Quarter to Three is a varied and eclectic forum.
We are an interesting bunch. Games are the focus, but that’s not all. We appreciate all views and thoughts. We’re glad you’re here. Please tell us about yourself. And long time members will tell you about themselves. Welcome to the forum.
Okay. I’ll start. My name is Rich. I started here in March of 2006. Back then you had to be vetted by @tomchick. Somehow I was allowed in. So much for vetting. :)
I am and was a hardware guy. I built systems for people. Later I got an Associates degree in computer networking. Then I worked for various companies as a consultant. Now I am retired and tired. I’m old. So be it. But I still love playing games, even though I’m 59. That’s human years.
Your turn.
Yeah, let’s do this thing! I’m divedivedive, though once upon a time I went by Pogue Mahone. I’ve got another name, but that’s not important right now. I like lots of things, like zombie movies, space exploration, and beer. I recently had a birthday which puts me, well let’s just say well into my forties. I don’t have as much gaming time as I used to, what with having two young children, but I do still like to play the video games when I can.
I’m going to take an opportunity to present a challenge to users, new and old. If you haven’t, give some thought to your top 100 games of all time. And then put your list over here:
I think that on a video game forum, there’s no better way to explain who you are and what you’re all about than explaining the games that mean the most to you, and that thread is a pretty great place to find out about others and tell people about yourselves. Not mandatory of course, but it’s fun in a homework kind of way.
Sonoftgb here, formerly tgb123, aka Norabunga. At 65 I’m probably the old man of the tribe, or at least one of the oldest. I’ve been in sales and marketing all my life, but am now semi-retired, with a wife, two dogs, and two cats. My goal is to be fully retired and living near the beach in Mexico by this time next year.
I’ve been a gamer for 50 years, starting with board and war games, and moving into computer gaming in the late 70’s. My preference is strategy and RPG, turn based, but I’ll try anything that promises a new experience (not easy to find after so much time). I also do a bit of beta testing on the side.
I’m Nightgaunt! I joined Qt3 back around 2000 (under my real name, Chris Floyd). Then I had a long hiatus and came back with a different account because I forgot what I had used way back then.
I’m a professional game designer (most recently Game Director on Life Is Strange: Before the Storm) and a video gamer/board gamer and a father of four children/husband of one wife.
I studied English, Philosophy, and Art History in college, so if you want to have a debate about whether video games are art and drive everyone else batty, please let me know any time.
I am primarily a PC gamer, and these days primarily a player of indie games that don’t require me to play them for 40 hours in 3 hour chunks. I haven’t played a single Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, HALO, Call of Duty, Dragon Age, or Final Fantasy game. I like games where you build stuff and mostly don’t fight because fighting is boring.
I hold many other unpopular opinions about video games, including that the pinnacle of the Civilization franchise is Civilization: Revolutions.
Well, sure, why not?
I was known here (and still am in other forums) as BleedTheFreak but I just go by my name now, since I’ve put content out in the world and would actually like credit for it, from YouTube and a few old web sites I wrote for a few times, to even writing a little for this very site.
However, I’m by trade an IT guy, been in the business for over 20 years (since I graduated college) and have an awesome wife who understands gamers as well as two kids, one of whom is going to prom tomorrow. All of us love super hero films.
I have at least one cat, who literally just unplugged the UPS from the wall while I was typing this. Thankfully the UPS is pretty new so the battery held and I didn’t go down. Thanks, Fritz.
I’ve been a gamer since I got a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas and played Zelda 48 straight hours. I love a wide selection of books, music genres, TV, and movies and will happily talk about any of those subjects, or other things I like such as cigars.
That’s pretty much it. I’m not super complicated. Welcome to Qt3!
Hi, I’m Armando Penblade, but some folks know me as Randy, including a contingent of local Qt3ers here in NC that I see for lunch sometimes.
I joined up something like 10 years ago (in 4 days!) and was vetted by Tom, who I told I wanted to be a videogame journalist after I graduated with my degree in Print Journalism–Magazine Focus from Boston U.
I didn’t become a videogame journalist. In fact, I don’t really play videogames at all anymore. My gaming time in almost exclusively consumed by tabletop RPGs, which I’m extremely involved in and actually about to start getting paid a little for on an NDA’d project that I’ll be merrily sharing with y’all as soon as I can.
But I used to play a lot of games, from my old Sega Master System and Genesis up through Gamecube and PS2 when I returned to consoles, and a ton of PC games between those two blocks and ever since. I mostly tend to play RPGs, strategy games, and adventure games, but I’ll dabble in action or even really arcadey racing games now and then.
Oh, and I cook. A lot. And love heavy metal and bad superhero TV/movies and Douglas Adams’ entire literary product and Doctor Who and futzing with Android phones (god bless Qualcomm) and my partner of 14.5 years, Arika, a woman so massively out of my league that I assume that Ashton Kutcher’s just got me setup as the longest-running gag on Punk’d in TV history.
I am the left-handed, asthmatic, illegitimate son of a coal miner’s daughter, born 53 years ago and jaundiced, and hospitalized at least once every year throughout my childhood. As a child I discovered things like comic books, movies, video games, books, and gaming and realized years later they were all forms of escape from a pretty fucked up childhood that still haunts and shapes me a half-century later.
I joined the internet in 1996, having just finished a MA in English Lit at age 31 and with absolutely no idea what I was going to do for the rest of my life; I had managed to turn my protracted college career into yet another form of hiding from the Real World. But sometime between the undergrad and grad years I’d discovered PC gaming, and taught myself how the machines that brought me so much joy actually worked. This naturally led me into an IT career that has now lasted for over 20 years. Today I work for the Air Force’s research labs and help run over a dozen networks as one of the main admins of my org, a level of responsibility I’d spent decades of my earlier life assiduously avoiding.
I’ve been with my wife since 1989. We met through a mutual friend and for whatever reason she took a shine to me and for months showed up at my work, my apartment, talking my ear off and absorbing my sagely advice (I was 24, she 19) on college, dating, life, etc. She eventually lost patience with my denseness and asked me out. So on June 2nd, a Fri night, I picked her up as she was getting off from work at her waitressing job to take her to a pizzeria inside a building with a log cabin facade on the north side of town. We didn’t see each other the next day, but have been together ever since. Today we have two kids, no pets, a nice house (our only debt), some good neighbors, and a few close friends. An ironic situation for a person who spent a lonely boyhood vowing to never marry or have children. Yet I wouldn’t have it any other way. I saved her from her family; she saved me from myself.
I joined Qt3 around 2002, having learned of it from a Usenet mention. I currently have installed on my system Vermintide 2, Shadow of War, Titanfall 2, Grim Dawn, Xcom 2, Battlefield 1, For Honor, Prey (2017), Total War: Warhammer 1, Diablo 3, and the Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire beta. I spend too much time on social media arguing politics and too little time reading and relaxing. I’m semi-literate in both Middle and modern English, love hiking, walks in the rain and on beaches, puppies, good food, and good music. I’m a child of the 70s and will duel to the death anyone who dares deny that decade as the zenith of American culture.
My turn:
I’m Wr W**k, about to turn 41, Dutch, father of two, feeder of a cat and butler to a woman. When I was little, I witnessed a Mirage tearing up a valley while on vacation with my parents. That left a deep, lasting impression. Ever since that day trains, automobiles and ships lost their luster to little boy schurem, it was planes!
When I was about 14, I sat in the back of the class and the maths teacher asked me to solve the equation on the blackboard. I couldn’t. And not being able to read teach’s scribblings meant not being able to spot a bogey at 8 o’ clock high. And that meant no jets for me.
I threw in the towel at school and majored in being a drop out. Discovered the joys of weed, music, that sort of thing. After a bunch of years of doing that I decided that life is empty, cut my hair and went to work.
IT at first but that turned out to be hell for me. I do not thrive in the corporate office environment. So I took on a student loan, made an entry exam and threw me into university life studying philosophy. I minored in polemology (peace sciences) and teaching. I also failed to graduate.
In those years I discovered a lot of good things: MMA, the joy of manual labor and the realities of 21st century worker oppression, my woman and the meaning of life.
PC gaming has been with me ever since the first homecomputer made it into our house. My dad was a bit of a tech nerd in his day, so we loaned the neighbours’ TV to hook up a C-64. And I played flight games. Because all I want is to tear down a valley in a Mirage.
Today, when the kids are asleep, the dishes are done, the house is clean and the clothes are folded and distributed (i’m the housekeeper, woman works. that’s my bit for womens’ lib lol) I put on my oculus and tear down the valleys of Georgia. In a fucking Mirage. Blasting dropkick murphies.
You can’t see me, but trust that I’m hammering a phantom like button right now.
Dutch people of the world, unite! (or at least ancestors, that counts right?)
I’m Jerry. Looking at my profile it says I’ve been here since 2005. IIRC I’d sent the request to Tom like a year before that, and had completely forgotten by the time I heard back. :) I’m 46 and have a wife, 2 daughters (4 & 8), and a dog. A long time ago, back when the Soviet Union still was a thing, I was Russian SIGINT specialist in the Army. My timing was impeccable as the 7th week of basic was during the coup attempt in Moscow, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist half way through language training in Monterey. So I spent the remainder of the time stationed in Texas in the 1st Cav Division. After that I went back to Iowa to finish school, and grabbed majors in Computer Science and Russian. My time since then has been spent programming ending up in the odd space of UNIX and Linux kernels. For the last 6 years I have been working remotely from home, first for Oracle and for the last 4 years for Red Hat.
Gaming wise, I think the earliest platform I remember is one of those original pong consoles. We had an atari 2600 at some point as well, but it really started when I was in between 5th and 6th grade when I somehow got my parents to get me a Commodore 64. It was another 18 months before I got a 1541 disk drive. 4th or 5th grade is also when I first started getting into conflict simulation board games, starting with Tactics II and quickly adding War at Sea and Victory in the Pacific to the mix. Some of my fondest memories of junior high and high school years were the weekly gaming sessions at a local game store with a group of adults who didn’t care that some kid was interested in playing those games as well. One unfortunate thing happened while I was off in the Army, which was my game collection meeting an untimely demise due to flooding in my dad’s basement.
@Brooski keeps tempting me to get back into it though.
I go on these forums with my real name, as I got tired of using aliases in the Internet. With older accounts I go mostly under the “Bletchley_Geek” moniker.
I was born in Barcelona, Spain, nearly forty years ago. I guess I was the Spanish version of a nerdy kid, to a great extent because my father put me in LOGO programming classes when I was 8 years old. Since then it has been rare the time I haven’t done without a programmable device around. I went like a cannonball for a CS bachelor after high school, but I flunked my first year. Had to try again and eventually got a masters in CS and Digital Signal Processing, while working on an early music recommender system. Back when we thought internet users would be rational and responsible enough to steer algorithms, and not the other way around. From that I went onto get a PhD in AI, and my thesis was about bringing together logic, probabilities and combinatorial search to make computers more able to figure out what their human masters intent is. Moved to OZ in 2012 as the Iberian Peninsula seemed on the brink of going under, and now I am happily settled down here, working again in crossing over different strands of AI techniques.
I joined this forum sometime in 2012, and Tom just asked to introduce myself to him via email. I guess he eventually decided he’d learnt too much about random strangers :)
Gaming wise I am more keen on strategy, RPG and war gaming than anything else. But over the years and informed by Tom’s suggestions I have occasionally left my comfort zone. That’s something I appreciate so I eventually became a patron.
I also had a brief jaunt as a pro bono programmer for Command Ops. So I guess I have like some microscopic experience in the games’ industry too :)
Heya, my name is Rod Humble I am a game developer with an interest in pushing games as an artistic medium forward. I like and play just about all games but wargames (miniatures, cardboard + digital), RPG’s (paper + digitial), strategy games + exploration + solo games are particularly of interest. Outside of games I am an astro nerd, history buff (military, ancients + ussr) & edm musician. Welcome to new & old members!
Hi all,
my name is Juan Raigada (duh). I go by that or by juanraigada everywhere online these days. I am 36, a father of a two month old son, married to an awesome wife which somehow respects my (many, wide-reaching ) hobbies and member of the forum since 2012.
I had a weird education (Computer Science and Fine Arts simultaneous degrees) and for a while I worked on the film industry. I got to be assistant director and second unit director on a Cannes award winning film (critic’s prize, but a really small film nonetheless) but eventually I figured I did not have the social/networking skills or the willingness to get them to advance further and I became an indie game developer (mostly because I lacked the resume to get into the industry proper,but it turned out to be the best decision, I think). So far I haven’t gone broke, which is an achievement in the current market! yay. It’s also because I teach part-time (college and vocational training levels) which helps pays the bills and to maintain a level income in-between project windfalls.
Game wise I like pretty much everything and depending on the month I might be into some AAA extravaganza or a super niche Japanese strategy game I translate as I play with my phone (I’m so happy Super Robot Wars games are being translated now…). the only thing that normally puts me off is really long games (and exceptional examples I try to play) just because I prefer to switch games often. My long term playing is mostly Blood Bowl (I help manage a league that will be looking for new members soon) and solo boardgames (the kid has made these harder to put up, but I have a plan…).
I’ve somewhat recently started to explore wargames, less because an interest in history (although that’s there) and more because I became tired with current boardgame design trends, more concerned about mechanical iteration/combination that about experiential and narrative design.
I also do sci-fi modelling as a hobby I’m really into (mechas and Maschinen Krieger stuff). You can see some of my work on the hobby desk thread here. Sadly, the kid will also make these come about way less often for a while (and I have no plan for this, unless I buy a new house, which isn’t happening).
Hi, my name is Matthew and I have been puttering around QT3 since 2008.
I am embarking on the start of my second career as a educator and am currently trying to figure out where that path leads me.
For fun I like to play videogames and boardgames and I tend to prefer coop games for both. I am also partial to painting minis and I do a little freelance illustration on the side as a sort of “paid hobby”. I occasionally post NSFW doodles I have done in Tom’s Twitch stream.
My real name is Laurence Brothers, been around forever. I used to do R&D for various tech firms, but I’ve also done MMO game design and more recently market research and technology analysis. Lately I’ve been writing, SF and fantasy mostly, and have 14 publications in various magazines and anthologies, along with three novels I’m trying to sell. Latest story coming out in Galaxy’s Edge next month, buy a subscription today :)
I’ve lurked and read here for a long time, but I rarely post.
I have an academic background (BA/MA) in national security studies, but I’ve spent my career working for a nonprofit in the online education / edtech industry as an instructional designer and project manager.
I grew up in NC, moved to DC for grad school and work, and as of last year I’ve followed my partner to her ‘hometown’ of southern California.
On the Waypoint forums, there’s a fun thread where folks have posted their #GameStruck4, the four games that “defined them”.
For me, those would be:
I don’t play any of these games with regularity any more, but they still inform the things I like and are, in a lot of ways, the benchmarks that I continue to compare new games to, fairly or not.
That’s cool, I saw over on The A.V. Club that people were doing a similar game but with 4 movies that defined them. Probably easier than trying to list 100 games for most folks.
Allright, the games that made me huh?
Not the first flight game (they called 'em simulators back then) I ever played, not even the first one I really sunk into, but this one defines the era and I wasted so much time on it in highschool. It was very immersive, with the RPG-like squadron management and the wargame-like strike planning and consequences to your flights.
I bought my first self-owned computer hardware for this; a soundblaster and a logitech analogue joystick. My sister made fun of its phallic shape. “pull-up! pull-up!” in a tinny voice filled my dreams. I also learned hacker mentality from getting the DOS computer to run the damn thing at all.
I grew up with starwars as a toddler. Han Solo shot first and the force was with me, always. The last movie was made in '83 so there wasn’t any new starwars to fire the imagination. And then X-wing happened. A flight simulator… but starwars! It blew my mind. I flew and flew and when the flying was done, I hacked the scenario files, trolled phone-in BBS’s for scenarios etc. My dad’s PC was always a 386DX. A very anemic machine and the experience of trying to eke out an immersive experience from that craptastic hunk of junk has left me with a permanent hunger for better, faster hardware that took decades to abate.
I’m a kid of the cold war. I knew an SA-6 from an SA-8 since I was 10 or so. M1Tank Platoon’s crummy copy protection taught me to distinguish soviet armored vehicles by their number and spacing of roadwheels. I knew every flying thing as intimately as books could let me. I knew all the likely targets as well. I built models. Painted them. Played with them as a kid. Wargame is the ultimate toybox. It has all of the things, detailed, lovingly painted, specced out to perfection. It’s a boyhood dream completed.
I was relatively early discovering the internet. My dad had a modem and he taught me how to use BBS’s before the internet existed. He worked in a school at that time and we were there when the schools hooked up into a proto-internet. And then the web happened and it all changed. Something rotten and something awful. I made friends without faces but with colorful nicknames in IRC. Learned how to touch-type a hundred words a second. Honed my english-language skills to a sharp, filthy edge because in IRC cyberspace, you dont fight with fists, you fight with funny, smart and biting language. Over the years, IRC waned. A bunch of us migrated to a chatroom-in-space; Eve-O. I played that for years. Eventually I grew weary of it’s populace overwhelming barbarism. Every time you’d build a sandcastle, bullies would come in and knock it over. Fuck that shit. Fuck other people.
Which brings me neatly to what helped me kick Eve. Tanks was a fun game. Short sharp romps in a heavy metal box that made big bad booms and the other players might as well be bots, they don’t matter really. Unlike Eve where politics and socio-economic structures and all those things happen (which is wildly interesting and to a socialist-anarchist like me is deeply sad in how they happen) Tanks players only need to drive mildly sensible and shoot. Or get shot. Whatever. There’s always next round. I also have always loved WoT’s aesthetics. It has this melancholy oil painting look often while also being metal like a bolt thrower record.
And now I’m a dad and when the kids go to sleep I tear down a valley in the caucasus in a mirage. In VR. And it. is. AWESOME.
Since the late 90s flight simming lied dormant for me. I knew it was still there, but I had lost interest, lost the peace of mind to study on radar modes and threat warning profiles. I dabbled a bit with il-2 1946 but that’s it. And then VR happened. And I got the full-time dad-role. This gives me time and mindspace to learn again. And its wonderful. I enjoy the intellectual challenges as well as the sheer exhileration of flight. Golden times indeed. I am one happy (former?) gamer.
I’m Kelly. I’m 50 and have a long dating history that thankfully landed with my current fiance. I’m a lead IT Network engineer for a large manufacturing company, having worked in IT in one form or another since roughly 1992. During part of that, I enjoyed seeing a large part of the world in the U.S. Navy. I eventually landed in Charlotte, NC.
I found QT3 around 2006, though truly I read posts from some of the long time people here as far back as the early 90s and 00s on Usenet newsgroups. I certainly also read Tom Chick in various articles, my favorite being the escapades of Tom vs Bruce, which truly is what let me to the forum. Thankfully Tom approved me. As time has gone by my interests have changed and certainly also the subforums here I post on. That’s part of the awesomeness that QT3 represents, a sounding board for any number of subjects, or a shoulder to lean on to spill your thoughts.
My love for all things gaming was driven by my early love of computers that drove my work interests as well. From programming in games on a TRS-80 and saving them on a cassette tape, to (mostly) PC gaming today. I play a little of everything, but I haven’t been a twitch style gamer for quite a while now, so I’m happy for things with a little bit of a slower pace. I love RPGs, survival games, sims, strategy, and occasionally wargames.
Besides gaming I’m an avid boater, I like to cook, I like to make beer (but haven’t in a while,) and I like to enjoy a good beer and the fun of being a bar local in a place where too many unfortunately know my name.
