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Howdy! What brings you to these strange shores?

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

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.

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.

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

zaphod

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

Internet to the rescue!

I would have guessed Joe-Wow, and doesn’t sound like I was terribly far off.

Ok, I’ll jump in.

I don’t post much, an extremely conscious decision because I feel like I’ve very poorly represented myself on other forums, and do not want to repeat that error in this community because I generally, honestly like and respect most of the people and their opinions here, something I cannot say about any other forum I’ve ever visited. I cannot count the number of posts I’ve typed, but deleted before posting due to fear of offending and/or sounding like the idiot I am. I’d like to believe that I’m past all online foolishness, and will now only post things I can look back at and be (somewhat) proud of, not embarrassed/ashamed of. I’d like to believe I’m doing ok with that here. So far. (I think some here know what I mean by this)

My addiction to gaming started with Space Invaders. I once skipped school with my girlfriend, and for no reason whatsoever found a Space Invaders game in the game room of a hotel with an inexplicable 9999 credits! I played at least a few hundred of those credits. My girlfriend was cool, played the first few dozen or so with me, then watched, pretending enthusiasm for the next few dozen, then tried very hard to not be annoyed by the next couple of hundred. But, I was hooked! As soon as I moved away from home, my first major purchase as an adult was a Nintendo game system. My time spent with Zelda, Link, and Final Fantasy could easily rival my recent time with games I play(ed) today.

When I bought my first PC, it had a whopping 300MB hard drive, and I started my gaming addiction with King’s Quest games, then DOOM, then Alone In The Dark. After that, it’s all a blur.

PC gaming got me into programming, which is my career now at IBM, and building my own PCs was/is a passion, each new build replacing my previous “awesome box” which were passed down to my (3) children, each having a PC of their own since they were old enough to use a mouse.

My best gaming experiences would be:

DOOM - When I read somewhere that Robin Williams played Doom, I immediately found the shareware version, and began my late-night gaming binges (It’s 4AM! Holy Shit!). I played through the main games (1 & 2) and all the fan-made maps I could find, which were well into the thousands.

Myst - Before there were things called walkthroughs, we old-timers had to figure stuff out on our own (yeah, lawn…off)! I both hated and loved the original because it made me think so much. I remember days wherein I’d spend hours daydreaming about the “ages”, and have “Eureka!” moments of discovery when thinking of an area/method/something I hadn’t thought of before, then rushing through my day and breaking speed-limits on my way home in order to try them. Riven completely kicked my ass, but Exile was one of my proudest gaming achievements in that I set and achieved my goal of completing the game totally on my own without any hints or help of any kind. If anyone says, “So what? Exile was easy!”, I will kick your dog!

Thief - A bit of a roller-coaster relationship with this game. I knew I wanted this game (the box was so cool looking on the shelf at MediaPlay) for months before I saved up enough money to purchase it. I did not like it at first. I thought it was too hard, and uninstalled after my first attempt. A few months later, I gave it another try for no particular reason, and it just clicked. Late night Thief binges were my life for years afterwards. By the time I finished the first, Thief 2: The Metal Age was released, so then I had that to continue my obsession. After playing both repeatedly, I discovered that there were Fan-made missions for Thief, and again, my obsession continued. Then, I began to feel a little guilty about spending so little money to gain so much enjoyment from a game, and decided to make my own Fan-made mission; a kind of “payback” to the Thief world. So, I made my own Thief Fan-made mission. It was well-received, so I made a sequel, and it was also well-recieved. Because they took so much time to create, I felt my “obligation” to the Thief-world was satisfied, so I felt I was done, but I still played Thief and any new Fan-made missions constantly. In hindsight, I think creating these missions made me a bit more critical of other Fan-made missions, and it was at this point that my love affair with the Thief community declined. I found myself being annoyed by other Fan-made missions for their lack of what I thought Fan-made missions should be. Admittedly, I was wrong to criticize as harshly as I did, and it is a horrible regret I live with to this day. There were some good people I no longer have contact with because of this mistake.

Elder Scrolls - Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and now ESO, in descending order of enjoyment. Morrowind was my first and best experience with any RPG. Exploration, man. Exploration. Exploration of a world so very cool, so very open and real was such a drastically different experience in a game, and I loved it so much.

Rainbow Six games (up to 3) - After 3, they became different games, and I have no interest. But, all before 3 I played and replayed dozens of times. Plotting out your teams actions on the planning map was so engrossing to me. I would spend at least a ratio of 10 to 1 on the planning-to-playing game. It was so satisfying to finally get the “right” plan where you didn’t even need to control a team for them to accomplish their tasks and you could focus (control) only one team in the execution. So many “Whoa!” moments! I still hate that you could not save at any point in each mission, but it sure did make every mission supremely intense!

Defense Grid - So much time playing and replaying (Steam says 520 hours!). Reflecting, I’m unable to come up with any real definition of why I love this game so much. I just do. For many years, it has been my go-to game for just plain relaxing, fun, satisfying gaming.

That’s enough, I guess.

Oh yeah, …um, Hi!

Hey guys,

I’m Woo and I’ve been around in the early 2000s and found my way to Qt3 via Planetcrap due to some forum drama that I can’t even remember anymore.

I’m Korean American and while my Korean is decent, I would rank that last out of the 3 languages I speak (English, Japanese, Korean) due to the extensive formal training I had in Japanese and spending most of my 20s working in Tokyo as a software engineer for the finance industry.

I’ve now moved back to the NYC where I work as technical operations lead but have also spent a few years living in California, Michigan, and Minnesota as well.

I’ve always been a big fan of Japanese games growing up and have a strong appreciation for their genres that started/only exist in Japan (Visual Novels, Tactical RPGs…and yes, some weird Adult games as well) but find myself gravitating towards PC games as I get older.

Some fun facts:

  • My primary side gig during college was as a J-E translator, during which I worked on a number of Fansubs for niche mecha anime (Dunbine, SPT Layzner, and Vifam to name a few), some Japanese B-movies, H games, and even a canceled X-box dungeon crawler.
  • My wife designed a good number of the avatar icons that’s now standard in every Playstation branded console, including her in her halloween costume :)

32/M/Wi


Joined back in 2007, as I was banned from NeoGAF for being a 22 year old brat arguing about some stupid stuff.

So I came here!

Studied Biology in school, worked in IT in college, and worked in software a bit after college, but realized I couldn’t do QA, and got a job working an the pharmaceutical industry as a scientist. More recently I began working as a Quality and Food Safety Coordinator at a food ingredients manufacturer. No longer a lab rat, I now wrangle production problems.

RPGs have always been my gaming genre of choice. Played many JRPGs on consoles, and got straight up addicted to WoW in 2004-2005. Did a lot of high level raiding that affected my school work, made a lot of friends, and more recently I joined the QT3 adjacent guild and did raiding in Mists of Pandaria. I love anything Sci-Fi, (I even took an honors course in Sci-Fi lit in college)

Of course I was on a couple episodes of the QT3 podcast chatting about
Dwarf Fortress and Day Z

Speaking of podcasts…
I do a weekly podcast, Born in the Eighties, as described by former forum members as

Anyway we had our 300th episode earlier this year. It is me and my friends generally free-associating about game news, movie news, tech news, and now mostly deep diving into what I call “the bowels of reddit” discovering some real bad communities. We have a nice little following, who think we are fun.

I also used to do improv in town, and our group was pretty well regarded doing bi-monthly shows with a nice following, but as these groups go, people moved etc…

I currently GM a game of “Starfinder” for a local group, and have GM’d Pathfinder games before, I have a local weekly group that plays pathfinder modules (and the Starfinder game I GM)

Other than that, I am an owner of 2 beautiful cats, I am getting Married in 3 weeks, and I now own a house. I did all of the adult things in the same 3 months. Also, I am a CPAP’er.

I love this community, because it generally feels civil here. (generally) we have good conversations, sometimes arguments, but in the end things never get nasty. There are no 'dunkings or 'pile-ons.

Which I think seriously is aided by adding “likes” to posts, which keeps me staunchly in the “no-likes” brigade here. I wrongly argued that the switch to discourse would be bad. I like the non-V-bulletin forums software. There are hiccups, but generally it works really good. As long as likes stay gone, we are good. :)

Ha, nice segue. Good lord they were brutal back in '11.

hatersgonnapanda

There are dozens of us!!!

I made a couple of fan made maps for the second game, and that was about my extent of trying anything fan made. But God I loved how deadly those games were and how fun some of the massive gun mods were. I also agree with you completely, the series went to shit when it went mainstream as a Counter Strike/Battlefield/Modern Warfare wannabe.

RB6 excelled at being a strategic, deadly, synchronized assault game. Like, well, the book. Playing early coop and doing insanely hard maps requiring a lot of team coordination were highlights in my gaming past.

Long time lurker here. I joined QT3 a long time ago while I worked at Blizzard. They had a strict cone of silence on us so I never developed much of a posting habit. I joined Blizzard at 20 years old and was there for almost 18 years - from Diablo 1 until Overwatch. I built the network and server infrastructure for the original Battle.net and launch WoW. Later I worked on the backend for WoW as it grew - and grew and grew!

I left to work for @Brad_Wardell at Stardock in 2014, leading a team to build Stardock an online multiplayer platform of their very own. That didn’t end up working out the way we hoped. I’m happy to see Stardock doing well though as Brad and I remain friends. I’m very excited to see Star Control by Stardock as it remains my all-time favorite video game series!

I joined Curse just before they were acquired by Twitch. I now lead a team of developers and engineers at Twitch building devtools, services, and infrastructure for Twitch’s various clients (web, mobile, desktop, etc). I split my time between my home in San Marcos, TX and the TwitchOC offices in Irvine, CA. Hard to do with a family but we love Texas and our ranch-ette there is perfect for us.

I’ve been a gamer since my dad brought home a C=64 in 1981. I clearly took the advice “do what you love” to heart. I have been fortunate enough to work and thrive in the gaming industry my entire career. Gaming is a big part of my life still. I spend hours every weekend I’m in Irvine playing games online with my 3 boys in Texas.

I bounce between genres, PC and console, and single versus multiplayer games. I love them all. I’ve found I often disagree with the critical consensus on games so I tend to try them all for myself. My favorite genres are RPGs, strategy, and open world action. That’s been a big crop lately so I’ve had no shortage of things. I’m trying to actually finish more games… in spite of game industry efforts to never let anyone finish any game through new DLC and online modes!

All in all I’m very proud to have helped bring multiple generations of gamers together.

I like to read sentiments like this. But, and I don’t know if this is interesting enough to put down in a post, I took the opposite approach.

I’ve always been a big fan of Samuel Clemens, read all his books at a pretty early age. I liked his acerbic, gentlemanly approach to things, he seemed like an idealized southerner in the vein of Atticus Finch. I was struck by a passage about his experiences in early life as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. I forget which book this was in, that escapes me. But what I do remember is that he early on decided this was what he wanted to do, so he pursued it doggedly, and worked very hard to be good at it. And he discovered that as he developed skills and an eye for the river, he started looking at it almost clinically, looking for the telltale swirl of a barely submerged tree trunk or rock that could rip a hole in a riverboat’s hull. And he stopped being able to appreciate the beauty of the river as its own thing.

Now, this is probably where I lose you, because it may not make a lot of sense, but I decided I wasn’t going to pursue something I truly loved as my life’s work. At the time, I was desperate to work in the field of oceanography or marine biology, but I decided that might be fun as a pastime. And, like yourself, I’m a lifelong video gamer. And I specifically decided I would not work in that field. And I’ve always avoided looking at games too analytically. There’s value in letting the man stay behind the curtain, leaving a little mystery in the world. That’s how I saw it, anyway, and I’m still not totally sure I was right. But here we are, and I still play games. And my son is completely fascinated with the ocean and all things in it, and if he asks me, I’ll say follow your dreams.

Hi Everyone. I’'m Nesrie.

That is not my real name. I joined the internet when using realnames wasn’t really considered safe, and just sort of kept up that habit for years.

I have identified myself as a lady, woman, female gamer, and I am also biracial. I typically tell people this on social forums I am active on now because I want them to know where I am coming from, but also to let those who are like me know they are not alone. We’re out here. We play games, love games… love tech, love nerd stuff too.

I came to this site around the recession where I went from almost a 99er with way too much time on my hand and no money to i guess I am working on 6 years now in my current profession of working with billing systems in healthcare. It’s a heavily, heavily regulated industry, and as member of basically IT I am put in the position where I spend my days altering the system to work for my end-users and never ending changing and conflicting requirements, but I am also required to stand-up to said end-users should they ever request or demand something that’s basically not okay to do.

As for gaming! Earliest experiences or I should say games that left lasting memories for me, Oregon Trail, Kyrandia, Hero’s Quest, King’s Quest and my obsession with cooperative play started with a keyboard and joystick combo with Serf City. I am a huge, huge cooperative game fan. Yes, I am obsessed with opportunities to spend too many hours playing against some AI with others.

I came to this site because Tom actually reviews strategy titles in a way that makes sense to me, although I rarely agree with him, and it felt like there was a time when strategy games were not getting much love… PC gaming, of course, was dying again, and here was a board full of people talking about strategy titles, PC games and hardware and well it went on from there.

I also call myself a mediocre nerd. I love franchises like Marvel and X-Men, but I don’t read the comics. I enjoy nearly all the Star Trek stuff, but I couldn’t tell you anything about the classes of the ships or even their model numbers. I like Star Wars but I am the last person you want in a trivia game asking you about the name of that white planet, the one with the snow not the salt. I spent probably 1 to 2 years thinking the Jersey shore kids and the Kardashians were the same people until someone finally explained to me why I am supposed to care about them, separately of course… I still don’t. You probably don’t want me on your team for celebrity pop-culture type games either, but I love movies so sign me up for that kind of game.

Hi my name is Yak. I joined Qt3 in 2003, and mostly play PC tactical RPGs. Jagged Alliance 2 is the only game I have replayed 4 - 5 times (with mods) from start to finish. I also love space sims such as FreeSpace and Independence War 2, but am heart-broken that I cannot get far in X-Wing or TIE Fighter because they are so hard. :(

All Time Favorite

  • Fallout – Best RPG ever.
  • Homeworld – Awesome cinematic experience.
  • Jagged Alliance 2 v1.13 – Huge game. Great mix of RPG and strategy.
  • Independence War 2: Edge Of Chaos – Awesome blend of space combat and narrative.
  • Final Fantasy III – Made me love RPGs.
  • The Temple of Elemental Evil: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure – This game should have spawned a long series of D&D RPGs like the old Gold Box games.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – This is when my interest in video games grew to become serious.

These games are not listed in the order I played them. Most of them I only learned about years after they were published via discussion forums and the used game/bargain bin.

IRL, I suffer from schizophrenia, and work for minimum wage at a college book store, even though I have a two-year IT degree.