Which is great, I thoroughly enjoy chatting with them and discussing the ins and outs of comic-based MMOs and the movies but I have to admit that I am somewhat lost when it comes to comics. Not for lack of trying, I might add

So all throughout this, I have been gaming. I used to always prefer playing offline single-player games but as I discovered that there was a vast repository of people out there playing together, I began my move towards almost exclusively playing MMOs. Starting with Anarchy Online back in 2000-ish. A great game, terrible launch and it took awhile to wrap your head around the skills-system – I still pop back for a afew weeks out of every year for a pure nostalgia trip. I was all about the Fixer there, which is a bit of a support role. The kind of role I still gravitate to, to this day. I’ve played (and often beta-tested) such varied games as Saga of Ryzom, SWG, EQ2, LotrO, DDO, Eve Online, Planetside, WoW, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Vanguard, WAR, AoC, CoH/V and there’s a probably afew more I cannot think of right now. With few exceptions (notably AoC and Pirates of the Burning Sea), I have returned back to each of these games from time to time. Rarely spending more than a year away. That’s the kind of gamer I am. Not so much hopping from one shiney thing to the next but I go to a game to get something out of it. Eve satisfies the Sci-Fi urges I get from reading too many such novels; LotrO and CoH/V are both fulfilling a need to play with people and keep in contact with some great friends; Saga of Ryzom is beautiful, has a truly dedicated community and has the best skill-based progression system I have played to-date. Occasionally I just need to shoot things and that is what Planetside and Left4Dead are for

Alot of people criticise alot of games past, present and future for being X-clones. Be it Ultima, EQ or WoW. The fact of the matter is provided there’s alittle something different (I draw you to the ease of getting into RvR scenarios and the innovative form of PQs in WAR as an example), that adds alittle something different, then does it matter if it’s largely the same mechanics as a previous best-seller? Are the vast majority of people really after something truly revolutionary? I don’t think they are. Most people just want to spend some time un-hooked from reality and the worries that brings; maybe spending some time with friends too far away to see regularly, or maybe just across the hall.

So as far as I’m concerned, so long as you’re having fun, the rest of the whiners and the haters can go take a hike

I was a lovely sunny friday afternoon when I decided it was about time I had a good crack at this blogging thing. To that end I decided to come back here and upgrade my Wordpress install to 2.7.1 and because I’m a total newb when it comes to web related things and thus – I overwrote my old blog. Hell it was only 3 posts so I guess it’s no great loss.

The reason for this newfound desire to blog? Well, alot of my fellow bloggers (at least the ones I chat with regularly) are also podcasters and they are very very good podcasters. But that does, even by their own admission, leave their blogs to neglect after they’ve said all they wanted to say on the podcast.  Now, I’m a cohost on the (AWESOME) Limited Edition podcast, over at the VirginWorlds Collective which focuses primarily on comicbooks and comic-related IPs in the gaming world (things like Champions Online, City of Heroes/Villains, DCUO etc), though we’ll chat about most of anything really. My initial role on the podcast was to provide the “newbie” perspective against John’s wild enthusiasm and Stephen’s encyclopaedic knowledge and initially I did a respectable job in going “WTF?!”. The problem is, I’ve been brought up, or brought myself up I should say, on novels. Lots and lots of novels. I read all the time in school (even when I should not have) and I continue to read afew dozen pages of something every night before sleep. I read scientific journals, the news, blogs, epic patchnotes, novels, texts (though not the ones related to the topic I’m studying), all the fluff in the Warhammer 40K rulebook etc etc. I just enjoy reading. Which does not lend itself to enjoying comicbooks. I’m so used to interpreting a story in my mind, I just cannot get into a comicbook where it is all provided for me on a glossy platter.

So this is where I’ll be talking about things that wouldn’t quite fit on the podcast. I love doing podcasts, especially Limited Edition with John and Stephen. I find the format to be enjoyable both in it’s format and the scope (I find it much easier to communicate in speech than in text – more so than might seem obvious due to the wonderful nature of my addled brain). That being said – I’m very passionate about computer games in general (not just ones relating to comic IPs) and a myriad of other topics that may or may not have anything todo with computers at all, let alone gaming.

So over the next week or so, I shall be making regular updates (hopefully one a day) until I’ve covered abit of my background, where I’m at right now and where I’m going. Along with afew things which have been hiding in the back of my mind for awhile now.

Before I go, I implore all readers who haven’t (and even those that have) to visit www.yellowspandex.com, totheblogmobile.com, www.virginworlds.com, www.vanhemlock.com and www.massively.com .

These are maintained by some great bloggers and are certainly in my daily-visit catergory of sites