Hearts and Diamonds

So I have these word documents on my computer entitled Rant – [rant topic] for getting my verbal diarrhoea on for various reasons. Collectively they’re now 3614 words so I’ve decided to turn self indulgence into self importance and put them on a blogspot. I’ll have to trim some down as I don’t want to post more than 500 words and I’m being indecisive about which one to kick off with but here’s ye olde intro post. I’ll introduce myself as a gamer first as Rant – Video Games takes up about 2411 of that total word count.

My first memory of games is of playing Street Fighter II at my neighbours' place. Not that I got this as a four year old button-masher, but this game was Chun Li’s debut. If you believe everything on wiki she’s one of the first heroines in the gaming world and these days I’ll generally write, play and read female roles, so I could credit that to Chun Li but it could also be that I find male hero’s fucking boring, which I could put down to Blanka. To a young boys eyes there really isn’t anything more awesome than a bright green man with spiked red hair who electrocutes people, and every hero less than that just wasn’t making the effort.

By ten I managed to save enough on $10/wk allowance for a Nintendo 64. This held two more bench mark games: Ocarina of Time and Turok 2, with the former being the first story driven game I played and the latter being the most unapologetically violent game I’ve played to date (Bear in mind that these were the nineties when we knew that nothing in a TV set could hurt you. Some years earlier I was worried that Doom would give me nightmares and my Dad basically told me to harden up). As much as I played Goldeneye I didn’t fall for it in the same way as Turok. It had a creepy darkness to it that stuck with me but my main memory of this game is having an enemy jump up through a bridge at me and through pure shitting-myself-reflex I fired my shotgun. Next thing I knew he had a giant, gargling hole in his chest. On reflection that probably explains why my default favourite weapon in shooters is the shotgun.

In grade twelve I bought a GameCube off a mate for $90 and it pretty much went obsolete that day. Resident Evil, Metroid and the new Zelda stopped it from getting sold but I felt burned enough to make the switch to X-Box by the next round of consoles. At the moment I’m swapping between Oblivion and Mass Effect for absolute escapism RPGs and just spent the few sober hours of the long weekend opening The Orange Box.

Outside gaming I’m a third year creative writing student who thinks astrology is a bit of a copout but apparently that’s a very Sagittarian viewpoint. The title Red Goes Faster I thought would be a great name for an indie band who sing about their sexuality but I don’t look good enough in skinnies to pull that off and $15 for new guitar strings is money I could spend on beer and save my neighbours’ ears.