My Gaming History: Kris Pt 4

So it’s the end of the year, and the end of this series of articles. I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about the past of some of the staff, I realise these are pretty personal articles and as so might not appeal to everyone. With any luck they’ve kept you occupied over that annoying bit between Christmas and the New Year where not much happens. Anyway, let’s move on to my final chapter; the one that’s happening right now.

Last time I skimmed over what happened whilst I was at college and university, so here it is in a bit more depth. When I started at college I pretty much moved over from being a console gamer to a PC gamer who did a bit of console gaming on the side. This was because I made a whole new group of friends at college, and moved on from almost everyone I knew when I was at secondary school. My new friends were all big PC gamers, so much so that I started going to LAN parties.

Ah LAN parties, how I miss them. I’d never played games with that many people in one go before, let alone with all of them in the same room. Sure multiplayer over the internet is okay but it doesn’t really compare to having ten to fifteen gamers all in the same room shouting at each other. I have extremely fond memories of long games of Red Alert or quick and dirty rounds of Counter-Strike played at about 2am.

Outside of LAN parties there was always Battlefield 2, a game I still contend is the best multiplayer shooter around. Sure, other games may be more popular or bigger or look better but, in my opinion, most of the features that you see in modern multiplayer FPSs started with Battlefield 2 and the game did it better than its successors.

Once college was done, I moved to university and faced a rather depressing issue: the internet wouldn’t let me play any games on my PC comfortably. The internet was pretty limited anyway and due to technical issues I was cut off for most of the time I was living in halls. To counter this I got my hands on a very cheap GameCube along with Soul Calibur 2 and Star Wars Rogue Squadron II. I think we can all agree that that’s enough to keep you entertained for the rest of time but in the end I decided to take a step forwards into the current generation and got my hands on a 360.

I didn’t really know why I wanted one at the time. I was actually perfectly happy with my GameCube, it’s a good console and even though I only had a few games for it, I still had a lot of fun with it. I don’t really know what it is about the Soul Calibur series but I seem to have the ability to play through the arcade mode as many times as I want without getting bored. No other fighter has that kind of hold over me, there’s just something in Soul Calibur that clicks with me.

I think the main reason I decided to pick up the 360 to accompany my GameCube was that it was very cheap. Very, very cheap. It was a barely-used launch console, about a year and a half old and I got it with 6 games for just £200. Even now I think you’d be hard pressed to find a similar deal. I’ve never been able to resist a bargain so I sort of ended up with the console just because I could. It’s served me well, although I’ve had one Red Ring of Death so it’s not actually the console I started with.

There’s not much else to say about the 360 really, it’s hard to write about history while you’re in it. Of course this was the same period I started writing for TSA as well, although that was three years after picking up the 360 just after I’d graduated from university. I love writing here, and there’s so much I could write about it but I’ve done most of that before. I think the only thing I haven’t said is thank you to Peter for the opportunity, so thanks boss. You deserve it.

Well that’s it. I hope you’ve enjoyed all of these articles. I’m off to celebrate the New Year now and possibly play some Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Enjoy yourselves!