A Timeline of Gaming Pt. 2

Here's the next, and the last, installment of my Timeline of Gaming series. During my last post, I covered the first five highlights of my 22 years in gaming. So, now, I'm going to list the last five highlights that happened from my teen years up to this date. Honestly, I wasn't that active as a gamer in the early 90's. It's because, during those years, I forayed into extreme sports (skateboarding) and was engulfed in the world of music. But gaming affected me profoundly by the time I got back to it.

And so it continued on to...

1996 - PC Gaming
Favorite Game: Fallout 2

During my last years in High School, the computer was getting common in households. Internet cafes were also slowly sprouting up in my area. Since I didn't own a computer until '98, I'd frequent the cafes to research and write school papers. Sometimes, when I get my work done early, I'd poke around their installed games, and that's how I got into PC gaming. The first games I played were real-time and turn-based strategy games like Red Alert and Heroes of Might and Magic. Their gameplay was so much different and advance than the Platformers and Beat 'Em Ups that I played on any Nintendo console. I was so astounded by them that I became a PC gamer for life.

1997 - Trading Card Game
Favorite Game: Magic: The Gathering

When Playstation was becoming the craze, I went low tech with trading card games. It started when I saw a fellow comics aficionado, from my elementary days, playing a card game called Magic: The Gathering. Desperate for more opponents, he taught me the rules and gave me a starting deck the very next day. After that, it was only a matter of time until I became addicted with the game. Addicted because I quit school and broke up with my girlfriend just to play it. While I only played Magic for two years (because I needed to stop before my addiction gets out of hand), I actually made a lot of friends through it.

1998 - Pen & Paper Role-Playing
Favorite Game: D20 Modern

A lot of people started playing Magic: The Gathering in my school, even the whole Tau Gamma Phi fraternity, and it started to feel like a religion. But if Magic was the religion, Dungeons & Dragons was the cult. An older fellow "Magickero" -who's also my English teacher and the theater director of my school- suggested that we should try playing table-top role-playing. Since I was already inside Geekdom, but haven't thoroughly explored it, I capitulated and agreed to the idea. Like Magic, I was hooked right away. For months, we spent plenty of hours on a derelict cottage behind a friend's house, pretending as fighters and mages, pillaging villages and raping elven queens. Not only the game was fun but it was also therapeutic, a quick and temporary escape from reality. Once you enter a campaign, all your problems are forgotten the entire duration of your stay.

1999 - Forum-Based Role-Playing
Favorite Game: RPoL.net

Before the end of the century, Internet Cafes where running amok in my area. Two main reasons that people go to cafes are either chatting or LAN gaming. I don't like to chat, and while I do enjoy a small dose of Counter-Strike, I'd rather be role-playing in a forum. After my RPG group went separate ways, I craved to play more campaigns. Since it's impossible to find a group in Iloilo (Philippines), I turned to online role-playing. This time, however, I was more than a player, I was also a Dungeon Master. But I was so new to the game I don't have mastery of the rules. So I failed as a DM, and my players started dropping out of my campaigns. Although, through planning and plotting campaigns, creating background stories for my non-playable character, I learned that I love writing.

2007 - Nintendo DS
Favorite Game: The World Ends With You

I never intended to buy any other gaming platform, not a console or a portable. PC already keeps me occupied. But when I was working night shifts, last year, I got so bored that I needed some form of entertainment. Reading was allowed but I'd get sleepy if I did. So I asked my boss if I could play some games on my cellphone. She told me it's fine if it doesn't disturb the patients and as long as I could hear the phones and overhead announcements. A month after, I got myself a Nintendo DS. Primarly, I thought the DS would only serve as a placeholder whenever I can't play PC games. But with its innovative and unique games, I just can't put it down even at home where I have access to my PC.

So that's the last leg of my short series, A Timeline of Gaming. I hope you guys enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

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