Child Gamer

My PC gaming career began at the age of four, with a few old sidescrollers like Cosmo's Cosmic Adventures, Duke Nukem (yes, the Duke began as a crude sidescroll shooter. Oh, the memories), Commander Keen, Jane of the Jungle, God of Thunder and... Xylon? Xyrex? Something like that...

A strange brew, certainly. It was all on my father's machine, and he wrote these neat batch files to make the games more accessible, with alphabetical, numbered lists and everything.

At age seven, I got my own computer. Maybe I was eight, not sure now. That was ten years ago. It had a pitiful Intel 486 25 MHz processor... even at the time, it was not a new machine, but it was my machine, and that qualified it.

Of course, I was upgraded a couple years later to a 256 MHz with crappy onboard video that lacked any kind of 3D acceleration, but it sure as hell played a mean game of Descent. It wasn't until Half-Life came out that I was desperate for a 3D card.

That came to me around age thirteen, five and a half years ago. As I recall, Diablo II was still a huge hit, Starcraft was my current love affair, and I was just getting good enough at Descent that I could kick my dad's ass once in awhile in a dogfight.

But, damn those mega missiles. I remember one time on a big map, he tossed two megas at me at once. I dodged both (they have homing devices, so you pretty much have to get behind them to lose them), then a third. Then - surprise! a fourth. I felt the heat of it when it zoomed by.

Well, I had him then. I was punding into him confidently with my weak lasers, having dodged four of the worst missiles in the game, when the fifth hit me.

ANOTHER one? You can only carry five missiles, and there might have been six on the entire map. How, in five minutes, had he acquired all those missiles? Well, you don't survive even an indirect hit with a Mega missile, so down I went, in flames.

Thanks, dad.

I never did beat him at Starcraft. Eight carriers running scared from an EMP and a nuke do not a successful campaign make.

Two years ago, while browsing the America's Army forums, I found a little gem of a Korean game called Kal Online. I was told that it's scheme was much like the pay-to-play games like Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest. I tried it out, never having seen a better game, and fell instantly in love with it.

I found a guild in Kal called Jaine's Outpost. They were not an ordinary gaming guild, but one put together specifically to facilitate a fansite, www.jainesoutpost.com

I was immediately intrigued. I had met a lot of assholes in my first MMORPG. I had almost given up on finding any decent company when I learned about Jaine's Outpost. They were a community dedicated to the instruction of players new to the game, and to providing a clean, family-oreiented and sophisticated forum for more intelligent players.

The site has so far had two or three thousand registered visitors, and gets about half a million hits per month.

I'm now one of the site's administrators, since I've been with the site for about a year now. I've gone from FPS and RTS gaming to a solid line of RPG's, including some bigger names like Guild Wars and EVE Online.

But I still play Descent.

And you'd better have more than one Mega Missile if you want to knock me out of the air, bub. You've got to get up pretty early in the morning to out-circle-strafe me.