This. Over the years I’ve learned where my tastes overlap with his and where they diverge, so I can get a lot out of his reviews despite the differences between us.
In my experience, whether or not I agree with Tom’s reviews is beside the point. I found Qt3 from the byline on the articles he used to have on the last page of CGW, and I came here just because I thought Tom was a heck of a writer and had interesting things to say. That’s enough for me.
Same with Bruce, really. I enjoy his articles on wargames though I really don’t play them, and when I do I invariably get lost. I have to stick to the shallow end of the pool, with Panzer General and Advance Wars.
I thought I did this once before and found this from 2012 in another similar thread on this topic. It is easier to just link the above as almost all of it is still true today.
I am no longer in my 40s, but close! I came here to this community through Dominions 2 discussions at other forums. This was most likely about 2004, and I waited many years before making an account. I was also a huge fan of all of the Tom vs. Bruce articles.
My wife and I don’t really play MMORPGs together much anymore, though. I think she has tired of them, but she plays games today as much as she ever has. My gaming time has been reduced drastically the past two years since I have dived back into bowling again after a 15 year hiatus. I am now involved in our local board, running a league and competitive tour, and trying to improve my own game. I think there is a thread around here somewhere if anyone ever wants to talk bowling stuff!
I’m Kevin, and I’m a 34 year old Dutch American with a wife and two small children. I moved to the United States back in 2005. Before this, I went to DoDD Schools in Europe, so my education was all in English. I recently completed my defense for my Master’s thesis, and hope to find something more in line with my interests in statistics and psychology, rather then what I do current, 401(k) adminstration.
I was introduced to PC gaming by my older brothers and started off with Global Conquest, Quest for Glory 3, Civilization and Pirates Gold. I was also a huge fan of Warriors under the Eternal Sun, the D&D game on the Sega Genesis.
I joined QT3 because of a Review of Dominions 2, and quickly bought Dominions 3. I am a fan of Strategy games and RPGs, and anything that allows me to customize my game play. I try to avoid anything with too many parts, such as Wargames.
Confession time, Mell. I threw shade at you guys and your teams during the early days. I was a player, I do very similar stuff to you in IT and I looked at things at launch and thought, what the hell, you guys can do better than that.
Oh I was so wrong. I did not in any way appreciate the SCALE of the traffic and user count that you were facing. I think some of your infrastructure info leaked at some point and that was the last time I opened my mouth with a negative thing to say about the team there or Blizzard as a whole. Not only did you face and meet that challenge from the start, you guys excelled with it as time went by.
So from one professional to another, I’m sorry I ever had a negative word about the way things were run or took place there when WoW launched. You have my deepest appreciation for what that effort must have entailed.
/hattip
PS: That ranch sky looks gorgeous!
Hi, I’ve been a member for one year but I’ve read the site/lurked on the forums since reading the Civ V review on 1UP. That game was one of the last games that burned me through a preorder because I launched it on release, I played the first game on Immortal and won it with 4, perhaps 5 Horsemen. I then uninstalled the broken mess, I checked Metacritic and I was astonished to see all the reviewers sing praises about it. All except Tom, of course, so I’ve been a bit of a fan ever since.
I work for the social network in Europe, my dept. deals with sensitive stuff so I can’t talk about my employer and I absolutely can’t talk about what I do due to an NDA, but I enjoy it.
I’ve been a gamer since 1989, the gateway drugs were Price of Persia, Street Fighter and Contra. My video game darlings are Ninja Gaiden (up to III), Heroes of Might and Magic (up to III), Starcraft, Street Fighter, Half Life, Diablo (I and II), Civ (up to IV), Baldur’s Gate, Morrowind, Patrician, Caesar and, more recently, Dark Souls, Path of Exile, Mount and Blade, Borderlands, Rimworld, Stardew Valley, Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings.
Random things: I predicted VR will go nowhere when it blew up a few years ago and I did the same with Steam Machines. I wrongly predicted the demise of Fortnite (although, to be fair, the initial coop-ish pitch was pathetic).
I’ve seen most mainstream films and tv series that have had a significant impact so I rarely watch either nowadays because I feel like I know what’s going to happen most times. I enjoy riding my bike and walking/hiking with my fluffy, spoilt, baby4lyfe Alaskan Malamute. I read stuff daily, I’m a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none, in terms of knowledge not technical skills (in the sense that I can have a conversation on a large variety of subjects, minus anything related to fashion/art, unless it’s fashion/art history).
I like it here, this and another UK forum are the last I frequent nowadays.
I think you had the right of it actually. It took me a long time to enjoy Blizzard games after I left. I couldn’t play Diablo II for fun because every time something glitched I was hopping out of the game to investigate what happened.
No worries! You wouldn’t be the first person to react that way. I have been guilty of it myself from time to time with other games too. :D
Thanks for the compliment on the sky! We’ve actually redone quite a bit of the house since that picture was taken. My wife is the photographer though and I didn’t have a new picture handy.
Exactly! I don’t know why I enjoy reading reviews from someone who often has different taste than I do, but he usually puts enough info in there, that makes sense, and I can form my own opinion on what might work for me.
My name is Scuzz. Okay it’s not really but that is what I have been called by my friends for 40+ years so it is the name I have used on the internet forever. My real name is kind of rare so I don’t use it online.
I started on forums because of gaming, added sports forums and now have pretty much limited myself to here and Octopus Overlords. I came here from there, and went there from the old PlanetBaldursGate site, I think.
I am 62, about to close a business I own part of and am working seasonally for a government agency. I would have to kill you if I told you which one, but it isn’t that hard to figure out what agency needs people in the spring.
I started gaming with the old Earl Weaver Baseball, JNSE Golf and then moved onto Baldur’s Gate. I am now a Dark Souls fan boy.
Oh man, I’d forgotten about that game until just now. I had entire leagues running when I was in my early teens. Used to leave the computer on overnight, running simulated games, and check the standings when I woke up.
My name is George.
I’ve been playing strategy PC games for over 25 years. While I don’t tend to post much on forums, I do read them and two things drew me to QT3. One, I really enjoyed the Tom vs Bruce series going back to Computer Gaming World magazine. So I’m a fan of Tom’s writing. The other is that I don’t know anyone that plays PC games or very involved board games so having a place to discuss games and find out about new ones here is appreciated. The AGEOD and Slitherine forums are the other forums where I’ve posted a few entries in the past.
My preference is turn based strategy games from the early stuff like Warlords, Master of Orion 1 and Master of Magic to more recent entries like Battle Brothers, Stars in Shadow, Massive Chalice, Invisible, Inc. I rarely finish games.
I’m 57. When I turned 50 my doc said there was no reason I couldn’t be in the best shape of my life and so I took him up on it and started distance running. In 2014 I had an accident that left me paralyzed from the neck down, but I was fortunate in that surgery and lots of physical therapy allowed me to recover and I ran my first marathon last fall.
Life is good. I like my job and I’m very happily married and have three kids that I am proud of and they are genuinely decent, thoughtful people. None of them play computer games.
Holy crap, that’s amazing. Congrats on all of that!
Holy shit, George.
I just looked up my join date, as I honestly couldn’t remember beyond “a long time ago.” Apparently I’ve been here since 2005. I joined when friends from my DAoC and Wow guild recommended the site. It’s been my go-to home on the net ever since and I suspect it will be for years to come. I’m in my mid 40s, so right in the typical demographic for this place. My name is “Jim,” but lots of folks who knew me first from online fora call me “RH” even offline. That gets some entertaining confused looks from folks who only know me in person. In practice, I tend to answer to just about anything, including the ever-useful, “Hey, asshole!”
I’ve been playing home games, video and otherwise, since I was a kid, starting with an Atari 2600. Several, actually, as my sister and I kept wearing them out. I shudder to think how many joysticks our parents bought. Played lots and lots on the 2600, Coleco, C64, C128, PC (my first PC was a 286), various Nintendos, Segas (including a Dreamcast!), Xboxen, and I’m sure plenty of others I’m forgetting as I type.
For tabletop, I was and am a big fan of PnP RPGs. I’ve played god knows how many systems, but always somehow keep coming back to various incarnations of D&D. Currently playing in a 5e game and loving it. I’m planning to give Gloomhaven a try Real Soon Now™ as it looks fascinating and right up my alley.
Professionally, I’m a middle manager who has long since been promoted away from the code to make sure I don’t do any more damage than I already had before my bosses figured out what was up. My team does compilers (LLVM based) for CPUs and GPUs both, linkers, dynamic linkers, binary utilities, and a variety of other associated low level things. As such, I find @wumpus’ mobile hardware threads very entertaining. ;)
Damn glad you can say that, after all you’ve been through.
I aim to please 🕺
Can’t have everything in life, we all have some failures…
“MrGrumpy”. Not sure why I chose that name - I don’t have a consistent handle for different forums. I never use my real name - not only is it rare, but it’s probably unique. But, even though I don’t have anything to hide, I still value my privacy (that’s why I’ve never created a Facebook account, because screw you Zuckerberg.) I did recently google my name and the “images” gallery returned pictures of Nazi officers. Oddly enough, my sister did one of those genetic services and found out despite our Dad being from Germany, we have almost no German on his side but rather Polish. (I was hoping for Prussian. :/ )
I’m 54, but don’t feel that old. I joined here in 2004 (became aware of Qt3 from another forum), but mostly lurked for a long time after that. I started PC gaming with CIV 1 and HoMM2. Started playing UO when it first came out, and then spent the next 10+ years playing MMOs, with the majority of that time in EQ2. Moved on to Rift for a while after that, tried some other MMO betas but one early morning after logging into the Elder Scrolls beta realized I can’t stomach most gamers in public games, logged off and haven’t touched one since. My gaming tastes are narrow, primarily turned based strategy and RPGs. My most played games are EU4 (over a 1000 hours, yeesh) and Diablo III, but I’m finally done with them.
Now I go for months at time not playing anything. I primarily enjoy gaming with my SO, but there’s just not a lot of games that support co-op that we both like. We are not married, but have been together for … 19 years. She’s a gamer, and has been a member of Qt3 for longer than I have. She never posts here - she laughed when I mentioned how the “Making Qt3 a more welcoming place” thread turned out. “Of course,” she said. Make of that what you will.
Professionally, I work for a small software company, started out as a support tech and then moved onto writing the help documentation. Shortly thereafter started doing QA and BA work (even though I had never even heard of “business rules” before I started. At least they don’'t have to pay a real BA real BA money …)
I think our company is going to go bankrupt soon - and it’s going to be almost entirely the fault of the company manager (we’re an LLC owned by a much larger company. He’ll probably get paid a handsome bonus if/when we go under.) I have no idea what I’m going to do if we do close. (I’d love to raise goats in Italy or anything to do with wildlife rescue, but yeah, pipe dream.) I’ve been at the company since '99, but not out of any sense of loyalty. I’ve stayed as long as I have primarily because it’s a 15 minute drive and I can dress however I like. That, and inertia. I don’t really care about money (my lack of ambition is a major personality flaw I’ve come to realize) and the thought of starting over again at a new company (even if I could at my age) leaves me slightly ill. I think I’d be inclined to move to a country with a low cost of living and do some kind of remote support work, but that’s complicated. My mom is in her 80’s, lives alone and I feel obligated to stay close. I think I can convince her to move with us though. Here’s hoping.
I knew Voldemort was on this forum somewhere!
I understand the feeling, but given what you said about doing QA/BA work leads me to believe that you could very easily find a solid position at another software firm. I know a couple folks who did more or less exactly that at my last job.