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Games
#10

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.

#11

You can’t see me, but trust that I’m hammering a phantom like button right now.

#12

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.

#13

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 :)

#14

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!

#15

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).

#16

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.

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#17

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 :)

#18

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:

  1. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri - Of all the strategy games I played during my formative years, this was the one that most affected me. Always having been a sci-fi fan, I ate up the fluff around the technologies and factions. The deformable terrain also really wowed me at the time – there’s no forgetting the first time you hit a city with the max-size planet buster and leave nothing but a crater for the ocean to reclaim.
  2. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - I spent more time with this game than probably any other. I haven’t really touched it since all the recent overhaul projects have modernized it for today’s machines, but even at the time its scope, beauty, and freedom were the perfect way for me to escape my small-town childhood. None of its sequels ever did much for me, as they lacked the alien charm of the landscape of Vvardenfell.
  3. Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun - I unironically think this is the best of Paradox’s releases, and I still prefer it over its sequel. The POP-splitting is of course a nightmare, and it’s hard to go back to the UI of the older Paradox titles, but Victoria and the other Europa-engine games did a great job, I felt, guiding you through history but still bounding you to relatively plausible scenarios through their event systems. When I way playing it heavily, I was probably looking for a “history simulator” rather than a “game”, but there was nothing else out there that really scratched that itch.
  4. Advance Wars - My gateway into wargaming. My most-played DS game, and one that I would take everywhere with me. Easy to boot up a skirmish, do a campaign mission, or play around with its great map editor. I’ve become much more interested in wargaming in the past year or so, and I’ve come to appreciate how elegantly this game tackled some of those concepts in a way that child-me could easily grasp.

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.

#19

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.

#20

Allright, the games that made me huh?

  • Falcon 3.0

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.

  • X-wing / Tie Fighter

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.

  • Eugens’ Wargame

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.

  • Eve Online

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.

  • World of Tanks / Warships

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.

  • DCS

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.

#21

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.

#23

Howdy! What brings you to these strange shores?

#25

That works!

#26

Welcome! Drop in the threads for your favorite games and enjoy the forums!

#27

I suppose if I’m going to do welcome posts I should also do my background. I go by Skip IRL, but have also been known as Samuel (my actual given name), Sam, Bob, David, and George at various points in life. Basically I just respond to any name shouted in my direction. The “ineffablebob” handle comes from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the bit where Arthur is the sandwich maker and the local holy/crazy man obeys the ineffable will of Bob.

Personal/Professional life: retired, 42, single, no kids (closest is two nieces, who I enjoy spoiling when I visit them, then returning them to my brother). Went to college at Rose-Hulman in Indiana, starting as an electrical engineer then switching to math/computer science when I realized that hardware was not my thing. Spent more than a decade in the IT industry as a consultant and systems architect, which sounds like it should follow from that Math/CS degree but in reality used almost none of it. Business process analysis and ERP integration doesn’t use much in the way of algorithm analysis or number theory! In the process I got to do a lot of travel around the USA and later the world. I’ve been to all 48 lower states, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, and technically the Netherlands and Alaska (only an airport in those cases).

Gaming: Started with a Commodore 64 and a neighbor’s Atari 2600, moving on to Nintendo and x86 PCs (at home) and Macs (at school). Spy Hunter, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Darklands, the various Super Marios, Civilization, etc, etc. D&D was frowned upon in my conservative evangelical upbringing, but I managed to absorb quite a bit of it anyway. In college I was introduced to Magic: The Gathering and went down the TCG rabbit hole for quite some time, playing over the next decade or so: Magic, Middle Earth (the ICE original), Star Trek, Wheel of Time, 7th Sea, Buffy (seriously!), L5R, The X-Files, Warcraft, Lord of the Rings (the Decipher one), and I’m sure a few more I can’t recall right now. Eventually extricated myself from the physical games, but I still play several online TCGs (Hearthstone and Eternal right now). Big fan of MMOs, too: City of Heroes (sadly now defunct), WoW, Guild Wars 2, Secret World, Marvel Heroes (also dead), Path of Exile, and quite a few more that I’ve dabbled in. And I love me some deckbuilders, primarily playing Star Realms and Hero Realms these days, with occasional forays into Dragonfire, Mystic Vale, Legendary, LoTR, Custom Heroes, and more.

Other Stuff: Love me some beer, mostly dark stuff, and I generally go to 2-3 festivals each year to sample stuff. Here in West Michigan we have a great craft beer scene. Big music fan of almost all kinds, but my first love is hard rock/metal and I frequent the Metal thread. I read quite a bit, although lately I’ve spent less time with books and more watching some of the gazillion hours of quality shows available on the various streaming services. (Finally caught up with Doctor Who most recently, and working through PKD’s Electric Dreams right now.) Huge baseball fan, Cubs and Tigers, and somewhat less rabid fan of various other sports. And I’m a (very) amateur runner, doing 5k and 10k runs around the local area. Helps with staying in shape and also supports some good causes.

Edit: Oh yeah, and I joined back in 2011 via the old email-to-Tom-introduction method. Which was prompted by hearing about the boards on the old Jumping the Shark podcast. Tom was a guest on one episode IIRC, and the boards here were mentioned, so I thought I’d check it out. Been here ever since.

#28

Hi Everyone - I’m pretty new to posting on this forum, but I have been lurking here for close to a decade. Once, on the old forum software, I tried to register to post, but I believe Tom had to approve new users and that never happen. Might have been a wise decision by him.

I work in IT supporting Salesforce.com and associated applications in the Higher Education vertical.

I’ve been a gamer since as long as I can remember. I used to spend hours watching my brother play Wing Commander and Flight Sims on the PC. We had an Atari growing up, as well as a Sega Master system (Spy vs Spy, Phantasy Star!) - but I didn’t really identify with a system until the SNES. From there, I played the crap out of any game I could get my hands on, but the one that will also stick with me is Final Fantasy 3 (6 I guess is the proper order). I even joined AOL with the username SabinMoMog way back long ago.

Saved up and bought my own N64 and also became and absolutely vicious Goldeneye player - to the point that my friends refused to play with me at all, even during 3 on 1 (I liked those 3 on 1 battles because it was more people for me to kill)

At the same time I was also into PC gaming and breaking the family computer on a regular basis. Played a ton of Civilization and Warcraft… but honestly I would play pretty much anything. Finally, things got serious when I found my one true love with Starsiege: Tribes. Joined the competitive gaming scene with that game, which in my opinion (colored by nostalgia) is the greatest FPS and team-combat video game ever. I played in a few tribes there, [INQ], [TKB], and .enD the most notable ones, My position was always as a light defender or secondarily heavy on the flag. Pretty decent with the chain gun, decent on the chase, but really excelled with blocking cappers. Played Tribes 2 of course, and then most recently played Tribes: Ascend. Tribes Ascend was a good foundation that captured a lot of what made Tribes great, except that the developers butchered the jet-pack ballet with an over-abundance of automatic weapons.

Once I went off to college I pretty much stopped playing PC games and only played Halo and FIFA and other games that work well with lots of college kids hanging around. Studied Sociology and Philosophy while in school. After I graduated, I got more into PC gaming again - mostly focused on Grand Strategy, RPG, and TBS… but over the last few years I’ve started picking up a few FPS games again (Battlefield 1 taking most of my time). Unfortunately, I just don’t have the twitch abilities much anymore, or my eyes are worse… who knows, but I find that I only have one good match out of 4 when I play FPS.

Recently I’ve started getting into boardgaming. It is something I’ve always loved - playing games like Battletech with my brother when I was a kid - but I never realized how many games exist until recently. Mostly I like everything that Tom hates - Mechs vs Minions, Gloomhaven, Mage Knight - but also a big fan of various card games and games of chance like Yahtzee. I have Scythe sitting waiting for me, and trying to get my collection caught up with all the important ones.

I am a big sports fan - specifically hockey and college football. Grew up playing soccer, basketball, and baseball… but as an adult I picked up hockey and played beer league hockey until my girls came along (4 and 2 y/o) - just haven’t had the time since.

I run my own decently sized college football message board for my alma mater. It is pretty fun, even get to do radio interviews about it from time to time.

Also enjoy politics - especially the polling data. Like reading Triggercut’s analysis in the politics forum about all that.

Excited to be welcomed to this community. I appreciate the breadth of games that get noticed here, and I love hearing the perspectives from so many ‘insiders’ to the industry.

#29

My name is Mark L. Well. I’m just this guy, you know?

#30

zaphod

#31

I’m João, a 40 years old Portuguese dude.
I don’t remember when I first saw a computer, but I was hooked from that time, It was probably a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, tapes that took forever. Put it into my mind that I was going to be a programmer. I’m a programmer.
Didn’t have enough money for a computer for a long time though, so my first one was a Schneider Euro PC, with Hercules graphics and no sound.

Generally geeky, bit of an easy sell for anything sci-fi / fantasy, remember being a young kid in my grandparents village, no TV, going around to the neighbors to try and score enough TV time to watch V.

Games that made me, I’d probably have several different answers to this but top 3:
Pirates, the really old one, it was amazing how the world changed around you.
Master of Orion. SciFi civilization. Aliens. Lasers. Perfection.
Street Fighter 2. I was a teen by this time, and playing PVP started to have interest.

In meatspace proper, mostly played Collectible stuff. The Battletech cardgame, Magic, L5R, Mageknight and Mechwarrior Dark Age.

Chances are, you can’t pronounce my name. :D